This past academic year I was on a flight from Chicago to New York, seated in 29D. As I boarded the plane, I noticed a handful of Orthodox Jewish men, distinctive by their dress and beards. Just before the doors closed, a man boarded, looking hurried and disheveled. He too was an Orthodox Jew, and he took the last open seat, a middle seat beside me.

As soon as he sat down, he took out his cell phone and made a call. The flight attendant asked him to turn off the phone, as by now we were pushing back from the gate. He wasn’t done talking. A few minutes later she came by again and asked him to turn off the phone. He clicked a button that turned off the screen, but it kept the call going. He kept talking, hiding the phone behind his beard and fedora rim.

As we taxied toward the runway, the flight attendant sat down, oblivious that my neighbor was still on the phone, now speaking in hushed tones. I felt a peculiar urge to point out his indiscretion. So when I caught her eye, I made a hand motion. She jumped up and confronted him like an angry elementary school teacher would a troublemaker.

“Sir, this is the third time I told you to get off the phone! I will have the pilot return to the gate and the police will escort you off the plane if you don’t get off now.” As everyone turned to look, he shut off his phone, saying nothing. He looked over at me, and I sheepishly shrugged my shoulders as if to say, “Can you believe she saw you?”

Not long after we took off, he got up, squeezed into the galley kitchen across from my seat and proceeded to open his pouch for a prayer ritual. He wrapped on his phylacteries and prayed for the next 10 minutes or so. He seemed to do everything just right, from the band on his arm to the Scriptures on his forehead to kissing the shawl to gently nodding throughout.

When he finished, he returned to his seat and began reading a Hebrew text. Not long before we landed, I couldn’t hold my curiosity anymore. “Excuse me, sir. May I ask you a question?” He looked up.

“You know, I’m not religious like you are,” I began. Which is true. I’m religious, but not like that. I continued. “I’m not being condemning or anything, but I find it a bit ironic how careful you were to obey all of the rules when you prayed but didn’t seem to care about the FAA rules the flight attendant was trying to enforce. How do you reconcile obeying religious rules but not safety rules?”

He quickly replied,