Well, it looks like the prophetic vision of Mel Brooks is about to be fulfilled. The world’s first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, is set to head up on the space shuttle Columbia shortly. Unfortunately, the shuttle launch was delayed, so Ramon will miss out on celebrating the first Yom Kippur ever in space. However, there is still the issue of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is traditionally demarcated by sunset and sunrise, but the space shuttle orbits the Earth once every ninety minutes. That’s sixteen “days” per 24-hour period, or two Sabbaths per day. Very confusing. Fortunately, Ramon’s local Floridian rabbi has consulted with his colleages and determined that the Sabbath actually depends on the rotation of the Earth, not sunset:

“This has been a theoretical question for some time,” says Rabbi Konikov. “But rabbinical scholars have now been confronted with this as a real life situation.” The rabbis have resolved it, says Rabbi Konikov, explaining that “Col. Ramon will mark the Sabbath according to Cape Canaveral time — the site of the launch.”

Very sensible, although I should note that (surprise!) some of the rabbis begged to differ:

One of the scholars consulted, Rabbi Levy Yitzhak Halperin, has already ruled the colonel should be relieved of his obligations as he will not be experiencing “Earth time”. This opinion is not shared by a British colleague, who insists that since one cannot exist in space without recreating Earth-like conditions that make it habitable, one should follow the same routine in Space as they would on Earth.

One wonders what the rabbis would say about far-future space colonies on distant planets. Is the Sabbath tied to the local sunset and sunrise, or is it still tied to the “place of launch” back on Earth? If it’s the former, what if the planet rotates in such a way that its synodic day is very long? To use Venus as an example, the Sabbath would arrive every 4,088 Earth-days, and the Day of Rest itself would last 584 days. Not an ideal solution. On the other hand, if it’s the latter, what about people who are born on the planet itself, who have no “site of launch”? And then there’s the voyage itself, where we have to account for relativistic effects. Would we celebrate the Sabbath based on the flow of time in the ship’s frame or the launch site’s frame? Furthermore, what if through genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancements, our descendants are able to survive in “non-Earthlike” environments? Would they still celebrate the Sabbath? Are they still even Jews? It looks like we’ll have to leave these questions of Talmudic importance for future scholars to ponder.