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April 7, 2023
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Pesach Day 2
April 7, 2023 — 16 Nissan 5783
Stocking Boxes to Freedom
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Lhakpa Sherpa grew up impoverished in the shadow of Mount Everest. Her father worked as a shepherd and her mother raised her along with her ten siblings. They were dirt poor. So poor that they couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the children, let alone to send Lhakpa to school. Instead, she spent her days wandering barefoot through the mountains.
Ever since she was little, Lhakpa has had one dream: she wanted to climb Mount Everest. At the time, women were not welcome to try. Every climber was male, every Sherpa porter was male, and even the thought of a woman trying to climb Mount Everest was enough to make experienced mountaineers laugh out loud. When Lhakpa was about 15, she started hanging around base camp and begging the Sherpa porters there to give her a chance. She spent two years pleading, begging, lobbying, and trying to persuade them before Babu Chhiri Sherpa, a legend in his own right who once spent a record-breaking 21 hours on the top of Mount Everest without oxygen, agreed to give her a chance.
She quickly rose through the ranks. She started as a regular porter, just carrying wealthy tourists’ oxygen canisters and tents and supplies and then became a “kitchen boy.” She would rise before the tourists, hike with all the supplies to the next base camp, set up camp, and then cook dinner all so that when the tourists arrived, they could have a hot meal and go to sleep.
But that wasn’t enough for Lhakpa. She didn’t just want to facilitate other people’s experiences. She wanted to climb Mount Everest. In 2000, after nearly 10 years of working as a porter and cook, Lhakpa approached the future Deputy Prime Minister Sujata Koirala and convinced her to fund the first Nepali Women’s Everest expedition. She picked six other talented women and they all attempted to summit Mount Everest. In the end, all six became so ill, they were unable to complete the climb. Only Lhakpa made it all the way to the top, becoming the second woman ever to summit Mount Everest and the first woman to summit Mount Everest and make it all the way down alive.
What happens when you become the first woman ever to climb Mount Everest to the top and come back to tell the story?
You’d think that she would have been swarmed with newspaper reporters clamoring to interview her, by authors wanting to write her story. You’d think that climbing and outdoorsy companies would be lining up, seeking to sponsor her and to have her represent their products. But no, none of that was to be.
Lhakpa’s life continued to be a struggle. She came down from her first ascent and had to find a menial job to make ends meet. When she wasn’t lugging tourists’ gear up and down the mountain, she found work building roofing or cleaning houses or stocking produce at Whole Foods. She married a fellow climber who became abusive, and she had to flee for her life with her two daughters. Then, making ends meet became even harder. But Lhakpa never resented her place in life. She never complained about work or about how hard it was to make a living, let alone about how impossible it felt to live out her dreams. Instead, she told herself that lugging boxes at Whole Foods and climbing ladders to hammer roofing tiles was a great way to train. Instead, she taught her daughters the value of hard work and that nothing can stand in the way of your dreams.
Over the last nearly twenty years, Lhakpa has returned to Nepal nine times and has climbed Mount Everest 10 times—which, according to New York Times reporters Bhadra Sharma and Adam Skolnick, is the equivalent of hitting 500 home runs or 3,000 hits in baseball. Only 34 men have ever achieved this goal, and Lhakpa set another world record as she became the first woman to do so.
When I first read this story, I called my sister, Sonia, to talk about it. I was telling her how angry I felt on Lhakpa’s behalf. I felt angry that she’s struggled so much in her life, that her incredible talent hasn’t been rewarded, that no one has sponsored her or even written the novel that surely her hard work has earned. And to me, it just felt so heartbreaking that after all that hard work, she finishes her tenth climb of Mount Everest, having set a world record, and comes home to find that Whole Foods doesn’t have a job for her, and she’s totally broke and has to start cleaning houses again just to survive.
But Sonia had a totally different perspective.
Last month, Sonia marked eight long years living with a debilitating chronic illness. Every day she wakes up in pain, every day she fights against her body to do what she wants to do, and despite lots and lots of doctors and treatment protocols, eight years later she is still fighting to regain her health. When I told Sonia Lhakpa’s story, she said, “wow, I feel like that’s actually the story we all need.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
She said, “most of the stories we read about in books or that are depicted on screen are written from the other side of hardship. They tell the story of how someone really struggled, but then won a million dollars or published a best-selling novel or landed an epic job. In those cases, it’s easy to see that you’ve made it. But that kind of liberation doesn’t happen for most of us. Most of us spend our days trudging through the mud, slogging through the desert. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see how your efforts make a difference. When you’re still working towards your ultimate goal, it’s difficult to acknowledge the progress you’ve made. But ultimately, that’s what’s most important.”
I wish I had that kind of wisdom. I remember when we were in the thick of our fertility struggles, I was so angry and resentful. In fact, when we did the transfer that ultimately generated this pregnancy, I remember having the worst attitude and saying to Solomon that nothing was ever going to change or make a difference. Before we got pregnant, I was sure we were never going to make it out of the desert. Now, it’s easy to feel liberated.
My sister is still in the thick of it. She still wakes up every morning in pain. It would be easy for Sonia to be angry or resentful that she hasn’t recovered fully yet. It would be easy to lament the life she doesn’t have. Instead, she tries to make the most out of living in the in betweens. For her, it’s not about the ultimate hope of recovery, her life is about finding meaning and value in every single day. If she only has an hour a day that she feels well, she goes outside or finds something funny to watch. She’s not working towards a Promised Land of complete health, honestly, she doesn’t know if that exists for her. But she is working to appreciate every moment as it comes.
The story of Passover is dangerous. It invites us to gloss over 400 years of slavery and struggle, it tempts us with the idea that liberation happens only when you get out of Egypt. That story is fine for our Seders, but when we’re really in the market for hope, we need stories like Lhakpa’s and stories like Sonia’s. We need to remember that even when it feels like we’re slogging through the desert, with no end in sight, every step we take has value in and of its own.