It was a snowy night, and snow covered all the runways. We waited in the airport terminal in New York until we were informed that there was no way that we could board the plane. They would have to clear away the snow first, and our flight would be delayed.
It’s not easy to board a flight after a two-and-a-half-hour delay, but it’s not so terrible. The problem was that we had to catch a connecting flight. We had a stopover in London, and we were supposed to fly to Israel from there. If we arrived two and a half hours late, the flight to Israel would already have taken off, and we would have missed it. What were we to do?
After two and a half nerve-racking hours, we finally boarded the plane, tired and worn out. The most natural thing would have been for us to stretch out on the seat and go to sleep after the long wait. But the pressure of not knowing what would happen when we arrived in London and how we would get a flight from there to Eretz Yisrael did not allow us to relax in the skies above the Atlantic.
There were about thirty of us on that flight who were going to Eretz Yisrael. We naturally formed a group in our shared difficulty as, shocked, we heard about the alternate plans that had been made for us. In London, we were to board a flight to Dubai. In Dubai we would wait six hours, and only then would we fly to Israel.
When we heard these plans we were very upset, and we let them know it. We had no strength for an additional flight and such a long wait! It was really upsetting. Really, really annoying. Really not right.
Among our group, there were some people in the know, who had connections, and they promised to try to do whatever they could. The minute they had more to tell us, they would do so, and in the meantime, it was recommended that we rest, because we would be landing soon.
In the seat in front of us sat a chareidi family. They had not joined the conversation and the pressured talks at all. They were so calm that I was sure that England was their final destination.
I saw how the steward turned to them in English and spoke to them, but the father did not understand. He turned to me. “Can you please translate what he is saying?”
That’s how I became the translator for a family that did not speak a word of English. I translated word for word, and I was amazed. The steward asked them what their destination was. They answered, “Israel.” They showed him their tickets, and he arranged a seat for them on an alternate flight from London directly to Israel! I heard it with my own ears, and I was the one who passed on the message with my own mouth. It was all so straightforward and simple.
We were pressured and talking and turning over the world, high above the clouds, making connections between continents, while they were sitting calmly and trusting that Hashem would arrange everything for them, and He truly did!
The plane landed at the London airport. They allowed us to stay in a hotel, and each of the travelers to Israel tried to improve his route. Some of the passengers in our group switched to a flight to Paris, and from there to Israel, some stayed with the six-hour stopover in Dubai, and some of them, like us and a few others, had it even better. We heard that a flight had opened from London to Israel, and we managed to get onto the list of passengers, along with the calm family for whom I had translated the steward’s words.
“What a miracle that we know English,” my daughter said, “so we were able to understand what was happening and to get onto the flight to Israel at the end.”
“No, my daughter,” I told her. “It’s not the English language that stood by us. People can speak not a word of English and get everything, and others can know English and French fluently and not get anything. If we hadn’t known English, we would have succeeded just like that family that didn’t know English and did nothing, and nonetheless things worked out for them easily, with a direct flight from England, directly from the Creator of the world. We relied on other things, and they relied only on Hashem. You don’t need anything other than siyata d’Shmaya.
