Heroic moments are inspiring, but they are rare. The real question is what happens the next day, and the day after that.
Operation Nachshon
On the eve of Passover in 1948, Jerusalem was under siege.
This was in the wake of the U.N. partition vote on November 29, 1947. In the months that followed, the first stage of the war between Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel began. Much of the fighting centered on the roads connecting the major cities.
One of the main battlefronts ran along the highway to Jerusalem. By March 1948, all access routes to the city had been cut off, and Jerusalem was effectively surrounded.
At the time, about eighty thousand Jews were living in the city. The meaning of the siege was stark: no food, no fuel, no weapons, no medicine. The situation kept worsening, and the siege threatened not only Jerusalem itself but the broader struggle for the future of the country.
The leadership of the Jewish community realized that they could no longer remain on the defensive. They would have to go on the offensive and reopen the road to Jerusalem.
They organized a force of 2,500 fighters—the first major military operation of the war. By the standards of that time, it was a very large force. The fighters were equipped with new weapons, and within a short time they succeeded in breaking through to Jerusalem. They delivered 900 tons of desperately needed supplies and, in doing so, saved the city.
The name of that campaign was Operation Nachshon, named after Nachshon ben Aminadav.
But who was this Nachshon, after whom the operation was named?
Nachshon Breaks the Deadlock
Today we celebrate the seventh day of Passover, the day associated with the splitting of the sea.
When the Israelites reached the Red Sea and saw the water in front of them and the Egyptian army closing in behind them, the Torah says simply: “They cried out to G-d.” The Midrash adds that there were four different factions among the people at the sea, each proposing a different course of action. But in the end, G-d said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the children of Israel to move forward.” Rashi explains: they have only one option—to go forward, because the sea will not stand in their way. The merit of their ancestors, and the faith with which they followed G-d out of Egypt, would be enough to split the sea for them (Exodus 14:15; Rashi ad loc.).
But who was the first person actually willing to walk into the sea?
A Midrash describes the scene vividly:
“Rabbi Tarfon and the elders were once sitting in the shade of a dovecote in Yavneh. They said to him: Master, teach us — by what merit did Judah attain kingship? He said to them: When Israel stood at the sea, one said, ‘I am not going down,’ and another said, ‘I am not going down,’ as it says, ‘Ephraim has surrounded Me with deceit.’ While they were standing there and taking counsel, Nachshon ben Aminadav jumped and fell into the waves of the sea.” (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Beshalach, parashah 5).
It is human nature: whenever something difficult has to be done, people suddenly become very generous about letting someone else do it.
There is a joke about a father sitting at the table with his ten children. He asks the oldest for a glass of water. The oldest turns to the brother next to him and says, “Honoring one’s father is such an important mitzvah, I would like to give you the privilege.” The second says the same thing to the third, and so the mitzvah keeps getting passed around the table. Finally it reaches the youngest child. Everyone waits to hear what he will say. He looks at his father and says, “Dad, if it’s such a great mitzvah, maybe you should do it yourself.”
That, in a sense, is what happened here. No one wanted to be the first to jump into a raging sea. Moses told the people that G-d had said, “Move forward,” but the reality in front of them was terrifying. The sea was wild, the danger was real, and so everyone preferred to let someone else take the first step.
And then one man stood up—Nachshon ben Aminadav—and leapt into the water. The tradition says that others followed after him, and in that merit the sea split.
This week, when I told that story to someone, he said to me: “You know, I don’t think Nachshon gets enough credit in Jewish tradition.” After all, he was the one who jumped, and the most dramatic miracle in Jewish history followed. And yet the story does not appear explicitly in the biblical text itself, and we do not really find a holiday or major prayer named after him. It is almost as though Judaism treated this act of courage as something natural, almost expected.
Steady, Everyday Courage
The Talmud says that Nachshon’s son was Elimelech, Naomi’s husband (Bava Batra 91a). And who was Elimelech?
On Shavuot, we read the Book of Ruth, the story of the most famous convert in Jewish history. That story begins with a Jewish leader named Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who left the Land of Israel during a famine. Elimelech was a wealthy man, and he was afraid that staying would mean spending his fortune supporting the hungry poor of the land. So he took his family and moved to Moab. In the end, within ten years, Elimelech and both of his sons died there in exile.
That contrast points to two very different kinds of sacrifice.
One kind is the dramatic, one-time act of courage—like Nachshon jumping into the sea. That is certainly an extraordinary act. But it happens in a single moment.
Then there is another kind: the ongoing, daily kind of sacrifice. The kind shown by Jews in Soviet Russia, for example, who lived with constant religious pressure and risk. They refused to send their children to school on Shabbat and holidays, and week after week they found themselves in endless conflict with school authorities and the system around them.
This week, a Jew from Russia told me that in the 1980s he was once called into the university dean’s office. The dean asked him why he was going to synagogue. He tried to deny it, but the dean pulled out a photograph showing him there.
That kind of steady, repeated courage is in many ways harder. The Rebbe once said that daily self-sacrifice is on an entirely different level from the sacrifice of a single heroic moment (see Sichot Kodesh 5732, vol. 1, p. 360).
Nachshon represents the one-time leap. Elimelech, by contrast, was unable to withstand the test of daily sacrifice. He left the Land of Israel and abandoned the people who depended on him in Bethlehem because he could not bear the burden.
And maybe that is why Judaism does not make such a grand spectacle out of Nachshon. Judaism is not built on rare, dramatic moments that happen once in a generation to one extraordinary person.
It is built, rather, on the daily sacrifices that ordinary people make all the time: not going to work on a holiday even when you already lost two workdays the week before; accepting the cost, the inconvenience, the pressure, and doing it again anyway. No medals are handed out for that. No one writes epic poems about it. But that is the real thing.
And that is why I am especially glad to be praying today alongside Jews who are living with that kind of quiet courage. No books may be written about them. No Midrash may single them out by name. But it is because of Jews like them that the Jewish people are still here.
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