ROSH HASHANAH 5787
SECTION D, PAGE 6
By Jason Kessler, Unpacked
The first Israeli to go to space had a problem that only a rabbi could solve.
He would be flying around the earth so fast that he’d see a sunrise every 90 minutes. But Shabbat is supposed to start at sundown every seventh day. This might have meant that every 10 1/2 hours the Israeli would have to break out the wine and the challah and the battery-powered space candles.
The rabbi gave him an answer that might surprise you.
Judaism has actually wrestled with questions like how to keep Shabbat at the North Pole, where the sun doesn’t set for months, or what to do if you’re lost in the desert and totally lose track of what day it is.
The rabbi’s answer for the astonaut changed the way I see Judaism’s relationship with time itself.
So when does Shabbat start when you’re flying thousands of miles an hour through space?
It’s 2003 and Ilan Ramon has a lot on his mind. He was an Israeli Air Force fighter pilot, a national hero, and he was about to become the first Israeli to go to space.
I can’t imagine the pressure he was under, mastering his training, memorizing emergency protocols, and on top of all that, he chose to take something extra aboard his spaceship. He felt it his duty to represent not just the nation of Israel, but the entire Jewish people.
So even though he wasn’t the most religiously observant Jew on earth, he looked for ways to honor Jewish tradition in space.
He asked NASA to get him kosher space food. He hung a small mezuzzah on one of the spacecraft doors. He even packed a tiny Torah that survived the Holocaust.
But the trickiest thing he decided to do was to observe Shabbat in space, which meant he had a question that no amount of astronaut training could answer.
This brought him to Rabbi Avi Konikov.
“Ilan Ramon turned to me with a question: ‘How does one mark the Sabbath in space?’”
Every 90 minutes — another sunset. Every 10.5 hours — another Sabbath.
“Jerusalem, we have a problem.”
Rabbi Konikov shared Ramon’s question with a panel of rabbinic scholars. The first thing they did was to look through centuries of past guidance for anything remotely similar.
The question of space travel obviously never came up before, but Judaism had been bumping up against similar questions for generations, since space isn’t the only place where nature’s clockwork seems to break down.
If you get far enough north on the globe, for example, the sun acts a little funky. During winter, it can go months without rising, leaving the area in perpetual darkness. During summer, it can go months without setting —just one super long day.
So when does Shabbat start when there’s no sunset?
In the 1800s, a rabbi answered:
“If you travel to the Arctic, you should follow the same time as the place you came from.”
If you’re heading to the North Pole and you crossed into the Arctic Circle from Alaska, then you have to light the Shabbat candles according to the timing in Alaska — before the sun sets in Alaska.
What if someone from Norway also heads to the North Pole and runs into the guy from Alaska? They’re both standing there right next to each other, but they’ll start Shabbat at different times because one came from Norway and the other from Alaska.
Does that mean two Jewish astronauts on the same space shuttle can be in two different Jewish time zones?
It does, although that might not seem right because the Jewish calendar is set to nature’s clockwork, determined by G-d.
If we decide that two Jews from two different places but now in the same place should have two different Shabbats, does that mess with our whole concept of Jewish time?
The Hebrew calendar operates with the precise rhythm of a Beethoven symphony: daily prayers tied to sunrise and sunset, monthly cycles tied to the moon, annual holidays. Shmita — the sabbatical year — takes effect only once every seven years, and the biblical jubilee year once every 50 years. All very precise.
In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.”
Heschel compares time to a sanctuary, a sacred space you enter, and that’s no accident, because Judaism treats certain periods of time as more than just alerts on a calendar. They are a different state of existence.
When Shabbat begins, a whole set of rules kick in. No work, no writing, no cooking, no electricity. That’s why Jews track time like a werewolf tracks the moon.
In Judaism, each month tracks the cycle of the moon, but a lunar year adds up to around 11 days less than a solar year.
In other words, after 12 lunar months, the earth still hasn’t quite finished going around the sun.
That means over time, a lunar calendar will get out of sync with the seasons. Passover will rotate around the months (like Ramadan), but the Torah requires that Passover always be bserved in the spring. So six out of every 19 years, an extra month is added to the year to pull everything back in sync.
Jewish time needs to know not just when to add an extra month to the year. Every month, the Sanhedrin in ancient Jerusalem made a game-time decision when to start each month, depending on when eyewitnesses spotted the new crescent moon in the sky.
After Rome conquered Israel and banned Jewish leaders from meeting to make these decisions, the sages adopted a fixed calendar that could run on autopilot, without witnesses having to look at the sky or make any judgment calls.
This means that Jewish time isn’t strictly a single universal clock, solely dependant on the rotation of the earth on its axis. Jewish time is tied to the Jewish community — to the input of witnesses each month. Jewish time is controlled in part by us.
This is seen in the decision of the ancient Sanhedrin when to begin each month, and, by extension, when to begin the Jewish holidays that fall in that month. It’s like the case of the man traveling alone through the desert who loses track of which day is Shabbat.
So what should he do? Jewish law rules: He should count seven days from the moment he realized he lost track. And the seventh day will be his Shabbat.
So when you have nothing else to go on, no community, no witnesses, no Wi-Fi, Judaism doesn’t give up.
Human intention becomes the foundation of sacred time when nothing else is available.
There was some disagreement among the panel of rabbis who addressed Ilan Ramon’s question about when to observe Shabbat in space. But they all agreed that Ramon should not celebrate a new Shabbat every 10.5 hours.
Just like at the North Pole, it’s not about whether sunset is actually visible. It’s about where you were before you got to the North Pole — and before you sent into space.
So Ramon decided to keep Shabbat on the same schedule as the time in Houston, Texas, where he was trained for his mission.
What mattered was the community he came from and his desire to enter a sacred sanctuary of time.
On his first Shabbat in space, Ramon couldn’t pour the wine into his kiddush cup because . . . no gravity.
So he used a straw to drink straight from the bottle.
And he read the prayer from a page he’d written out by hand.
Ramon got his wish. He represented the Jewish people with class and pride.
Then, tragically, he never made it home.
When the shuttle was on its way back to earth, it disintegrated in midair. The entire crew was lost.
Instead of a breaking out a welcoming party, NASA spent four months searching across Texas for remains of Ramon, his colleagues and their spacecraft.
Among the wreckage they found something unbelievable: Ramon’s handwritten prayer, the words he used to sanctify Shabbat in space. Somehow, it survived.
