‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me…’ – George Gershwin
One of the many miracles recorded in the Torah is the falling of the manna in the desert, supplying the Israelites with nourishment for their 40-year journey from Egypt to Israel. A miracle-within-a-miracle, the Midrash says, was that the mana fell in direct correlation with the righteousness of the people.
For those who were truly righteous, it landed right at the opening of their tent, enabling them to reach down and collect the food, as one might today pick up the morning paper. Those who were not quite as righteous would have to walk out into their front yard, while others, even less righteous, would have to go deep into the field to collect their portion.
Thus, Heaven was revealing, in a miraculous fashion, just who were tzadikim in God’s eyes, and who were less so.
So, too, the dramatic events of flydubai’s flight 1073 – what I like to call “the miracle at 30,000 feet” – have brought to the surface a host of eye-opening revelations. One of them is the startling vulnerability of our much-vaunted security apparatus, with the Mossad and other departments not only failing to mark the Omani pilot as a potential terrorist, but admitting that several, if not dozens of unchecked pilots from hostile countries have flown planes into Israel over the years.
A flydubai Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft prepares for landing at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport in Lod on September 30, 2026; illustrative (credit: Jack GUEZ / AFP via Getty Images)
Numerous other governmental figures are also showing blood red on their faces after this near-mega disaster. Chief among them is Miri Regev, our transportation minister, who previously failed to provide alternate means of travel during the COVID pandemic, as well as in the current ongoing war, and sat idly by as our country’s faithful airlines mercilessly gouged the public. And her cohorts in the coalition, rather than using the near-disaster to check their own flaws and failures, merely spin the events to unabashedly seduce votes in the coming election.
The attempted hijacking and aborted suicidal crash of flight 1073 is a further indictment of the so-called “free press” and the obscene mania that possesses its editors. International outlets strove mightily to disguise and dispute the obvious anti-Israel, antisemitic nature of the attack. Their inane headlines exposed their biases as much as their unprofessionalism. “Fight in flight breaks out between two pilots”… “Near catastrophe averted due to on-board crew rescue”… Far be it from them to admit that a deranged hatred of Israel – fueled by their own selective condemnation of the Jewish state – now energizes the crazies of every society from Libya to London to attack Jews at will.
So radicalized are they that they just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the ingenuity, gumption, and downright heroism of the average Israeli, as well as God’s perpetual guarding of the Jewish people. They are determined to take that away from us.
The brighter side of our story
WHICH BRINGS us to another side – a brighter side – of this story. It is the story of a nation that has merited the blessings of miracles that, if not outright suspensions of nature, are as close as you can get to glimpsing God.
Throughout our 2,000 years in exile, such miracles were virtually nonexistent. Yes, we did survive, and that alone can certainly qualify as miraculous. But it happened in a silent, below-the-surface fashion; it did not grab us, it did not cause us to jump up in amazement and force us to shake our heads in absolute wonderment. That kind of nes galui, revealed miracle, was reserved for Israel and Israel alone.
We saw it in 1967, when we humbled our boastful enemies in less than a week. We saw it in 1973, when we rose from a near-catastrophic defeat to overwhelm our adversaries in a military miracle that is still being studied in West Point and numerous other academies. We saw it in 1976, in the raid on Entebbe; we saw it in May of 1991, when a covert Israeli operation airlifted 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to freedom in Israel in just 36 hours.
And now we have seen it again, in just 12 minutes, over the skies of Saudi Arabia.
The full story has yet to be told, but the confluence of miracles is staggering: How did Captain Smit Machchhar manage to open the cockpit door – twice – while being brutally stabbed by terrorist Hamam al-Hammami? How did plumber Yaniv Hayoun and several other passengers have the courage to confront al-Hammami and subdue him? How did Hayoun know to grab the flight yoke and pull back on the controls to help level out the plane? How did another skilled pilot happen to be on the plane and so take over the controls? How were there not other accomplices on board – such as there were on the 9/11 flights – who would have aided the terrorist?
The very thought of that plane crashing into Ben Gurion Airport, setting it aflame and perhaps killing more than a thousand people, is mind-blowing in both its horror and the catastrophe that was prevented. I maintain that the flow of such deliverances from doom can only happen here, in the Holy Land.
The epic saga of our journey from Egypt to Israel is not only replete with miracles; it is marked annually by holidays that focus on those miracles. Pessah retells the story of our liberation, from the 10 Plagues to the splitting of the sea; Sukkot relates our ability to survive the harsh desert in flimsy, mobile shacks; Shavuot tells of the thunderous moments at the foot of Mt. Sinai when God gave us the Torah.
Marking our own modern ‘checkpoints’
We would do well to mark our own modern “checkpoints,” our series of miracles that have graced and continue to grace us as we return to our land after centuries of dispersals, determined to rewrite history and re-establish ourselves as a sovereign nation.
The day our family arrived in Israel, over 34 years ago, my good friend Rabbi Kenny Cohen wisely told me: “You’ll endure some tough times here, to be sure, and encounter difficult, daunting challenges. You’ll get frustrated, maybe even fed up with some of the meshigas (‘craziness’) that goes on here. But then something extraordinary, some miraculous, “they can’t make this up” event will happen, and you will understand that this country is like no other, that it is a special privilege to live here, where we are watched over by God.”
The miracle at 30,000 feet was such an event; God is indeed watching, and no one can take that away from us.■
The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana.
rabbistewart@gmail.com