An Embrace That Holds Entire Worlds

Some embraces hold more than two people. This one holds entire worlds.

Today, as I was scrolling through my feed, this image stopped me. The faces were familiar. But what struck me was how even the scar on the back of Captain Smit Machchhar’s head had become familiar. Once you know what happened aboard that flydubai flight, how a wounded, bleeding man found the strength to help save more than 170 lives, you cannot look at those scars and see only an injury. I kept looking at this photograph, thinking of all the people who got to hold someone they loved because he refused to give up.

Let me begin with a teaching I knew from the Quran when I was a Muslim. This time, I am deliberately choosing to quote its original rabbinic formulation, preserved in the Jerusalem Talmud. In a story that brings together an Indian pilot, an Emirati airline, a flight to Israel and the Jewish lives he helped protect, that choice feels deeply meaningful to me:

שכל המאבד נפש אחת מעלין עליו כאילו איבד עולם מלא וכל המקיים נפש אחת מעלין עליו כאילו קיים עולם מלא

“Whoever destroys a single life is regarded as though they had destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves a single life is regarded as though they had preserved an entire world.” – Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:9

Look at this photograph. Then imagine the photographs that, because of his courage, never had to exist. Portraits beside coffins. Children holding pictures of parents. Families gathering around an empty chair, trying to understand how an ordinary journey became their last goodbye.

Wounded and bleeding, Captain Smit Machchhar still found the strength to act. As the aircraft descended, the Indian flydubai pilot opened the cockpit door, allowing others to intervene. His presence of mind, together with the courage of fellow crew members and passengers, helped bring everyone home.

Even through his own pain, he understood that other lives depended on what he did next.

That is extraordinary bravery. That is responsibility carried through unbearable pain. That is love for human life expressed through action.

In a figurative sense, he helped avert a “World War III”, the worlds shattered within families, the grief without an ending, and the hatred and retaliation that a catastrophe might have unleashed beyond that aircraft. Nobody can know how far those consequences would have travelled.

But somewhere, a family was spared the phone call that would have divided their lives into before and after.

Every person who returned home carried a world with them. Someone’s child. Someone’s parent. Someone’s reason to keep going. Birthdays still to celebrate. Apologies still to make. Children and grandchildren still to be born.

And look at this extraordinary meeting of humanity: an Indian captain, an Emirati airline, a flight to Israel, and a Jewish teaching that gives words to the meaning of his courage.

“Whoever preserves a single life is regarded as though they had preserved an entire world.”

The words of the Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:9, become painfully, beautifully understandable in this photograph.

The Abraham Accords helped open the way for regular flights between the UAE and Israel. Their significance lives in these journeys, in people meeting, working, visiting and learning to trust one another across boundaries that once kept them apart. Every passenger boards with the quiet expectation that strangers will help them reach the people they love.

That trust is worth defending.

By honouring this captain and his fellow crew members, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed placed the protection of human life before the world as something deserving the highest recognition.

To me, that sends a powerful message against antisemitism: Jewish lives are precious. Their safety must never depend on anyone’s political approval. A flight to Israel deserves the same safety as a flight anywhere else. No grievance makes an innocent passenger expendable.

Fighting terror requires cooperation across countries, religions and communities. It requires us to protect that cooperation precisely when hatred tries to tear it apart.

Nature is the greatest teacher. In a falling aircraft, gravity makes no distinction between religions or nationalities. Survival depends on human beings protecting one another.

And sometimes, through one wounded man’s refusal to give up, life presents that lesson with a clarity no sermon could ever achieve.

Look at the embrace again.

Think of all the other embraces that became possible because those passengers came home.

He helped save a plane full of people, and all the worlds waiting to welcome them back.