As Artemis II returned to earth, and members of its crew shared their religious reflections about their experience, my own thoughts went to another sojourner in space who never made it home. This man had asked one of the most interesting theological questions in the history of space travel, one which is bound up with our own technological future, and to the age in which we find ourselves.
I refer to Ilan Ramon, a crew member of the space shuttle Columbia. As the first Israeli in space, Ramon had sought to represent his people by marking the Jewish Sabbath in orbit, observing the ritual known as Kiddush, welcoming the sacred day over a cup of wine. At first blush, this desire seems symbolically sublime. The celebration of the Shabbat is meant to be a commemoration of creation: “for in six days God made the heaven and the earth… wherefore God blessed the Sabbath day.” Where, then, is it more fitting to recall the creation of heaven and earth than in the very heavens?
Yet in another way, there is an ostensible oddity to observing this ancient ritual while engaged in the futuristic activity that is space travel. Sabbath, whose Hebrew equivalent means “stop,” is bound up with the rhythms of earthly existence; those that observe it mark the passing of six 24-hour days, and then, in tranquility, embrace a day of rest with the setting of the sun. Ramon, in contrast, would be orbiting the earth at 17,500 miles per hour; he would experiencing a new sunrise and sunset every 90-odd minutes. There seemed therefore, a strange, if charming, anachronistic aspect to Ramon’s religious quest. Undaunted, and in consultation with a rabbi on the space coast, he chose to mark the Sabbath based on the time of Cape Canaveral time—the last location he had left. We therefore have the indelible image of Ramon, floating in space, holding a goblet aloft, and marking the Sabbath day.
Soon after, the Columbia exploded upon reentry. Speaking at the NASA memorial for the shuttle crew, the rabbi whom Ramon had consulted, Tzvi Konikov, described the philosophical complexity of the query with which this Jewish astronaut had presented him:
“Last year Ilan Ramon turned to me with a question. How does one mark the Sabbath in space? With every 90 minutes is a sunset; every 10.5 hours is a sabbath; every 20 days, Rosh Hashannah. Jerusalem, we have a problem.”
Yet, Konikov concluded that there is an enduring lesson to Ramon’s ritual. “Ilan,” he reflected, “taught us a wonderful message. No matter how fast we’re going, no matter how important our work, we need to pause and think about why we’re here on earth.”
There is much wisdom in this brief tribute. Classical writers, such as Tacitus, thought the Jewish observance of the Sabbath bizarre, a sign of the indolence of this small, stubborn people. But in fact, the rabbinic tradition has preached the exact opposite, insisting that the biblical description of the portion of the week preceding the Sabbath—“six days shalt Thou work”—is actually a phrase that forbids laziness and which obligates us to live productive lives. But Judaism also insists that, without a pause for reflection as to “why we are here on earth,” the very work that dignifies our lives can become a source of enslavement.
The Sabbath is described in the Torah as a remembrance not only of creation, but also of the Exodus: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt… therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” Work is central to human productivity, as long as it is done with freedom and purpose. The Shabbat reminds us that we are vocational beings meant to find purpose in the labors of our lives; in pausing on the seventh day for reflection, it provides us the perspective that ennobles our work. For without that perspective, the very work in which we engage, which fills up our time, can become mechanistic.
Ultimately, it can become our ruler.
“Not every human being,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik has written, “takes advantage of the unique human endowment to experience time—to live time rather than to live in time. Many human beings float with the tide of time because there is no alternative to it.” There is thus something so apt about Ramon, experiencing the speeding up of time as few other have, choosing to live in time, and to sanctify it by joining himself to his people’s past as he embodied the achievements of its future.
The image of someone fulfilling the dream so many young children have—to become an astronaut—while pausing to mark the way in which he was part of something larger than himself is the ultimate embodiment of Robert Frost’s description of the the life well lived, in which the work one wishes to do is transformed into a reflection of a higher calling:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Ilan Ramon lived and died before the age of the iPhone, and long before the advent of chatbots, but his story is profoundly relevant to our own era. The digitization of our age has produced wonders, but it has not made us less busy, and there is the sense that at times we are ruled by our devices rather than the reverse.
As Ben Sasse has written, the technology “that has liberated us from so much inconvenience and drudgery has also unmoored us from the things that anchor our identities. The revolution that has given tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to live like historic royalty has also outpaced our ability to figure out what community, friendships, and relationships should look like in the modern world.”
Similarly, the heralding of the AI age bears with it both promise and peril: the ability to delegate mechanistic aspects of our lives to machines can free us to devote ourselves to what is more more important, but there is also the looming danger of human beings no longer finding the forms of work that lend dignity to their lives. Ramon—a man whose Kiddush in the cosmos, reflected an embrace of technology’s promise and a sanctification of earthly existence—seems almost a prophet for our time. He shows us how to reject the temptation of Luddism without ignoring the genuine questions of meaning we are forced to confront.
Remarkably, as I’ve described elsewhere, a remnant of Ramon’s diary survived the explosion of the Columbia and its fall from space. It was discovered in a field in Texas. On its pages, handwritten, were the words of the Kiddush, prepared in advance of his journey: ancient words that had been to space and back, a bridge between heaven and earth, past and future. They have so much to teach us today.