Stories shape the world.
They shape what we know, what we believe, how we see ourselves, how we see others.
They’re not just how we remember the past.
They’re how we live in the present.
We don’t just tell stories – we live inside them.
When I visit my grandchildren and they curl up beside me at bedtime, they always ask the same thing:“Sabi, tell us a story.”
They press close. Their faces wide open. Waiting.
And I begin.
Sometimes with wild forests.
Sometimes with children who fly.
Sometimes with something I remember from long ago, when I was young like them.
And the stories change – because I change.
And because each night, something different feels possible. Or necessary.But they always remember.
“You didn’t say that last time.”
“What happened to the dragon?”
Even at five, even at three, they already know:
The parts we leave out aren’t just details.
They change what the story means.
Living in a story
We all live in stories – not around them. In them.
They tell us what kind of world we’re living in, and where our lives are placed inside it.
They shape what we believe is possible, what we think is justified, what we call truth.
They shape our values – and the value we place on others.
I worry that my grandchildren are growing up in a world where creating such a story –a story that is honest, complex, and complete – has become more and more difficult.A world where stories move faster than truth.
Where headlines decide reality before facts can catch up.
Where an image… a post… a viral moment… can erase history in an instant.
A world where it’s easier to tell simple stories.
Where algorithms reward outrage.
Where complexity is inconvenient.
Where the pieces that don’t fit are ignored, cut out, rewritten.
On Pesach, we are given a commandment that sits at the heart of who we are:Vehigadeta levincha – you shall tell your child.
Not teach.
Not summarize.
Not explain.
You shall tell.
You shall speak the story aloud.
You shall place it in the hands of the next generation –
not as an idea, but as something lived.
Something carried.
And just before the telling begins, the Haggadah offers something more – quietly, almost in passing:Vekol hamarbe lesaper b’yetziat Mitzrayim, harei ze meshubach:
The more you tell of the story of the Exodus, the more praiseworthy it is.
Why more?
Because the tradition is reminding us how a story must be told –not in outline, not in fragments, not just the parts that are easy to carry –but with all its elements:
The pain, the joy, the waiting, the turning, the shame, the dignity, the doubt, the defiance, the unexpected grace.
For a story to be true, it must hold everything –the things we celebrate and the things we would rather leave unsaid.
To leave things out does not protect the story.
It empties it.
It hollows the center.It turns memory into performance, and truth into something selective and unstable.
And if we build our lives inside stories – and we do –then how vital it is that those stories be true.
Because if the story is incomplete – if too much is left out –then we are no longer living inside a reality.
We are living inside a version.
And a version – no matter how polished – cannot hold a life.
That’s why the Haggadah begins with vekol hamarbe lesaper, harei zeh meshubach –because only by telling everything – fully, faithfully, without avoidance or excess –does the story become something that can be trusted.
And that’s why the Haggadah adds:
Mathil begenut umesayem beshevach – we begin with shame and end with praise.Not to suggest a simple progression, but to show that a real story must contain both:what we fell into and what we rose toward.
What we would rather not say, and what we must never forget.
This is the story I tell my children. And now, my grandchildren.
A story that holds everything –the complexity, the difficulty, the parts we carry with pride, and the ones we carry with pain.But I find myself wondering:
What does the world tell its children, when it tells our story?
What does it pass down?
And what does it choose to leave out?
The world today struggles to tell a story properly.
It rushes to the ending.
It decides who is right before asking what is true.
It speaks in headlines and hashtags – fragments pretending to be narrative.
It does not hold complexity.
It does not leave space for contradiction.
It does not begin with genut and rise toward shevach – because it doesn’t begin at all.It starts with the conclusion and works backward.
Stories are not told to be understood. They are told to prove.
And the consequences of that are not theoretical.
They are very real.
And nowhere is this clearer – nowhere more painful – than in how the world tells the story of Israel.
When the world tells the story of Israel, it doesn’t begin at the beginning.
It begins where it wants to end.
It speaks of power, but not of vulnerability.
It names presence, but not return.
It counts what is visible now and ignores what was carried here –across centuries, across loss, across longing.
It leaves out exile.
It leaves out indigeneity.
It leaves out the sound of Hebrew spoken before there was a state –before there was a refuge – before there was any safety at all.
It leaves out the Jews from Arab lands – those whose stories are too often missing from the frame –who came not in strength, but in flight.
From Aleppo, Baghdad, Sana’a, Cairo.
Not as settlers, but as refugees.
And it leaves out what was built while under fire.
What was made while mourning.
What was defended.
And when those parts are left out, the story is no longer reduced.
It is rewritten.
A return becomes a conquest.
A refuge becomes a crime.
And that is not just a mis-telling.
It is a failure of moral imagination.
And of moral responsibility.
Because this isn’t only about Israel.
It’s about how we tell stories about others.
How quickly we name what we do not know.
How easily we speak in the place of those we have not listened to.
And our tradition teaches us something else entirely –not to speak on behalf of the stranger,but to remember what it was to be one.
To carry that memory so deeply that it changes how we speak, how we judge, how we tell.Veyadatem et nefesh hager, ki gerim hayitem b’eretz Mitzrayim:
You shall know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
We were not formed to explain the other.
We were formed to remember what it feels like to be misread.
To be reduced.
To be spoken about, rather than spoken to.
And that memory – if it means anything at all –should shape how we tell every story that is not our own.
This is the story I try to tell my children.
And now, my grandchildren.
I try to tell them that stories are not just what we remember.They are how we live.
That what we leave out doesn’t disappear – it changes everything.
I try to tell them that our tradition gave us a different way –a way to begin with what we would rather not say,and still hold the whole thing together.
I try to tell them that if we forget how to tell a story – truthfully, fully, with memory and care –then we will forget how to live inside one.
And that when we speak about others… when we speak about anyone…we must tell their story not with certainty, but with care.
Not to define them, or use them, or prove something through them.
But to honor what we cannot fully know.
To make space for a truth that isn’t ours.
And to carry it with the same weight we ask for our own.
