A Near-Death Experience at 30,000 Feet

On fear, courage, and the astonishing return of tomorrow.

We usually think of a near-death experience as something mystical.

A tunnel.

A light.

A feeling of leaving the body.

The presence of someone long gone.

A glimpse of something beyond this life.

But perhaps there is another kind.

Not an experience of what may lie beyond death.

An experience of standing so close to death that life itself suddenly becomes visible.

That is what I keep thinking about when I think of the passengers aboard that FlyDubai flight.

For a terrifying stretch of time, many of them believed they were about to die.

Not someday.

Not in the abstract.

Now.

The future disappeared.

And when that happens, the architecture of ordinary life collapses very quickly.

The appointment does not matter.

The money does not matter.

The argument does not matter.

The person beside you does.

The child in your arms does.

The face you suddenly wish you could see one more time does.

Breath matters.

Another second matters.

Life matters.

Perhaps that is what a near-death experience really does.

It rearranges value.

It exposes how much of our lives are spent treating the trivial as urgent and the precious as permanent.

There is another layer here too.

These were Israelis.

People who, in recent years especially, have lived with a sharper awareness than most of us that death can come suddenly.

Sirens.

Bombs.

Shelters.

War.

Terror.

The memory of October 7.

And yet even when danger becomes part of the atmosphere, human beings adapt.

They go to work.

They make plans.

They fall in love.

They raise children.

They complain about traffic.

They live.

Because they have to.

You cannot wake every morning believing it may be your last.

And so tomorrow becomes an assumption again.

Until suddenly it isn’t.

That is what makes what happened on that plane so striking.

Death was no longer national.

Not historical.

Not military.

Not something happening to someone else.

It was personal.

Immediate.

Inside the cabin.

There is a difference between knowing death exists and believing:

This is my moment.

That knowledge enters the body differently.

And when death comes that close, the noise of ordinary life falls away.

What remains is astonishingly simple:

Life itself.

Then, inside that terror, people acted.

A wounded Indian pilot kept fighting.

Passengers moved toward danger.

An Israeli plumber wrestled the terrorist to the ground, helping subdue him. Then he took control of the plane and did what he could to level it.

Other off-duty pilots, traveling as passengers, stepped in to help.

Passengers helped restrain the attacker with cords from a headset.

A dentist tended to the injured pilot.

No one aboard that aircraft knew whether any of it would be enough.

They acted anyway.

That is courage in its purest form.

Not the absence of fear.

The decision that something else matters more.

Some have called what happened a miracle.

I understand the impulse.

When an aircraft falls toward its doom, and the passengers survive, the word seems almost unavoidable.

But I find myself drawn to another understanding of miracle.

This one did not arrive untouched by human hands.

It came through them.

Through courage.

Through instinct.

Through training.

Through the refusal to surrender.

Perhaps grace sometimes looks like that.

Not something descending dramatically from the heavens.

Something moving through a human being.

A hand reaching.

A person standing.

Someone acting while everyone else is terrified.

Someone, in the face of catastrophe, saying:

Not yet.

And somehow, this time, death listened.

The future returned.

Hours later, after the emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, after the wounded had been treated and some passengers had to overcome the fear of boarding another aircraft, they finally began the journey home.

A rescue flight carried them back toward Tel Aviv.

And as that plane headed toward Ben Gurion Airport, something happened that I cannot stop thinking about.

They sang.

They sang in Hebrew.

One of the songs was “VeHashem Yitbarach Tamid Ohev Oti.”

And the Blessed G-d always loves me.

Think about those words for a moment.

Only hours earlier, these people had been falling through the sky, believing they might be taking their final breaths.

Now the lights of Israel were appearing beneath them, and they were singing:

G-d always loves me.

They cheered.

They cried.

They embraced.

They were looking toward home.

And singing because they had lived long enough to return to it.

There is something beyond language in that transition.

One moment, you believe there will be no tomorrow.

Hours later, another airplane is carrying you toward it.

What does home look like after you have believed you would never see it again?

What does the ground beneath you mean?

What does it feel like to know that somewhere below, people you love are waiting for you?

Perhaps that is why they sang.

Not because everything was suddenly all right.

Not because the terror had disappeared.

They sang because they were coming home.

They had looked upon death’s door.

And it had not opened.

For now.

And now Tel Aviv was below them.

Home.

The future.

Another day.

All of it returned.

When they reached Ben Gurion Airport, another song began.

Passengers and the families waiting for them joined in:

“Am Yisrael Chai.”

The people of Israel live.

There may be no more fitting words.

These were people who only hours earlier had believed they might die.

Now they were standing on Israeli soil, surrounded by people who had feared they might never see them again.

And they were singing not merely:

I am alive.

But something larger.

We are alive.

Am Yisrael Chai is usually heard as a declaration about a people.

A statement of endurance.

A refusal to disappear.

But here it was also intensely personal.

These particular people were alive.

These parents.

These children.

These husbands and wives.

These strangers who had shared a cabin in which death suddenly seemed certain.

For once, the ancient collective declaration and the simplest individual fact had become the same thing.

Am Yisrael Chai.

We live.

That singing feels almost like the completion of the near-death experience.

The terror was the descent.

The survival was the escape.

But the transformation may have begun on that second airplane, when they understood that they were not merely alive.

They were going home.

G-d always loves me.

The people of Israel live.

After coming so close to death, they answered it with life.

People who survive near-death experiences often describe themselves afterward as changed.

Some become less afraid of death.

Some care less about status or possessions.

Some become more compassionate.

Some speak of gratitude as though it has become physical.

The world itself can seem altered.

Not because the world has changed.

Because they have.

A tree is still a tree.

A cup of coffee is still a cup of coffee.

There are still bills.

There is still traffic.

There is still uncertainty.

And yet, after believing all of it was gone, the ordinary may become almost unbearably beautiful.

A glass of water.

A familiar voice.

A doorway.

A child’s face.

Things we barely notice suddenly become evidence of something astonishing.

You are still here.

That may be what a near-death experience reveals most deeply.

Not what happens when we die.

What happens when we almost do.

What becomes visible when everything we assumed was permanent suddenly isn’t?

Maybe we see how much of life we have mistaken for background.

The people around us.

The chance to make something right.

The privilege of another ordinary morning.

The passengers aboard that flight may not have experienced the classic NDE of tunnels and light and leaving the body.

But they crossed a threshold nonetheless.

On one side:

This is over.

On the other:

I am still here.

Imagine believing there will be no tomorrow.

Then tomorrow returns.

Imagine beginning to say goodbye to your life.

Then being handed the rest of it back.

We usually think joy comes from receiving something new.

A new love.

A new child.

A new home.

A dream fulfilled.

But there is another kind of joy.

Older.

Deeper.

More elemental.

The joy of almost losing everything and then discovering that, somehow, you still possess it.

Your breath.

Your family.

Your future.

The next morning.

Home.

That is why the singing matters.

It was not ordinary celebration.

It was something closer to release.

The sound human beings make when terror loosens its grip and life rushes back in.

Somewhere between laughter and weeping.

Between grief and gratitude.

Between goodbye and hello.

And because these were Israelis, perhaps there was another layer beneath those songs as well.

They returned from an experience in which each person had confronted his or her own mortality.

But when they sang, they reached for words that connected them to something beyond themselves.

To G-d.

To home.

To one another.

To a people.

VeHashem Yitbarach Tamid Ohev Oti.

G-d always loves me.

Then:

Am Yisrael Chai.

The people of Israel live.

First the individual.

Then the collective.

I am still here.

We are still here.

Maybe that is why their singing has stayed with me.

Because one day, for every one of us, death will not pass by.

There will be a final morning.

A final embrace.

A final breath.

We simply do not know which one.

And perhaps that uncertainty is not only frightening.

Perhaps it is also an invitation.

To notice.

To forgive sooner.

To speak more tenderly.

To stop treating ordinary days as though they are merely waiting rooms for some more important life.

To stop assuming that tomorrow already belongs to us.

Human beings postpone gratitude with remarkable consistency.

We tell ourselves we will appreciate things later.

When work slows down.

When the crisis ends.

When there is more money.

When the children are older.

Tomorrow becomes a warehouse for everything we neglect to feel today.

Until, occasionally, tomorrow disappears.

And then what would we give to have it back?

One more breakfast.

One more walk.

One more conversation.

One more chance to say I love you.

One more chance to say I’m sorry.

One more chance to look at someone we love and understand that their presence beside us is temporary.

Maybe ordinary life will close around those passengers again.

It usually does.

The bills return.

The worries return.

Human beings are extraordinarily good at forgetting what they have learned.

But perhaps something remains.

A slight shift.

A crack in the old assumptions.

A quieter awareness beneath everything:

This could have ended.

And because it did not, perhaps I should live a little differently.

Love a little more openly.

Forgive a little faster.

Notice a little more.

Spend less time proving myself right.

Spend less time worrying about things I will not remember at the end.

Maybe that is the gift hidden inside a near-death experience.

Not knowledge of death.

Knowledge of life.

The passengers aboard that FlyDubai flight came frighteningly close to the edge.

Brave human beings pulled them back.

And hours later, as another plane carried them home to Tel Aviv, they sang.

I keep returning to that image.

Not the falling aircraft.

Not the terror.

The singing.

Because perhaps that was the truest expression of what had happened to them.

They had believed the future was gone.

Then the future returned.

They had begun to lose the world.

Then the world was handed back.

And for a few minutes, they knew exactly what it was worth.

So they sang.

G-d always loves me.

The people of Israel live.

Maybe we do not need to nearly die in order to have a near-death revelation.

Maybe we only need to listen to those who did.

They thought their lives were over.

Then they looked out the window and saw home.

And they sang.