Something incredibly bizarre and the source of much intense investigation happened this week leading up to Yom Kippur 2023:
A US Marine pilot ejected from an F-35 fighter jet flying over the Carolinas. Some emergency or mishap. Some say he was auto-ejected, because this particular plane had that feature. Problem was that the plane kept flying on without him. It’s a stealth jet, hidden from radar, a highly sophisticated super-capable plane. This version of the F-35 can take off vertically without a runway. It runs a cost of some $80-$100 million. And the military could not find it! Most bizarre of all, they put out public notice asking the citizenry if anyone saw this plane!
Conspiracies abounded. More so, the memes! The hilarity of comparing a highly sophisticated military fighter jet to some misplaced car keys. The places one could hide a jet in ordinary type hiding places (or behind the infamous boxes in Trump’s bathroom). Or saying how two expensive jets were lost one week: This F-35 and Aaron Rodgers… and on and on.
The main question people (and certainly the military experts) are asking, “How can you lose a plane like this!?”
We’re not speaking of a small company here. This is the US military. And this plane isn’t some small device or random thing. It’s a very expensive, large piece of very sophisticated and secretive hardware, it was loaded with the best technology, this is a coveted aircraft. How can they fumble something like this? And for the military to reach out to citizens to help find it??
I don’t know the answer to the plane, and most certainly the experts paid the big money find that out, will figure it out. It’s not my headache.
But really this is a question we can ask ourselves.
We are entrusted with or help create some very precious things. What comes to mind is our family and our Jewish heritage. Both these things have tremendous priceless preciousness, they are irreplaceable, and they are not simple: they are very complex and sophisticated with many moving parts and variables that optimally should operate in harmony.
But sometimes they don’t. And we run the risk of losing it.
Now, family is family, and our Jewish identity works the same. No matter what we do or don’t do, no matter how far we stray or how much we object or disassociate, our core Jewish identity “the Pintele Yid” remains. We can never get rid of that, thank G-d. It’s like family. (Much, much to be said about that – but it’s another message for another time).
But we’re speaking of family cohesion, healthy happy family dynamic, and in terms of our Jewish heritage (not our core identity – which never gets lost, but) our involvement, our awareness, our observance. Despite all the investment and effort, and that which was built up and developed, it can crash in some random field somewhere, as this plane did, and you don’t even know where it went. It took the military a day to find the whereabouts of that missing F-35 (a long time for a missing military plane).
People care about family, but without hands-on active involvement, it doesn’t have the same impact. You often hear Jews say they are Jews at heart, or they’re involved at some level, but not in a regular kind of way, and that kind of thing runs out of fuel, it’s hard to keep it lasting.
How can something so precious and important fly out of reach? How can get it get so lost that we can no longer track it?
This F-35 isn’t a drone. It’s auto-pilot mode only goes so far. It needs a pilot in that cockpit. He/she needs to have hands on that wheel/controller.
Again, Chassidus repeatedly emphasizes that we can never ever lose our Jewish core. That remains whole and intact regardless. It’s like a black box. And we never lose our core connection to family. But much of the external lived experience can be lost if we’re not flying in that cockpit: present, involved, and engaged.
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Oy, this message is going in a Mussar-style direction. It’s off the flight track for a Chabad Chassidic perspective which focuses much more on positive uplift than the threat and concern over risk and loss. So what’s the positive message here?
Sometimes the technology fails. All the fancy secretive tracking didn’t work. For some reason all those systems were down. For the military to enlist untrained civilian help in finding an advanced supersonic plane like this reminds us that sometimes the way to find what’s lost isn’t the fancy stuff. It’s the stuff anyone and everyone can do. You don’t need fancy equipment or specialized training. You can do it with the basics you already have and know. It can be right next door or even in your own backyard.
With our families, and with our Judaism, it’s the little everyday things that go a long way and can retrieve what’s lost.