Torah Portion - April 24, 2008

Torah Portion for the Seventh Day of Pesach

The seventh day of Passover is traditionally viewed as the anniversary of the day our ancestors crossed the Sea of Reeds. Unlike the first two nights of Pesach, when we reenact the story of leaving Egypt, most Jews do not create a ritual of the splitting of the sea. Perhaps we should.

The entire Festival of Liberation is set aside for us to experience freedom. At the Seder, we remind one another that “every Jew must feel that we personally have gone out of Egypt." We do this at every Seder, year after year. That is because freedom cannot be   acquired once. We must continually relearn how to live as free people.

Freedom does bring with it great responsibility. This is a common platitude, but what does it really mean? One understanding is that the liberation of Pesach is not merely an escape from the physical bondage of hard labor, but the development of inner freedom. This requires that we take risks.

When the Israelites, fresh from slavery, stood at the shores of the sea-- with the Egyptian armies swiftly moving toward them--many were sure that they were as good as dead. They complained and cried and agonized, but they didn’t do anything. Born into slavery, they did not understand that freedom meant taking responsibility to make changes in their lives. God instructed Moses to tell everyone to keep moving forward; God would split the sea. But not of the Hebrew slaves believed this, and they stood there, sobbing and screaming.

The Midrash teaches that only one person, Nachshon ben Aminadav, was brave enough to trust that if he did his part, then freedom would lie before him. Nachshon walked into the water. The water grew deeper and deeper, but Nachshon kept walking. When the waves reached Nachshon's nose, the sea parted.  

One might call Nachshon the first free Israelite. His understood that the new nation’s life in freedom would entail work and courage and faith. Nachshon took this to heart, and moved forward. That is what we must do.

Nachshon learned that any relationship—between human beings, or between humans and the Holy One, must be two-sided. To live as free people, we cannot expect a human leader like Moses, or the Divine Power of God, to give us what we want and need. Only then are we truly free to do what our ancestors did as they crossed safely to the opposite shore. They sang, as the Psalmist says, a new song to God. The old songs, a rehashing of the kvetching that comes from not taking responsibility, would not work for the new nation of Israelites.  

Let us reenact Nachshon’s courage on the seventh day of Pesach, just as we reenacted the Exodus itself at the Seder. By combining freedom and responsibility, courage and song, we can become “a free people in our own land.