Thursday, January 04, 2007

More on EL AL

A friend of mine who is an EL AL frequent flyer sent them an email explaining that after his upcoming trip (for which he had already purchased tickets) he will be unable to fly on their airline again due to their new policy of violating shabbat.

He got back a nice letter explaining that the reason they flew on shabbat on that one occassion was not for financial considerations but rather because they wished to prevent suffering and distress to their passengers. They also stressed that they are the only airline in the world that plans its flight schedule without flights on shabbat.

_My Commentary_

If the chareidi community goes ahead with its ban, EL AL will most likely start scheduling regular flights on shabbat. They will change the status of the airline from shabbat oberservant with exceptions to not shabbat observant at all.

Instead of threatening not to ride their planes anymore because of a violation in a special circumstance, they could have done much better by praising EL AL and asking them to continue being shabbat observance and to try and find ways to not violate shabbat during times of crisis.

2 comments:

yingerman said...

this appears to be a typical both-sides-are-screwed situation.
The rabbis can't back down cause you gotta support shabbos in public, right? I mean who wants to labled a shabbos sissy.
And Elal says their in the right 'cause passengers got stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and you gotta be a mench.

Until someone stands up (maybe a rep from Elal should visit R Kaniefski or something) and says
Ok we'll work on it, the situation is only gonna stagnate.

Anonymous said...

I love the fact that this kora (this that the right word) has been signed by all the big guns already but won't be issued unless negotiations breakdown. I think they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths.