How davening at 35,000ft lifted my faith in humanity
EVERY SEASONED observant traveller will know that a flight to the Far East from London presents real “davening/praying” challenges.
Typically, the flight will leave London in the afternoon and arrive at its destination late morning or early afternoon the next day.
This means that at minima, one will need to pray Arvit, Shema Mita and Schaharis in the plane — and at the correct halachic times.
As the plane is going towards sunrise, effectively in winter it may never encounter the right time for morning prayers until very close to landing (and too late for donning tefillins as the seat belt sign is on).
Conversely, in summer time, six to seven hours into the flight you will have sunrise over barren lands and, a few hours later, local time, one will have missed the halachic boundary for saying Shema and Chemonei Esrei (the Amida).
To compound this analysis, six hours into the flight, it will roughly be midnight London time when a passenger, well fed and tired after a full day, would aspire to some sleep in preparation of another full day (Asia time) of work ahead.
Have I mentioned that davening in full gear (tallis and tefillins) in a plane, away from the toilets and (hopefully) facing the direction of Jerusalem, constitutes another interesting challenge?
Having travelled extensively to China and the far east in the past 12 months, I had settled into a routine of anxious calculations of times and expected sunlight patterns, reconnaissance of areas where one can daven away from public scrutiny and revolving toilet doors. I resolved myself to little or no sleep with a regular ritual of slightly raising the plane windows shutters at intervals to catch a glimpse of nascent daylight on the horizon. Thus, many hours of what we French call “entre chien et loup” (the time where there is enough light to see the contours of an animal but not enough to distinguish between a dog and a wolf) were spent in a semi-comatose state.
Last month, on a trip to China, I flew via Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, at a time where the recent events
in the city were at full intensity and at the very time when the airline itself was in turmoil and had just witnessed the resignation of its CEO and the firing of crew members.
The flight was a complex one as it was due to leave London at 5.05pm and get into Hong Kong the next day at mid-morning — and I had to catch a flight to Shanghai one hour later to arrive around 3pm.
The only way to daven the morning prayers was thus on the first flight before breakfast service (as all areas would be then busy and impractical for prayers). That meant finding the right “window of opportunity” when light would first come out.
Please bear in mind that at 7am Hong Kong time it would probably be 5am where the plane would be then and, due to the septentrional flight path, still dark outside. I resolved to ask the crew to kindly wake me up at sunrise wherever and whenever that would be. The crew member also understood from my confused explanations that I was intent on facing Jerusalem.
To my amazement, the kind stewardess came back to my seat a few moments later with a map of the flight (above) on which the pilot had taken the time and effort to interpolate the time and position of the sunrise as anticipated on that flight, providing me with a clear path to daven with netz ha rama — a favourable time for the prayers to ascend; in this case with a head start of 35,000ft!
Moreover, this most yidden-friendly pilot had identified the direction of the plane as well as pointing an arrow to Israel, allowing me to daven in the right direction.
As most of the passengers were asleep, I was awoken with enough time to prepare and reach the Amida for 7.37am Hong Kong time, above eastern Siberia, the doubly symbolic place of a “midbar/desert /toundra” and of the possible location of some of the infamous gulags where too many of our brethren suffered under the Communist regime.
As it was the quietest time of the flight, the amiable crew offered me a space off the galley, with a view through a window and a curtain fully isolating me from the rest of the plane. A most fitting environment for tefillah (as the term is first introduced in tractate Bechakot 23b with Pinchas) or rather for lehitpallel — that is, engaging in profound self-judgement, introspection and self-evaluation.
As we traverse the critical times of Elul and Tishrei, my take is that even in the troubled times we live in, the world is also populated with good people, eager to help, respectful of other religions and eminently competent at what they do. My admiration and gratitude to Cathay Pacific and the entire crew of CX 238 on August 26, and a Ctiva ve Hatima Tova to all of us for a peaceful and productive 5780.