Flag Waving

Sermon, Shabbat Shlach Lecha, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

There is an element in the narrative of the Book of Numbers that is not much studied, but perhaps should be.  Near the beginning of Bamidbar we are told that each tribe has its own flag, and that these standards were carried forward with the tribal members when the people of Israel journeyed across the wilderness towards the Holy Land.  We don’t know exactly what these d’galim looked like, as the Torah, and in fact the entire Bible doesn’t report anything about what they looked like, although later Midrashim tell us a lot about what the tribal flags may have looked like, or at least what people think they looked like a couple of thousand years later.  The flags descriptions of what each tribe used became the model for the illustrations you see in many Jewish works of art based on the symbols for each tribe.

In our own weekly portion of Shlach Lecha, the last Aliyah includes the commandment to place a blue thread, techelet, on every garment.  That blue thread is the origin of the blue stripes on so many tallitot, tallisses, which became the inspiration for the modern Israeli flag, the blue and white of the Magein David on the flag you can see behind me tonight.

Which leads to an interesting and relevant subject: this Sunday is June 14th, which happens to be Flag Day.  While the observance of this holiday has, um, flagged, way when back in the pre-Vietnam War era many, if not most, people used to put up American flags on June 14th simply because they were proud of our country.  In those long-ago times, the flag wasn’t considered some sort of marker of political affiliation, or a means of expressing either your super-patriotism or your anti-patriotism or whatever people are doing these days with American flag symbolism.  The stars and stripes were simply a way of showing that you were proud to be a citizen of the most important democracy in the world, and that you believed in the American experiment of freedom with responsibility. 

And so, on June 14th, you hung up an American flag, sometimes on a stanchion that was built into your house expressly for that purpose.  Nobody thought that marked you as a Republican or a Democrat or a supporter of one guy or another.  It was just a way to show that you were proud to be an American, whatever that meant to you.

The flag back then had only recently changed, by the way—this is a long time ago—to 50 stars, so people bought new ones that included the new states of Alaska and Hawaii.  The flags themselves were made of broadcloth—cloth, not plastic—and had brass grommets.  They were kind of heavy to a kid, and they were folded up after the 14th and put away, to be pulled out again for 4th of July in a few weeks, and then not used again until the following flag day, although some people put them up for Thanksgiving.

It was a simple gesture, putting out the flag for Flag Day, and my family did it every year—and again on the 4th of July—from before I came along and when I was a little kid until sometime in the late 60s, when the mood in the nation changed pretty conclusively from a kind of consensus patriotism to a much more critical and unhappy one.  After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy—the real Robert Kennedy—and during the height of the Vietnam War, waving the flag, or at least placing the American flag on your home, didn’t seem like such a positive act anymore, and like most of our neighbors in our middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood, we just sort of stopped putting it out.  It wasn’t an act of protest against anything.  It was more of a recognition that the flag as a symbol had lost some of its luster and didn’t signify quite the same thing as it used to.

Now, to be honest, the America of these pre-Vietnam War, halcyon days wasn’t exactly a paradise.  In my own youth I remember the Watts riots taking place fairly close to where we lived in Los Angeles, and I recall that smog alerts were a regular part of my childhood; our pattern was to play outside until our lungs hurt—the sky in the summer was always a brownish color in LA back then—and then we’d go inside and rest for a while until our lungs didn’t hurt, drink iced tea, and go back outside to play some more.  The news was filled with stories about polluted rivers—including some that caught on fire—and they were always recalling consumer products that could, you know, kill you.  Women were barely visible in the workplace—except for schools and hospitals, where they were nurses—and equal rights were, well, not really equal.

Growing up in LA, while we felt very American as kids, we already knew that Jews couldn’t go to work in a variety of industries: banking and finance, insurance, advertising—no Jewish characters on the TV show Mad Men, right?--white shoe corporate law firms, and big business in general, and that we were quota’ed out of many medical and dental schools and most Ivy League colleges.  The virulently Antisemitic John Birch Society was quite big in nearby Orange County, California; in fact,  my family didn’t go to the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park because its owner was a big supporter of the John Birch Society.  Disneyland was OK, since Walt Disney himself did not seem to be an antisemite, and Jews wrote all the songs in his musical movies.  In my own neighborhood, we had Holocaust survivors living on our street, and when we went to the bakery to get challah for Shabbes you’d see the numbers tattooed by the Nazis on the arms of the women as they reached up to take a number for bread.

It wasn’t a perfect world, but supporting our country as an entity by putting up a flag seemed to be much less controversial.  Until it wasn’t.  And nowadays, in our highly polarized political climate, the flag is often used as a kind of cultural marker of loyalty to one side.

Now to be honest, Flag Day has a special importance in my own family, since it is my oldest son Boaz’s birthday, and he turns 30 this Sunday. That’s a little hard for me to reconcile with my own general immaturity—how can I possibly have a 30-year-old son and two grandsons, especially when I also have a three year old daughter?  In any case, it has always been easy to remember Boaz’s birthday, just as it’s easy to remember my daughter Cipora’s birthday, which falls on December 25th—you know, Jewish Chinese Food Day. 

Birthdays can really focus our attention on some obscure facts.  My own birthday, January 7th, I share with former president Millard Fillmore, who you might recall—or maybe not—as the guy who later became the first presidential candidate of the Know Nothing Party, an anti-immigrant party in the 1850s.  Oddly, my oldest son Boaz shares a birthday with another anti-immigrant president, whose name I can’t recall, although I believe he is celebrating his birthday weirdly by staging an octagon cage fight on the White House lawn. 

You genuinely can’t make this stuff up.

I guess all of this is a way to note that Flag Day, this Sunday, should really be about celebrating what we truly know to be American values, however well they are observed in the present.  And those values include central ideas like freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from corruption, the rule of law, and honesty and transparency in our public life. 

Just one further thought about Flag Day.  There are many symbols used to signify identity and values in our world.  Judaism, of course, uses both the Star of David, the magein David, and the menorah.  Whatever symbol is used, we need to remember that what matters much more than the outward signifier we use is the quality of our conduct.  How we treat others, what values we actually stand for, and what positive actions we take to affirm those values in the real world: that’s what we Jews call mitzvot.  It’s our actions to improve the world that have real value. 

That’s what really counts, no matter what flags we wave.