Before Whom They Stood

Menachem Butler

I have long enjoyed reading the thoughtful essays published in The Lehrhaus, and more than one has caused me to rethink positions I had held for years. R. Michael Bernstein’s recent essay, “How To Cleanse A Sanctuary” (June 13, 2026), has produced the opposite reaction. Its argument is thoughtful and sincere, but the more closely one examines it, the more apparent it becomes that its central claim rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the liturgical meaning of bowing and the rabbinic conception of prayer itself. R. Bernstein opens by declaring, “Every time I go to shul, I bow to objects I consider to be idols,” and concludes with the exhortation, “Let’s stop bowing to flags.” His argument is therefore not merely that national flags are inappropriately placed within the synagogue sanctuary, or even beside the aron kodesh. It is that their presence changes the meaning of prayer itself, such that the bowing of the Amidah becomes entangled with the worshiper’s relationship to those symbols. Yet that claim depends upon assigning to the act of prayer a meaning that neither Hazal nor the subsequent liturgical tradition assigned to it. The critique of the flag is therefore not generated by the structure of prayer itself; it arises from a prior judgment about nationalism and is then read back into the act of prayer.

As Professor Uri Ehrlich demonstrated in his landmark study The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach of Jewish Liturgy (Mohr Siebeck, 2004), the bodily gestures of the Amidah constitute a carefully constructed symbolic language through which the worshiper expresses his standing before God. Professor Ehrlich argues that bowing serves as “the principal means of expressing the worshiper’s status before his God” and that, through this gesture, “the worshiper can express a variety of feelings: intimacy or alienation, confidence or fear, reverence or submissiveness.” Throughout his analysis, the object of the gesture is always God. The bow is understood as part of the worshiper’s encounter with the divine presence, not as a response to incidental objects that happen to occupy the worshiper’s field of vision. Indeed, Professor Ehrlich repeatedly explains bowing as an expression of the human-divine relationship and notes that the rabbinic tradition ultimately favored a model in which “the status of a Jew at prayer more closely resembles the parent-child relationship than the master-servant one.” Within this framework, bodily gestures derive their meaning from the act of prayer itself and from the theological relationship it embodies. If R. Bernstein’s argument were accepted, it would become difficult to explain why any object visible to a worshiper during prayer – including the aron itself – would not be implicated by the same logic whenever one bows. Yet Jews have bowed toward the aron for centuries without imagining that the gesture was directed to it. Whatever merits R. Bernstein’s interpretive approach may have elsewhere, it is difficult to square with the way the rabbinic tradition, as reconstructed by Professor Ehrlich, understands the symbolic language of prayer.

More fundamentally, the disagreement here is not about bowing at all; it is about the place of national identity within Jewish life. R. Bernstein writes that he regards “nationalist chauvinism” as “a form of false religion,” and flags as its “household idols.” Once those premises are granted, it is not difficult to understand why the presence of flags in a sanctuary would be troubling. But many Jews simply do not share those premises. For them, national symbols are neither objects of devotion nor rivals to the worship of God. The question therefore becomes not merely what contemporary Jews think about nationalism, but how the generations that built these synagogues understood their own commitments. His argument sits uneasily with the self-understanding of the very generation that built many of the synagogues in which these flags now stand.

More than twenty years ago, I wrote about Chaplain Louis Werfel, the first Yeshiva College graduate and the only Orthodox rabbi to be killed in action during the Second World War. He was a product of Torah Vodaath, of Yeshiva College, and of RIETS. Together with his wife, Adina, whom I interviewed while researching his life and legacy, he belonged to a specific, pioneering generation – a generation of young Orthodox Jews who looked beyond the great, established Jewish centers of the Northeast and set out to build Torah life in places where it had scarcely existed before. Their goal was to build institutions that could sustain a future. But the war came, and the war interrupted that work. Chaplain Werfel went on to minister to Jewish soldiers across the expanses of North Africa. He died in uniform and was buried, ultimately, in the soil of Israel.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, what strikes me now is the profound nature of that generation’s self-understanding. Neither Chaplain Werfel nor the generation he represented saw their world in terms of fractured allegiances. The categories through which such questions are often understood today would have been largely foreign to them. They did not understand commitment to Torah, gratitude to America, concern for the Jewish people, and support for Zionism as competing loyalties, but as obligations that reinforced one another.

The question at stake in the present debate is therefore not whether a flag is aesthetically appropriate beside the aron. It is whether the generation that placed it there fundamentally misunderstood the nature of prayer and the service of God. Chaplain Werfel, and those like him, did not believe they were balancing rival loyalties. They believed they were serving God through all of them. Indeed, in one of the final reports he sent from North Africa, Chaplain Werfel reflected on watching American planes depart for combat, and recalled that the thought running through his mind was the talmudic dictum sheluhei mitzvah einan nizakin (lit., those engaged in the performance of a mitzvah are not harmed) (Kiddushin 39b). The language through which he understood his military service was the language of Torah itself.

The generation that placed flags beside the aron did not do so because they attributed holiness to cloth and dye. They did so because those symbols represented political and historical conditions that they believed had enabled the flourishing of Jewish life. One may question the judgment. But it is difficult to maintain that the same generation could distinguish between God and country in life, yet somehow became incapable of distinguishing between worship and symbolism in prayer. Any argument that treats the presence of a national symbol as a corruption of prayer therefore places itself in judgment not merely of a practice, but of the moral and religious vision that shaped much of twentieth-century American Orthodoxy. It is to challenge the self-understanding of the generation that built these synagogues, founded these schools, served in uniform, and celebrated the birth of the State of Israel.

For me, this history is not an abstraction; it is deeply personal. When Chaplain Werfel was killed in Algeria in December 1943, my grandfather, Donald B. Butler, was serving in the United States Army in Oran. A contemporary report by Chaplain Jacob Hochman records that my grandfather stood by the grave, assisted at Chaplain Werfel’s burial, and recited portions of Tehillim into the North African air. Consider the men gathered around that grave. An Orthodox rabbi lay buried in military uniform. Jewish soldiers from across the religious spectrum stood around him reciting Tehillim. Some would return home to build synagogues and schools; others would help sustain the institutions of American Jewish life and support the emerging State of Israel. None understood these commitments as existing in tension with one another. They prayed beneath American flags without imagining that civic gratitude diminished their devotion to God. They did not look at America and see a competing object of loyalty. They saw America as a refuge. They did not look at Zionism and see a rival to God. They saw Israel as a necessity. To their minds, these were the historical circumstances that allowed Jewish life to be lived openly, securely, and on a scale previous generations could scarcely have imagined. They carried it all, and they carried it together.

None of this requires agreement with the practice of placing flags beside the aron, and reasonable people can differ about whether such placement is desirable. That question deserves its own discussion, and indeed it received one in these pages four years ago in R. Moshe Kurtz’s thoughtful halakhic essay on national flags in synagogue sanctuaries, an essay R. Bernstein himself cites. R. Kurtz raised serious questions about the symbolism of placing national flags near the aron and surveyed a wide range of rabbinic responses to the issue. But that is ultimately a different argument. R. Kurtz was concerned with the place of flags in the synagogue. R. Bernstein is concerned with the meaning of prayer itself. The distance between those two claims is considerable. The argument is no longer about where a flag should stand; it is about what happens when a Jew bows. Readers are asked to believe that the presence of a flag changes the meaning of that act, that a gesture directed toward God becomes entangled with a symbol of national identity simply because the symbol is visible. Yet that is not how Hazal understood prayer, and it is not how generations of Jews understood their own lives.

The generation of American Orthodox Jews represented by Chaplain Louis Werfel understood the difference between a national symbol and an idol because they understood the difference between civic gratitude and the service of God.

They knew perfectly well before Whom they stood.