Sermons

Parashat Ki Teitze 5785

You can read Rabbi Deborah's sermon below or listen to it here:

If you saw me do this  (thumbs up) to you across the room what would it mean?

Voices in the room- encouragement, approval, good job, yes, I see you

I think it’s a pretty straightforward gesture, a sign of approval, encouragement, maybe even blessing. But symbols don’t stay still. In Greece, Iran, or Iraq, the same thumbs up gesture can be an insult. In some countries it just means one, it's like holding your pointer finger up in the UK. 

On Facebook, it is the casual “like.” It’s worth a fortune if you are someone who can monetise it, but how you use it is everything. In response to someone’s long email or statement on whatsapp it comes across as curt, dismissive, even passive-aggressive.

One sign, and already we can see instability of meaning. What we thought just a few moments ago was obvious and universal, is actually fragile and up for negotiation.

We do the same with another familiar symbol: the hashtag. Once it just meant “number.” Then it became a way of sorting conversations online. Then it became an organising system for something with moral force: #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter. Now it’s used just as often in irony—#blessed. One little mark, very different meanings, all depending on who’s using it and when.

This is the world of semiotics: signs and the meanings they point to. The sign itself - the signifier -can be simple: a thumb, a hashtag, a cross on white fabric. The meaning it points to - the signified - can shift around. Sometimes that bond is very strong, like the Star of David which almost nobody mistakes for anything but Judaism. But sometimes the bond is weak, and then symbols are up for appropriation, for contest.

There’s a certain irony given what I’m about to talk about that in English the idiom for declaring what you stand for is ‘pinning your colours to the mast’. Colours being a British term for flags in a military context. Flags give us the illusion of stability. They look like they fix meaning. A piece of cloth, a pattern, a colour scheme, and we’re told “this is who we are.” But in truth flags are some of the most unstable signs around.

Take the St George’s Cross. Right now it’s everywhere, I crossed the road earlier this week and it was spray painted across the zebra crossing. It’s there because some people felt putting it there said something. But what does it say?

This summer, a few short weeks ago, the flag symbolised the Lionesses and their victory, female sport, togetherness, everyone coming together to support our national team. But in the space of the same summer it has taken on a role in public life where it symbolises territorialism, nationalism, and has been wielded  by some against others as a sign of exclusion.

How can one flag mean two very different things?

When the semiotic relationship between signs and the things they signify is so unstable, as it seems to be with flags, it forces a load of questions. Is it just too much pressure to put on something so small and 2D to be an effective signifier of something so complex as national identity? Or is the  instability a commentary on the fragility of the identity it’s pointing to—that “Englishness” itself isn’t fully settled. Is it civic or ethnic? Christian or secular? Imperial nostalgia or just neighbourhood festivity? 

If the sign is slippery, it’s often because the thing it points to is slippery too. 

And that’s where context becomes everything, because the sign can’t stand in isolation, it can only be read with enough other things around to clarify what it points to. Who uses signs, where they use them and how they use them become essential parts of the puzzle (it’s what people who spend serious brain power on it call vexillogeography, the idea that all symbols have spatial identity).

As our Bar Mitzvah, Jacob, taught us a few moments ago, this week we are dealing in Torah with conversations about demarcation and in particular declaration of who is in and who is out. When it comes to who can be admitted into the community of Israel, Ammonites and Moabites are excluded forever. Egyptians and Edomites can be included after a few generations. Amalek is an enemy for all time. These are the categories of the wilderness, raised to demarcate belonging. 

When the Israelites encamped in the wilderness they marked out their camps and the location of each tribe with flags, they probably weren’t the only people to do this, it helped you know where you belonged and when you’d strayed into a space that wasn’t for you. 

For those who made them in biblical times these exclusions about who could be in the community didn’t seem unwarranted, they reflected at some point a difficult encounter with others. But they also had the effect of excluding entire categories of individuals both in the present and in the future who had no role in or responsibility for the behaviour of others who shared their tribal heritage.

Generations later, along comes Ruth. Ruth the Moabite. By the letter of the law, she should be excluded from the community of Israel. By the signifier, “Moabite” equals “out.” But her life tells another story. Her loyalty, her kindness, her willingness to stand with Naomi undo the power of the label. 

The sign collapses under the weight of a human being. And not just collapses—reconfigures. Out of Ruth comes King David, and with him a new sense of Israel’s own identity. I think it's a good reminder that any conversation that takes place about people on the level of categories is dangerous. Moabite stopped meaning ‘out forever’ because labels, signs, CAN change their meaning. 

The fact that simple 2D symbols change their meaning isn’t really a problem, that’s why the whole world of semiotics exists, because signs changing meaning and holding meaning in different ways is a fascinating and important part of human social worlds.

To go back to the example of our flag at present, the danger isn’t that the St George’s Cross is unstable in meaning. The deeper problem is that the identity it’s pointing to - what “England” or “Britishness” mean - is so unsettled. 

When both the sign and the thing signified are weak, that’s when you’re really in a mess. 

It’s tempting to see our role as a synagogue community that values welcome and has supported local refugee hotels and communities to be about resisting exclusionary uses of the flag, to try and claim or reclaim the flag itself. But I think that might be a distraction, because without strengthening what the flag stands for, without making our national identity itself more secure, more generous, more worthy of pride, we’ll be stuck in this problem.

Ruth’s story reminds us that it isn’t just that categories can collapse under the weight of a human life - it’s that communities can be transformed when they have the courage to let people in. Ruth didn’t only defy the label “Moabite”; she was received, she was embraced, she was allowed to become part of Israel’s story. And in doing so, she helped give Israel a stronger, more expansive sense of itself.

It isn’t enough to critique exclusionary uses of flags, or even to note their instability. The real work is to shape the national identity and the category that they point to so that it is secure enough, confident enough, generous enough to include more people. Ruth’s entry into the Israelite people shows us that when we welcome rather than exclude, when we let the person rather than the category set the terms, identity doesn’t weaken - it deepens.

This is our call to deepen local civic relationships, support and invest in a stronger collective identity. So that when the flag is raised, it really does point to something we’d want to claim - something rooted in welcome, in fairness and in justice.