Thoughts Before Boarding the Flight to Israel

I’m in the Continental Airlines “President’s Club” at Newark Airport, composing one more blog post before boarding my flight to Israel. Although some of my seminary colleagues are flying on El-Al, I’m flying on Continental because I had accumulated a lot of mileage with them during my many years of business travel. What better use for it than finally making my long-overdue first trip to the Biblical land of our ancestors. My colleague, Enid Lader, who organized this trip is also flying on Continental. She commutes to our seminary, in Riverdale, NY from the western suburbs of Cleveland. Now completing her third year of rabbinical school, Enid has accumulated a lot of mileage and decided to use it for this trip.

The rabbi with whom I’m interning, Rabbi Ken Emert, says that on El-Al flights, the arrival celebration begins in the air, with Israeli singing and dancing. I’m wondering whether the same will be true on Continental. I do intend to pray our morning prayers on the flight and have brought my talit and tefilin in my briefcase. I’m sure that there will be a shacharit minyan on the flight. Perhaps there will be several minyanim for different denominations.

Enid and I were going to meet for dinner here at the airport, but she called me to say that her flight was late leaving Cleveland, so I had a very quick dinner and came here to the President’s Club to complete the 15 blog posts that were required for my Gratz College course on modern Israel.

I hope that you’ve found at least some of my posts thought provoking. I’m sure that they’ll become more interesting when we arrive in Israel and start posting photos and comments about the unique places were going to see and people we’re going to meet. One of the people I’m especially looking forward to meeting is my Gratz College professor, Rabbi Shalom Berger, who is also on the faculty of Bar Ilan University. This blog was his idea and I’m grateful for his inspiration.