The Legacy of Ilan Ramon

The memory is etched into my mind precisely, with the kind of unforgiving detail our brain saves for tragedy. February 1, 2003. We were living in New York at the time, but were visiting our family in Baltimore for the weekend. I was sitting next to my mother in shul. It was the rabbi’s speech, and as usual, my mind was wandering. My mother’s friend entered the women’s section and walked over to us. She touched my mother’s arm lightly and whispered, “I just heard the Columbia shuttle exploded.”

 

My mind went through weird acrobatics. No, I thought, she’s confused. The space shuttle Challenger exploded, back when I was in elementary school. Not the Columbia. You’re getting it wrong. It’s 2003 now, the technology is much better, accidents like this don’t happen anymore.

 

But, unfortunately, tragically, it was true. Accidents like this do happen; they happen even in the advanced technological world of 2003.

 

I was teaching 3rd grade at a Jewish day school in New York at the time, so you can imagine the excitement and hype surrounding Ilan Ramon. The first Israeli astronaut! Every student and teacher knew all the details, and we could blurt them out with pride to anyone who asked: Married with four kids. A former IDF fighter pilot. Not observant, but planned to keep kosher in outer space. A child of Holocaust survivors, he had brought sentimental items into space—a pencil sketch of the moon, drawn by a Jew who later perished in Auschwitz. And a tiny Torah scroll, rescued from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A Torah in outer space! Who could have ever imagined? That little Torah was almost as famous as Ramon himself.

 

And then our expectations, our exhilaration, our tremendous, bursting pride turned to heart-wrenching devastation. The shuttle exploded. All seven astronauts on board perished. A piece of foam, which had struck the shuttle during takeoff, which the NASA scientists deemed inconsequential, turned out to be the culprit, allowing in hot gases. Causing the shuttle to blow apart on reentry.

 

We were stunned. Our Israeli astronaut, gone.

 

Unfortunately, when we think of Ilan Ramon, we often think, “Israeli astronaut who was killed,” instead of “Israeli astronaut.” We have a tendency to focus on the circumstances of a person’s death rather than how he lived his life.

 

Ramon’s legacy, though, is his life, not his death. He taught us we could truly be anything we want to be. We have (thank God!) plenty of successful Jews we could admire, in the fields of medicine, law, academia, business and entertainment. But Ilan Ramon was our first Israeli space cowboy. He epitomized a risk-taking, dream-following, limit-pushing hero.

So I would like to remember Ilan Ramon, not as someone who died tragically and too young, but as someone who broke barriers, who pursued one of the world’s most demanding jobs, and who did so as a proud Jew and a proud Israeli.

 

Please join me in raising a glass of Tang to Ilan Ramon, Israeli astronaut, and to all future Jewish space cowboys and cowgirls.