by Zvi Baranoff
The first Yidden that arrived on Planet Birobidzhan from Planet Earth so very long ago traveled on board the optimistically named Hatikvah. They came with high hopes and great expectations. The ship was designed for one way transit and it served the founders well.
The voyage of the founders of Planet Birobidzhan aboard the Hatikvah took close to two decades. The Hatikvah was a huge, lumbering vessel. The Hatikvah was designed for the relative comfort of passengers on a very long voyage, intending to settle a new world. It was not built for speed.
Those that followed in cryogenic suspension and packed like herring, were generally speaking, less optimistic on arrival. Those ships that carried the emigrants from the Home Planet were crowded. When “defrosted” the passengers felt somewhat sick akin to a hangover and then experienced significant social disorientation. Each ship brought less supplies than the preceding one. Accommodations for the new arrivals were minimal and substandard. Life on Planet Birobidzhan in the early days was difficult and bleak. Soon, the time between arrival of each transit ship stretched out until the fateful day when the last one landed and no further word from the Home Planet was heard. The Yidden on Planet Birobidzhan had been left to fend for themselves.
It was nearly three centuries after contact with the Home Planet had been lost, before the Yidden of Planet Birobidzhan attempted to reestablish contact by sending a ship across the void back to the Home Planet. Three centuries, by any measurement, is a very long time.
The voyage on the ship named Shliach - The Emissary - toward the Home Planet was a long time in the planning. Such a voyage was even longer in the imaginations and dreams of menschen on Planet Birobidzhan. By the best of guesstimate of the engineers that designed and built the Shliach, the “return” flight voyage would be around nine to twelve years - half the time of the founders excursion.
The Shliach had the advantages of upgraded design, advanced metallics, the technological utilization of Dovid's Slingshot and pellet beams, new fuels, and a streamlined body. Therefore, the Shliach was a much faster ship than the Hatikvah. Nonetheless, the distance was still vast and the time to transpire such a distance was still enormous.
The Shliach was a much smaller ship than the lumbering Hatikvah of the founders. Far fewer passengers were destined to travel from Planet Birobidzhan to the Home Planet. This was meant as a diplomatic and trade mission rather than a settlement project.
It was determined that the passengers were all to be unmarried men, to simplify the social dynamics and eliminate the concerns of pregnancy, birthing, and children. Most of the men were widowed, although some were divorced. Nes ben Dovid was the youngest of the passengers originally on the roster, and the only one that had never been married. However, he met and fell in love with Shprintza Freyda. He chose to marry and emigrated to Planet Shney, giving up his berth on the Shliach.
It was decided that eighteen was the optimal number of passengers. The evident reason that eighteen were chosen is because of the relationship of the number with the letters chet and yud, the word chai meaning life, making eighteen the number of mazel. However, the underlying, unspoken rationale was determined by statisticians in the service of halakhah. Ten men are required to form a minyan for daily prayer, particularly the reading of the Toyre and recital of Kadish. Because of the long flight and the advanced age of several of the passengers, odds were that some deaths might occur before reaching the Home Planet. Eighteen were sent to assure that ten would survive.
The Shiluchim, the eighteen men that were chosen to travel on board the Shliach needed to represent the diverse people of Planet Birobidzhan and likely the common interests of the Yidden of the Home Planet as well, in any interactions with the powers-that-be (whatever they might turn out to be) of Planet Earth. They were all well educated and most were also wealthy. Each had to finance their own share of the expedition or be sponsored by those whose interest they represented on Planet Birobidzhan. Several of the men were linguists, fluent in multiple languages that were widely spoken on Planet Earth, at least at the time of our last contact with the Home Planet.
They were presented with a complex outreach mission. We knew nothing about what had transpired on the Home Planet over the past centuries. No one knew what to expect from reestablishing contact with Earth, or if reestablishing contact was even possible. The Shiluchim needed a flexible attitude, prepared to navigate and negotiate complexities. If conditions on the Home Planet had continued to worsen, perhaps the Yidden of the Home Planet would need ransoming and rescuing. On the other hand, if conditions there were significantly improved, there may be an opportunity for a return to our world of origin. Alternatively, trade could be established between the distant planets.
The ship's cargo hold was packed with gold bars and coins from Planet Shney. With as much uncertainty that enveloped this mission, there was a sense that gold could come in handy. Gold, it was presumed, was still the universal language. Gold would serve as a commodity for trade, a means perhaps to grease palms to facilitate negotiations, or may be needed for pidyon shevuyim, the ransoming of the Yidden of the Home Planet. The Shiluchim needed to be prepared for whatever circumstances that encountered.
Also packed into the hold of the ship were the emergency food rations. The passengers of the Shilach had an adequate, if somewhat tedious, supply of ready-made kosher food for their long voyage to Planet Earth. It was reasonably assumed that food could be found on arrival, even if they would need to resort to a diet of lentils like Daniel had in Babylon. However, if chas v'chalila, the Shiluchim determined that even approaching the Home Planet was unsafe, they had the option to abort the approach and return to Planet Birobidzhan, surviving with the bare-bone emergency rations. That was certainly a bleak option, but an option nonetheless.
We intuitively understand that time is a flexible, pliable concept. We accept by faith that the Ineffable One created the Heavens and the Earth in six days and nonetheless understand that millions of years unfolded within those six days. We believe that God rested on the seventh day while still knowing that rest is neither necessary nor possible for the Supreme Being. We celebrate and honor the Shabbos every week, following the example set by our Creator, as documented in the Tanakh. We enhance the Divine each week by stretching Shabbos at both ends. We usher the Shekhinah in when we light our candles eighteen minutes before sunset on Freytag. We stretch the holiness with the Havdalah ceremony after the stars appear in our sky. We entice the Holy Spirit to linger with us for just a little while longer even as Shabbos fades into the beginning of the work week.
Shabbos slips away, each week, much too quickly. Each Suntag, it is a long work week until the next Shabbos. When we were children, we could hardly wait until our birthday and it always felt forever away. Now that we are older, time seems to somehow speed up as one birthday follows another in rapid succession. None of these thoughts about the relativity of time come even close to understanding how time might be perceived on an intergalactic journey.
Likewise, distance is also understood relatively. It is, for instance, a long walk to the market when hungry or tired, even if it is only a few blocks. A far greater distance separates the major cities of Planet Birobidzhan. Even by plane it is a long way from Niu Niu Yark to New Yerushalaim, with First Landing an obligatory stop around the halfway point between the two. Traveling by cargo ship or ferry from one continent to another is an even bigger shlep. No long trip on Planet Birobidzhan compares to an intergalactic voyage between Planet Birobidzhan and the Home Planet.
For the first couple of years, the Shliach's receivers picked up radio broadcasting from Planet Birobidzhan and those broadcasts provided the passengers a thread of attachment to their world. As the Shliach plodded forward into the void, the delays increased and the signal weakened until the thread broke.
The tedious sameness then became overwhelming. There were no outside sounds or sights. There was no breeze. No sunsets or sunrises. There were no children shouting and running about and no women gossiping in the nonexistent market. In the public areas of the ship, one encountered the same few men and engaged in the well-worn same repetitive pastimes such as study and playing chess.
The monotony was expected to continue until the Shliach reached the wormhole. The best estimates suggested that the ship would be in the vicinity of the wormhole about seven years after the launch from Planet Birobidzhan.
The founders that transited the wormhole in the other direction so many years ago were the only emigrants that had done so fully awake and aware. The description of that crossing was enshrined in their journals. The ship's medical records also chronicled the discomfort experienced and recorded the injuries including spontaneous abortions. No one was particularly looking forward to transiting the wormhole although they all understood that to be absolutely necessary. It surely promised to be a most distressing experience.
Beyond the wormhole, the Shliach would likely be within listening range of Earth broadcasting, assuming that there were broadcasts from the Home Planet and also assuming that the on-board receivers were compatible with those possible broadcasts. This was what these men had to look forward to.
Here are the links to the rest of the story as posted so far:
1 - The Miracle of Vilna on Planet Shney
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-miracle-of-vilna-on-planet-shney.html
2 - Nes and Shprintza Freyda Spin the Dreidl on Planet Birobidzhan
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/01/nes-and-shprintza-freyda-spin-dreidl-on.html?m=1
3 - From Shloflozikayt to the Vision of a Marvelous Shtot
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/02/from-shloflozikayt-to-vision-of.html
4 - A Strategy for the Yeshiva Takes Shape and Nes Opens a Pool Hall on Planet Shney
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-strategy-for-yeshiva-takes-shape-and.html
5 - With the Best Intentions, On a New World
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/02/with-best-intentions-on-new-world.html
6 - The Shliach's Flight to the Home Planet
https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-shliachs-flight-to-home-planet.html