Students offer to ‘launch your sins into the sky’

A group of Jewish students in California have taken a Jewish ritual a step further by designing a rocket to launch sins skywards.

Thanks to a club of would-be rocket scientists at Hillel at the prestigious Stanford University, the Jewish practice of tossing breadcrumbs into water to represent the hurling away of sins (tashlich) has now been turbo-charged.

Sins, or breadcrumbs representing sins, can now be fired 4,000 feet above the dinner table. While not entirely ‘space’, this still represents some height.

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Daniel Shorr of the Student Space Initiative at the Stanford club described it as “low Earth orbit” and said he and others had been “doing experiments and competing with other universities” when the idea struck.

Naughty Jews can go online and submit their sins in confidence. The student team will, without looking, peel them off and place them on a small SD card, alongside a few breadcrumbs strapped to the five-foot rocket. Hillel assistant director Jeremy Ragent said: “Certainly, tashlich in space is something new for us.”