Today is the last day of our Festival of Freedom. Let’s remember that the first day of Pesach commemorates our exodus from Egypt, but it is on the last day that we celebrate crossing the Red Sea and arriving on the shore of freedom. There are, yes, two steps in the journey, not just leaving but arriving as well.
The one who had the greatest taste for freedom was, according to rabbinic legend, not Moses, but a man named Nachshon ben Aminadav. The children of Israel left in haste, hence the dry bread of affliction. They didn’t know what was in front of them, only what was behind them. Freedom was what they thought they’d find, and ultimately, they did. But as in any journey, it’s not always smooth sailing; there will be challenges along the way. The chariots of Pharaoh chased after our ancestors since Pharaoh had changed his mind in the last minute. Looking ahead, looking in front of them, was the raging sea. They didn’t have a corps of engineers who would build them a bridge to cross. They were stuck!
All 600,000 of them froze in place; they didn’t move as they stood by the shore. Finally, Nachshon said (or this is what I would have Nachshon say), “Hey, move!” (brilliant, eh?) When no one, not even Moses, moved, Nachshon figured, “It’s me or it’s over,” and proceeded into the water.
It was only when one person took the initiative that God parted the waters, as the midrash reminds us. Only one person is needed to show courage and conviction and belief in the promise of freedom…Nachshon was the one then. Which of us is the person today?
On another note, you probably have heard that the one person missing from the Haggadah is Moses himself; nowhere in the text is he to be found. Why is this? The sages wanted to make certain that our People knew that God was our Liberator (upper-case L), and while Moses played a most significant role in the saga, he was merely the “tool” of God in the liberation. We say that Moses was the greatest individual our people had ever seen, but the sages feared that future generations would view Moses to be more significant than God. For this reason, we learn that while Moses died atop Mt. Nebo, never able to enter the Promised Land himself, there is no marker whatsoever to indicate a grave.
(Speaking of a corps of engineers…. The little child came home from religious school. The parent asked, “So, what did you learn today?” The answer: “Well, we learned that Moses was a really strong man who beat up the Egyptian pharaoh. While the pharaoh was still unconscious, Moses got all the people together and they ran to the water. When they got there, he has the Corps of Engineers build a huge pontoon bridge. Once they got to the other side, they blew up the bridge while the Egyptians were trying to cross. The parent was shocked, “Is THAT what the rabbi taught you?” The kid responded, “No, not at all, but you’d never believe the story that the rabbi DID tell us!”)