In just a few days, Jewish families around the world will sit around the Passover table and retell one of the great migration stories in human history.

It is the story of the Exodus. Not only a story of liberation, but of movement. Of a people who, after generations of enslavement, rose up and left the only home they had ever known, stepping into uncertainty in search of safety, dignity, and the dream of a better future, just as refugees do today.

We read this story every year. We sing it. We debate it. We reenact it. But sometimes we forget that the story of the Exodus is, at its core, a story of migration. A story of refuge. It is the story of a people fleeing oppression and rebuilding their lives somewhere new.

There is another lesson in the Exodus story that has always struck me. It is not the story of one hero rescuing everyone. Yes, there is Moses. There is Miriam. There is Aaron. There is Nachshon bravely stepping into the sea.

But the Exodus is carried forward by the multitude. By a people moving together.

By each person carrying something. Some holding baskets. Some pulling carts. Some lifting children. Each taking responsibility not only for themselves, but for one another.

The Exodus teaches us something profound. It takes a nation to move a nation.

No single person is expected to rescue an entire people. When each of us carries something, miracles can happen.

But this idea is not a Biblical artifact. It is alive today.

In 1933, as Nazi persecution spread across Germany and Austria, Jewish families were desperate to escape. The British Jewish community responded. They organized. They raised funds. They opened homes. They created pathways to safety. Much of that work was coordinated through the Central British Fund for German Jewry, which helped tens of thousands of Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution, including nearly 10,000 children who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport before the war began.

The story did not end with rescue. Those children were placed in homes. They were given schooling and apprenticeships. They were helped to find work. Because the goal was not only survival. The goal was dignity. The goal was independence. The goal was helping people rebuild their lives and pursue a better future.

That organization would, over time, evolve into what is now World Jewish Relief, carrying forward the same core idea: that responding to crisis means not only helping people survive, but helping them rebuild their lives.

Across the world today, that idea continues to take shape in different ways. War-damaged homes in Ukraine are being repaired so that people can remain where they belong. Farmers in Africa are receiving training to adapt to changing climates and sustain their livelihoods. Fishermen in Haiti are receiving support to rebuild after devastating storms. Refugees who have fled war are being supported to learn new languages and find employment as they begin again. Families in Israel are receiving trauma support as they navigate the realities of war. Mothers and babies are receiving critical maternal and neonatal care in Gaza.

This work spans countries and continents, from Ukraine and Moldova to Ethiopia and Rwanda, from Bangladesh and the Philippines to Israel and Gaza. It reflects a simple but powerful idea: that Jewish responsibility does not stop at the boundaries of the Jewish community. It extends to anyone facing crisis.

In today’s world, it is easy to watch a crisis unfold on television or read about it online and feel completely helpless. The invasion of Ukraine. Drought devastating communities in Africa. Earthquakes, floods, displacement. The scale of suffering can make it feel as though nothing we do could possibly make a difference.

But there is another possibility. That each of us can take part in carrying something. That concern can become action, and compassion can become impact.

And in doing so, something else happens as well. We do not only help the people receiving support, but also those yearning to make a difference. We give our values somewhere to live.

For me, this idea is deeply personal.

My family’s history is also rooted in a journey from vulnerability to possibility.

Our story begins in a small village in Ukraine called Obodivka. As family lore tells it, there was once a teenage boy named Charlie who delivered milk in the village. One of the houses on his route belonged to a family with a young girl named Naomi. They did not know each other well, but Charlie quietly admired her.

When Charlie was nineteen, his brother, already living in America, invited him to join him in Philadelphia to work in the fur business. And so, in 1913, Charlie left Ukraine and came to America in search of a better future. But he remembered that young girl in Obodivka. He wrote to Naomi’s parents asking if they would send her to America to become his bride.

And so, at just seventeen years old, Naomi made the journey alone, full of uncertainty and trepidation. She traveled from Ukraine to Liverpool. She crossed the Atlantic on the Lusitania. She arrived in America to marry a young man she barely knew and to begin a new life.

In 1919, a pogrom destroyed much of the Jewish community of Obodivka. Jewish men were rounded up and shot in the center of the village. Had Charlie remained there, he almost certainly would have been among them.

Instead, Charlie and Naomi built a life in America. They had three children. One of them, a daughter named Rose, would grow up to marry Harry. Rose and Harry would have two children, including a son named Joel, or Yussy as they called him, my father.

Many decades later, when I was even younger than the ages at which my Bubby Naomi and Zayde Charlie made their own exodus from Obodivka, I would sit with them for Passover Seders.

So, when I think about refugee stories, I do not think about nameless and faceless masses. I think about the young mother fleeing Afghanistan and participating in World Jewish Relief’s Specialized Training and Employment Program, learning English and rebuilding her career in a new country. I think about Maria, the young woman who fled political persecution in Cuba whom I met in the Eloy Detention Center outside Tucson in 2020. And I think about Naomi, a seventeen-year-old girl crossing an ocean alone, carrying a dream of a better future.

Earlier this year, I returned to Ukraine with World Jewish Relief. When I first visited eight years ago, I met older adults living alone in Soviet-era apartment buildings whose pensions were not enough to cover food, medicine, and utilities at the same time. Every month required impossible choices.

When I returned this year, I met people living in very similar circumstances, but now with an added layer of hardship. Many had windows blown out by missile strikes in the middle of winter. Heat was intermittent. Electricity sometimes only a few hours a day. And many of these older adults simply do not have the physical ability to reach a bomb shelter every time an air raid siren sounds. Instead, they huddle, sometimes for hours, in a hallway or on a kitchen floor.

And yet what struck me most was not the hardship. It was the resilience.

When their homes are repaired, they invite neighbors over. They share warmth. They share food. They look after one another. Even in the middle of war, they are building community, holding on to the simple dream of a return to normalcy, as meager as it may have been.

There was another moment on this trip that has stayed with me. One of the remarkable programs I encountered brings together psychologists from Israel and Ukraine. Israeli psychologists, who have spent decades helping people cope with trauma from war and terrorism, are partnering with Ukrainian psychologists who are now confronting those same challenges every day. They share knowledge about trauma care, resilience, and healing.

Those on the ground, empowered through these partnerships, bring different skills to bear. Some people carry food. Some people carry tools. Some people carry knowledge. And together, they carry healing.

On Passover this year, we will once again tell that great migration story. But the story of the Exodus is not only about our past. It is about our responsibility to those in search of safety, and to those holding on in the places they call home.

The Torah tells us that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Indeed, the babies who were carried out of Egypt would become the adults who crossed into the promised land. By the time our people reached Israel, the next generation was carrying the community forward.

The responsibility to move a nation does not belong to one moment or one leader. It passes from generation to generation. Each generation carrying what it can, facing new challenges, and writing new chapters in the story.

And now that responsibility belongs to us.

None of us is expected to rescue a nation. But when each of us carries something, together, we can move one.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)