A Plumber, a Dentist, 67 Minutes, and the Miracle of Survival

There is an old joke that if you put two Jews in a room, you get three opinions. Apparently, if you put a plane full of people headed to Israel in an emergency, you discover a plumber who can help fly the plane, a dentist who can treat the wounded pilot, and other passengers willing and able to intervene.

You could hardly invent a more improbable story.

Social media quickly began riffing on the sheer improbability of it all, including what useful expertise might be found among the passengers on any given flight to Israel. And almost immediately, Israelis and Jews did what we often do when something frightening and improbable happens. We make jokes.

The jokes were funny precisely because the circumstances surrounding the attempted murder of a plane full of Israeli men, women and children returning from vacation were so extraordinary. Of course there was a dentist. Of course there was a plumber. Of course somebody on an Israel-bound flight seemed to have exactly the skill needed at exactly the right moment.

The humor was not really about what happened. What happened was terrifying. The humor was about the almost absurd collection of people who happened to be there when they were needed.

And one of the most unbelievable parts was apparently not a joke at all. The plumber, Yaniv Hayun, explained that when the plane was hurtling toward the ground, he knew enough from watching Air Crash Investigation to pull back on the airplane’s steering column. That prompted someone else to lament that after years of watching MasterChef, he still could not make an omelet.

Humor gave people a way to absorb something terrifying that had ended, remarkably, without the catastrophe everyone feared. But at almost exactly the same time, something much darker happened online. Other people looked at the same improbable details and did not laugh. They regarded the improbability itself as evidence of a conspiracy by Jews.

According to monitoring by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the first social media post suggesting that the incident was an Israeli “false flag” appeared only 67 minutes after the plane’s first emergency distress signal. Within five hours, its researchers had identified 1,000 hostile posts. Over 12 hours, they identified 2,963 posts attributing the incident in some fashion to Israel, Mossad, Netanyahu, Zionists, or Jews. Sixty-seven minutes.

There is also the bitter irony that the people aboard the plane were flying to Israel. Had the intervention failed and the worst occurred, most of the dead would have been Israeli Jews. Instead, multiple passengers intervened, people with unexpectedly useful skills stepped forward, and lives were miraculously saved. For some people online, the very improbability of the successful rescue became evidence that Israel orchestrated it.

Jews know this historical trap well. Jewish vulnerability provokes indifference or blame, while Jewish agency is transformed into evidence of hidden Jewish power. The same remarkable facts produced two radically different responses. For many Israelis and Jews, the improbability became the joke: What are the odds that exactly the people you needed would happen to be aboard that plane? For others, the improbability became proof: What are the odds that exactly the people you needed would happen to be aboard that plane?

One sees extraordinary human courage, heroes and perhaps a miracle. The other sees the same survival and reaches for an ancient explanation: Mossad. Zionists. Jews.

That is why this story matters to me in North Carolina. I am not an Israeli commentator. I am a Jewish physician and professor who has spent much of my professional life in public health and communication and, more recently, teaching and writing about antisemitism. But I am also a father, a teacher and a member of a Jewish community.

I could spend the rest of this essay writing about the antisemites. They are part of the story. Hannah Arendt understood how dangerous antisemitism becomes when the Jew is transformed from someone who is merely disliked into the hidden actor who supposedly explains what otherwise seems inexplicable. Only 67 minutes after an airplane carrying mostly Israelis nearly crashed, that ancient idea was already attaching itself to a brand-new event.

But I don’t want to give the antisemites any more agency in this story. They are not the people I want to write about. The people on that airplane are.

The airplane was hurtling toward the ground at 1,700 feet per second. There was no time for theories and no time to develop a plan. People simply acted. A plumber, a dentist, the wounded pilot, flight attendants, mothers and other passengers stepped forward. The knowledge and courage necessary to prevent catastrophe were there when they were needed.

That is the part of this story I don’t want to lose.

Maybe that is also why Israelis immediately made jokes. Humor did not trivialize what happened. It allowed us to absorb something almost too frightening to contemplate. The airplane almost crashed. It didn’t. People almost died. They didn’t.

There is something deeply Jewish in laughing after surviving something not funny at all. And there is something deeply Israeli in the rest of it.

Israel itself is an improbable story. Jews refugees from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere, speaking different languages and carrying different histories. Numerous wars, terrorism, enormous loss, political upheaval and internal divisions. On October 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

And Israel is still here. Not because Israelis possess some mysterious power, and not because everything Israel does is right. Israel survives because, again and again, ordinary people decide that when something needs to be done, they will do it.

That is what struck me about the people aboard this airplane. Nobody needed to be a superhero. They needed to be themselves at exactly the moment when what they knew how to do suddenly mattered. The plumber was still a plumber. The dentist was still a dentist. The passengers were still passengers. Yet confronted with catastrophe, together they became something more.

Perhaps that is a small part of the miracle of Israel. The miracle is not that catastrophe never comes. Jewish history makes any such claims impossible. The miracle is survival, the stubborn refusal to disappear. Rebuilding after destruction, returning after exile, laughing after terror, getting up again when history has given us every reason to stay down.

Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live. The power lies in the verb. Not merely endure. Live. Build families. Go to work. Argue. Laugh. Board airplanes. Go on vacation. Come home.

I imagine those terrifying minutes when nobody aboard knew whether they would live or die. There were no memes yet, no conspiracy theories, no arguments about Israel. There were simply human beings confronted with catastrophe, and they chose to act. Afterward, because they were alive, they laughed.

These are the people whose stories I want to hear. More than that, I want us to invite them here. Bring them into our communities, our synagogues, our schools and universities, and our homes. Let our children sit across from them and hear what happened in their own words. Let them ask what they saw, what they feared and why they acted. And after they go home, we should keep telling their story.

Judaism has understood this story telling for thousands of years. V’shinantam l’vanecha. Teach these words diligently to your children. We are told to speak of them when we sit in our homes and when we walk on the way. What survives depends, in part, upon what one generation chooses to tell the next.

We keep telling a story whose ending we already know because their deliverance becomes our deliverance. Their survival becomes part of our survival. Eventually their story becomes our children’s story.

Maybe that is what we should do with this story too. Tell our children about the plumber and the dentist. Tell them about the passengers who did not wait for someone else to save them. Tell them that people were terrified and acted anyway. Tell them that an airplane filled with people going home to Israel nearly became another Jewish tragedy, and instead it landed.

Yes, tell them that within 67 minutes people were already blaming Israel and Jews. Our children need to recognize that ancient hatred when it puts on new clothes. But don’t let that be the story they remember most.

Let them remember the people who survived. The Passover Haggadah does not end with Pharaoh. It ends with freedom. Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live.

And when threatened with catastrophe, sometimes a plumber becomes a pilot, a dentist becomes an emergency physician, passengers become rescuers, and an airplane that seems destined to fall somehow comes home.

That is the story I want our children to know. Tell our children.

And then tell the story again.