It was the perfect picture: 50 rabbis praying on a plane. They were on a special charter flight over Israel, sounding the shofar in order to ward off H1N1.

Without prayer, Judaism is unthinkable, and one must appreciate how these rabbis wanted to protect the entire community. But even so, this flight disturbed me. When we emphasize an exotic form of prayer, we forget that in Judaism, using hand sanitizer is also a religious act.

Safety is a religious obligation. The Bible requires that a roof be properly gated to prevent people from falling off of it. Halachic authorities include in this commandment the responsibility to ensure occupational safety and an injunction against reckless driving.

So why are rabbis flying around in planes instead of handing out Purel dispensers?

Regrettably, this can be traced to a false dichotomy between the ritual and the ethical. Some people mistakenly see spiritual requirements such as kashrut as “true” Judaism and underemphasize Judaism’s humane requirements. That’s why some Orthodox Jews can be extremely punctilious about ritual commandments and at the same time smoke like chimneys and drive like maniacs.

Today, there is a new phenomenon behind this false dichotomy. Orthodox Jews are seen as long-bearded, exotic figures. In the Hollywood narrative, Orthodoxy is a group of rituals that make its adherents mysterious and unusual.

Unfortunately, many Orthodox Jews have adopted the Hollywood point of view and imagine that the primary purpose of Judaism is simply to be different. This’s why mundane topics such as safety and ethics are neglected. After all, being ethical isn’t all that exotic.

Of course, ethics are the foundation of Judaism. Yet this emphasis doesn’t devalue the Torah’s rituals. On the contrary: combined with ethics, ritual becomes part of a powerful, meaningful whole. Judaism isn’t about being exotic, it’s about being holy. Defining Judaism solely by being different turns us into caricatures of ourselves.

Many great rabbis understood this. Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the founder of the Meimad party in Israel, once said that if he was asked to join the Israeli cabinet, he would want to be minister of health, because Halachah demands that we be more stringent about health than any other religious requirement. The late Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, made it his life’s work to open a hospital in the city of Netanya. To these rabbis, safety and ethics were not at all secular concerns.

Safety is a religious issue, and health measures are the authentic Jewish response to H1N1. Thinking otherwise produces a movie-set Judaism that is both narrow-minded and empty.