Don't listen to fundamentalists!!!!
Reader comment on item: El Al, "Goy" Airline?
in response to reader comment: why it would be wrong for El Al to fly on shabbes

Submitted by Issac (United States), Dec 30, 2006 at 20:09

Hey Yakkov, first of all, where do you see a segol or a chirik in the Hebrew word ShaBBAT, the last i checked there is a kamatz under the bet, not a segol or a chirik, so your transliteration and pronunciation of the Hebrew word is incorrect.

Secondly, if one wants to argue from a religious perspective, it can be argued that having a functioning airliner operating is as important to the Israeli state as any public services be it privately dispensed or publicly dispensed, such as electricity, hot water, police, fire dept, and military and hence would not fall under a sabbatical prohibition. Just don't fly on Shabbat if you don't want to.

As I understand it, El Al has done its best to respect the wishes of its observant clients, but one would hope that the observant people who travel on El Al would understand that it does not look right for religious people to strong-arm others to practice as they do, and that El Al has to worry about its $$$ to live in the same sense that a person has to look worry about surviving in the real world. With that, and as El Al's executives are executives for a living so, as one would hope, they know what they're doing better than a rabbi would know what they're doing, it would be foolish for El Al to share or relinquish any amount of control of the company to the demands of unqualified rabbis that on top of being unqualified, do not have the companies # 1 goal in mind which is profiting.

Further, Yaakov, it is most unfortunate religious people generally see being Jewish as a religious inheritance and not as a genetic inheritance. That is why you feel that it would look hypocritical if El Al flew on shabbat while marketing itself as a Jewish airline. To my understanding, El Al has never claimed to be a RELIGIOUS airline, but it certainly caters to them probably more than a completely gentile airline ever would.

Although being Jewish is a complex identity of being both a member of a people and a religion, its not simply like being French or being Italian, the idea that being Jewish has nothing to do with a genetic inheritance of being born to a Jewish mother and is only determined by how much you practice the religion is not factual if you look at history, and also unnecessarily divisive amongst the Jewish people.

If El Al were to claim to be a religious airline and then fly on the shabbat, then you would have grounds to call it hypocritical, however there is a such thing as being Jewish in the nationalistic sense but not in the religious sense.

Further, it would help everyone for observant people to understand that El Al planes are secure primarily because of well trained air marshals being on every plane, not saying that perhaps there was some divine grace to it also.

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