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the jacket seemed to be taking on a life of its own,
what might it do to me while I sleep?
Then, when I rose to wipe myself and jumped as the toilet automatically flushed, it smirked at me from behind its cuff.
    But in club class, with the hateful thing stashed in the overhead locker, I was free of all burdens, free to smirk at the frummer who was making his way awkwardly up the aisle dragging an enormous wheeled case, which bumped againstone seat back and then the next. He was overweight and sweat wormed from beneath his hot homburg, his silk-faced frock coat falling open to reveal a black cummerbund and untuckings of white shirt. He seemed oblivious to the little anguishes he was causing – pre-flight champagne spilled, a laptop jogged – his eyes, in the shadows between his heron’s nest beard and his hat brim, unaffected, or so it seemed to me, by proximate concerns, yet brimming with the awe and anxiety provoked by Yahweh.
    Consulting his ticket, he threw himself down beside me, ignoring the bag, which was left for a brace of cabin crew, straining like navvies, to lever into a locker. Then, nothing: we sat eyes front, with nought to meditate on but a spray of plastic flowers in a vase bolted to a bulkhead. The fabric of the aircraft whiningly tensed, groaningly relaxed. The copilot came on the PA: we had, he said, been slow getting away from the gate and now we’d lost our one o’clock slot; as soon as he had any more information he would let us know. But he didn’t. We sat in that rebreathed time, inhaling seconds, then minutes, then half hours. The frummer grew restless and began making a flurry of phone calls, slooshing Yiddish into the only clamshell he was allowed. Finally the stewardess came to tell him to stop phoning because the plane was taxiing, but this too he ignored.
    I found the frummer heartening; his contradictory behaviour – at once mystical and insufferably worldly – seemed wholly in keeping with the paradox of modern air travel, whereby millions of pounds of thrust, a galaxy of halogen lights and leagues of concrete encapsulate a mundane environment dominated by the most trivial concerns. And it was while I was reflecting on this that the four merciless deities bolted tothe wings began to howl and the jet trundled along the runway with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley, then rattled into the clouds.
    When a while after takeoff the stewardess came by I ordered herb salad, followed by Vincent Bhatia’s prawn bhuna masala with coconut and curry leaf rice. Oh, and Eton mess to follow. The frummer laid tefillin. Of course, I knew a bit about phylacteries – they were bound to appeal to me – and if I’d ever inclined to observance tying little boxes to my head would’ve been a big part of the draw.
    I chewed salad – he lashed the
shel yad
to his arm and the
shel rosh
to his head. I ate curry – he prayed:
And it shall be for a sign for you upon your head, and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth, for with a strong hand has the LORD brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year
.
    This, just one of the injunctions for the faithful to write down on parchment that a box was to be tied to their head, which was then put in a box that was tied to their head – a reduction ad absurdum that made me dizzy with joy. That within the tefillin was a scroll upon which no fewer than 3,188 Hebrew characters were written in kosher ink confirmed the magical intent. After all, it took fifteen hours with a limner’s abject concentration to write them, and if one was wrong, or two were out of order, the juju
wouldn’t work
: no mitzvah! This little black box was the flight recorder for a Haredi jet-propelled through life by the
halacha
, a set of rules so comprehensive – if open to labyrinthine interpretation – that they told him what he should be doing every moment of the day, and exactly how he should