Thread by @aharonium

Just a reminder, the old flag of Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of the Soviet Union, is amazing. I'd like to see more folks waving it because the rainbow is an ancient symbol of the rainbow covenant, anti-predation, and divine-human boundaries en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Au…

Here's my remix of the flag from 2015 where the rainbow is superimposed against a cosmic background. The presence of the Pleiades and Orion in the flag is a reference to the end of the story of the Nephilim in the Midrash of Shemḥazai and Aza'el.

I like rainbows and I like religious symbols that are grounded in stories that are deeply meaningful to me. I like the idea of prophylactic and apotropaic magical wards as well, including the Shield of David (מגן דוד magen david).

I am a Jewish American, not an Israeli-Jew, and I deeply appreciate the division of "church and state" in the open and multicultural civil society here in the US. If I were an Israeli I'd prefer a flag that eschewed religious symbols

Nevertheless, I also like the flag that Theodore Herzl originally imagined for his dream state. The seven stars, with the lower six, suggested to me a kabbalistic diagram for the lower sephirot in the Tree of Life

Ultimately, I think it's best to keep religious, mystical, and magical symbolism far away from the flags & escutcheons of national entities. The former represent ideals, the latter are inevitably sullied by ethical and moral failures -- חילולי ה׳ -- desecration of the Divine name

But when oppressed minorities of all sorts appeal to the power of some common symbol of self-defense, or even the cultivation of identity, I also think it's terribly rude to object, that is, so long as it isn't some obtuse cover for the projection of violent prejudice and bigotry

While some have come to associate the Magen David more with the State of Israel (and the violence of its military Occupation) than with Judaism and world Jewry, its reasonable to wonder what the Magen David serves as a confusion of national, ethnic, and religious symbolism

As a religious and rabbinic Jew of the mythopoetic school, focused on midrash aggadah and the landscape and lore of the Jewish imagination, I worry too when any symbol, religious or otherwise, is used to valorize and validate Power rather than exhibit and express its limitation

I urge my fellow Jews to defend our historic symbols when and where they are forbidden from being displayed so long as the symbols are used for cultivating pride and protection in league with our people's historic values of אהבת חסד (ahavat ḥesed, loving lovingkindness)

We must defend these values from being over-written as much or more than we object to our symbols being criticized for representing onerous and shameful policies and history

We need to remember that there are consequences to a חילול ה׳ -- they confuse us and our friends, they embolden our enemies and endanger our existence. We are responsible for making our symbols into less contested symbols of blessing and to do this we need to strive in good faith

We must live as witness to righteousness, justice, and compassion and continue to demand the same non-exceptional justice for ourselves to those who deny our diversity and view our historic symbols only through the filter of their hatred, experience, and/or ignorance

Finally, the symbol that I most often employ for celebrating my identity is that of the medieval Judenhut, which I've appropriated from obscurity for my own adventures in tabletop fantasy roleplaying in the landscape and lore of Jewish storytelling

Our culture, its dream cosmologies, mytho-history, this world and the world coming, finds its sanctuary not inside any land or language but inside a living people carrying a rich web of symbolic associations, a sanctuary I think of as the imaginary land beyond the River Sambatyōn

If you want to ever visit there I will join you! Immerse yourself and find fluency in its currents, familiar and obscure, esoteric and exoteric. Saussure defined a sign as signifier + signified. If you carry a signifier for a culture on a flag, become the depth that it signifies