With Passover and Earth Day being celebrated on Monday, Eli Greenstein Jacober’s ideas flip to plagues — each biblical and fashionable.

The Jewish educator traces a by line from the hail, frogs and locusts that shook Pharaoh’s Egypt practically 3,500 years in the past to the air pollution, deforestation and invasive species that harry us as we speak — environmental injury.

It has impressed the “Passover Earth Day Challenge,” an effort to provide 5,000 acts of ecological restore throughout the nation. The problem, which continues by April 30, when Passover ends, comes from the environmental advocacy nonprofit Restore the World; Mr. Greenstein Jacober, a resident of Baltimore, is the group’s senior director of progress technique.

“I’ve not seen frogs soar out of the Nile, or the [river] flip to blood, however I do reside in a actuality the place I see waste within the [Inner] Harbor and Baltimore,” he mentioned, referring to the March 26 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. A runaway cargo ship crashed into one of many bridge’s helps, sending many of the thoroughfare crashing into the Patapsco River and killing six building staff.

Mr. Greenstein Jacober mentioned younger adults who observe Restore the World are involved in regards to the atmosphere.

“They reside on this world. They’re going to have children on this world,” he mentioned. “They’re interested by, ‘What’s it that I can do?’”

Restore the World has devised a digital workbook that gives dialogue factors to be raised through the Passover Seder, the non secular meal that commemorates the Jews’ flight from Egypt, as instructed within the Ebook of Exodus.

“One of many kinds of recent plagues that we recognized is simply lack of environmental consciousness,” Mr. Greenstein Jacober mentioned. “And so the problem for that’s to have a dialog with your loved ones and associates and type of perceive, ‘What do folks take into consideration what’s happening as we speak? Do you assume that we have to make adjustments?’”

And Jewish values help the notion of environmental actions, he added.

“Lots of our vacation traditions, Passover included, are primarily based on an agricultural cycle,” he mentioned. “When do you plant the primary crops? When do you harvest the crops? When do you cease tilling the sphere? So constructed into our calendar is an identification of connection to the earth and connection to the land.”

What’s extra, environmentalism additionally aligns with the biblical educating of “Bal Taschit,” Hebrew for “thou shalt not destroy,” he mentioned. The precept, expressed in Deuteronomy 20:19-20, helps an “act of service” to fight overconsumption, which he says is an environmental menace.