Variants of the Moshiach flag, used by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hassidism.
Flying the Yellow Flag, My eighth grader asks, ‘Why can’t you believe the Rebbe is Moshiach?’
In the weeks leading up to camp, the Amazon orders always reach a fever pitch. I have been asked to buy everything from fake nails and bedside fans to Polaroid cameras. But this year’s request reached a new level.
“Mommy, can I order a Moshiach flag?” followed quickly by, “Don’t worry, I won’t ask for anything else.” If you don’t know what that is, it is the yellow flag, poster, or bumper sticker found in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and throughout Israel, with a red crown and the Hebrew word Moshiach emblazoned across it.
To an outsider, the flag stands for the belief that the Rebbe Menachem Schneerson was sent to redeem the Jewish people. But that didn’t explain why my daughter wanted to buy one and take it to camp. In any case, I knew it was supposed to be part of her shtick, the way some girls come to camp with tutu skirts, glitter face paint, hair chalk, or wacky socks; mine would come with a flag. So I said yes. Where I drew the line, however, was when she asked if she could whip it out at her eighth grade graduation. That was an immediate no.
We are shluchim, Chabad emissaries in Atlanta, Georgia, and my daughter goes to a Jewish school that is plain Orthodox, not Chabad. For the past year, she has used Moshiach as her own little rebellion. As a pint-size intellectual, she spends her days poking at her teachers.
“Why can’t you believe the Rebbe is Moshiach? Isn’t there supposed to be a Moshiach in every generation?” Her classmates were happy for the diversion; they were in eighth grade.
She delighted in challenging what she saw as her teachers’ black-and-white thinking—and you’ve got to love a teenager who thinks in color. She was facing a teacher whom all her older siblings had before her, a woman known for coming down hard on the legalistic side of Judaism. The teacher wanted to talk about modest sleeve lengths, and my child wanted to bring in some of the Soul, and she did it the only way she knew how. Who better than the Rebbe—alive, vibrant, and urgent in her imagination—to do this through?
Her father and I have had our share of conversations with her about the Rebbe and Moshiach. We’ve said our view comes from what Maimonides calls b’chezkas Moshiach, which means we believe that someone, somewhere, holds the potential to be the redeemer; however, we hold the question of who lightly. We’re open to any possibility. Just come already!
For her school’s graduation art project, students were assigned cinder blocks on a wall to paint and leave behind as part of a class installation in the basement gym. My daughter painted hers as the yellow flag. Of course she did. Credit to the teachers for letting her.
The flag hadn’t changed, but a new generation had picked it up and transformed it into something else.
When it came time to go to camp, I left said child in New York with her cousins. She was excited to go to camp—she had been before—yet, as with many kids, a familiar knot of nerves tightened in her stomach. The difficult thing she had to do was get herself on the bus for camp the next morning. She assured me she was going to be fine. Ninety-three texts later, between 12:00 and 12:15 a.m., while I peacefully slept in Atlanta, she informed us that under no circumstances was she going to camp. The texts ranged from logical arguments to emotional declarations to the occasional all-caps plea. Whatever alchemy we did as parents, however we maneuvered the situation—this was not our first rodeo, as she is our youngest of eight, and we have been here before—she got on that bus. By herself (surrounded by hundreds of girls, no doubt). Not to mention the two hours I spent on the phone with her while she bought herself an iced coffee and a bagel and loaded her bags. Her last words to me were: "One week. You said one week. I’ll see you then.”
And then I saw the pictures.
A few days into camp, my daughter was glowing like the sun. Yes, the camp T-shirts were yellow. The bunks are painted yellow. The whole energy of the place has a certain brightness to it. But there was an addition to her yellowness in every single picture: She had draped herself in the yellow Moshiach flag. I’d known this mutiny had been ripening for at least a year. I just hadn’t given it much thought.
I was thrilled to see her happy. The flag part? I mean, I let her order the thing on Amazon. Seeing the pictures, I couldn’t help but notice the arc: miserable, then happy. I knew the flag wasn’t what made her happy, but somehow it was part of the joy.
And that was what made me stop and think. To understand why, you have to understand what that yellow flag meant to my generation.
In the 1990s, when the yellow flag was becoming—depending on who you asked—either the ubiquitous or the fringe symbol of Chabad, I would have rather polished my mother’s entire silver collection than been seen with one. I was not one of those people who believed the Rebbe couldn’t pass away. I just hoped he wouldn’t. I was not one of those people who didn’t believe he could be Moshiach. I hoped he was. Moshiach was never simply a doctrine in my childhood. It’s the thing people said after another war, another terrorist attack, another funeral: “Nu. It’s time.” It was less theology than a visceral desire for the world to be better. “We Want Moshiach Now” was our pop song; we sang it at the top of our lungs, feeling its urgency. Our grandparents had been through horrific things; we needed God to give us better.
I grew up in Los Angeles, but at that edge of morning on that dreadful day when we heard that the Rebbe had passed away, I was in New York, on Eastern Parkway. I was sitting in my friend’s car, to the left of 770, the Rebbe’s headquarters, while she was trying to convince me to go out with her brother. We had just come back from the hospital, where we had sat in the waiting room and recited Psalms for the Rebbe’s recovery. We hadn’t gone to sleep yet when my friend’s pager went off. She looked at it and we confirmed the worst. I knew the Rebbe was sick. I knew he was old. But this was not the ending we had prayed for, nor had we ever imagined it in our idealistic teenage brains.
No one braced us for having the ground completely vanish beneath us. I felt the sickening vertigo of an endless free fall. From somewhere inside this abyss, my mother told me I needed to rip my clothing, just like any other mourner. And so we did. My father took a knife and made the initial cut in my linen vest. I took over, pulling the fabric apart with a harsh, stuttering rip until there was a tear about three inches long. I moved in a daze, lost in a tradition I had never practiced, while the rending of a garment broke me, as it does.
Afterward, we sat in my friend’s house, a few doors down from 770 Eastern Parkway, wrapped in a mummy-like silence. It was my first real experience with death. I had lost grandparents before, but they had passed away in New York while I remained safely insulated in California; I had been too young for the grief to reach me. But this was different. At almost 19, the shield of childhood was gone. My friend and I had just been discussing my future and dating for marriage. Now, time had simply stopped.
We never went to sleep that night, but eventually, we poured into the street, where thousands had gathered for the funeral. The casket was to pass 770 before heading to Montefiore Cemetery. It was my first funeral, and I was deeply sad, deeply confused. Standing on the grassy median of Eastern Parkway—the heavy July foliage overhead providing our only shield from the scorching sun—I looked across the pavement. I looked past the black sea of men in hats and jackets. Past the hearse carrying the Rebbe’s casket.
And there they were.
With the world slipping out of focus, I wanted to tell myself I was imagining it. But I wasn’t. Through the sweat and tears stinging my eyes, I saw them: people dancing. People waving yellow flags. Even though the entire moment felt untethered from reality, there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that what I was witnessing was fundamentally wrong. I had grown up with parents and grandparents (who were Holocaust survivors and survivors of Stalin’s rule). They believed deeply in miracles, in the power of the Rebbe, in the possibility of redemption. They carried plenty of magic inside them. But they were also practical. Grounded. They did not confuse hope with denial.
To me, that yellow flag became the ultimate symbol of discord—a jarring disconnect from the world I knew. Years later, when we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, as shluchim, we understood with absolute clarity that we could not be associated with the Meshichistim. The people who waved the flag. The people in denial. Even if our head shliach hadn’t made this clear, we already knew it in our bones: We would be dead on arrival. Trying to build an in-town community, to teach and inspire, while carrying the weight of that flag was a fool’s errand. Imagine investing your life in introducing people to Judaism, only to spend the first 20 minutes explaining what you don’t believe. I had been raised to define Judaism by what it is, not by what it isn’t. Yet somehow that flag kept forcing me to introduce myself through a controversy that wasn’t mine.
But you cannot always outrun a symbol.
We met a Jewish family at the park, welcomed them into our home for a Shabbat meal, and felt a connection—only for them to decline our Hebrew School. They confessed they feared we were tied to those same extreme ideas about the Rebbe and Moshiach. For years, that yellow flag represented a conversation I never wanted to have. Why should I have to defend something I believed to be so out of bounds, so fringe, and so far from reality? More than that, why did I have to defend myself against it? It was exhausting to watch so much of what I knew to be good, beautiful, and true be completely eclipsed by the shadow of that flag.
Fast-forward from the largely calm aughts to the aftermath of Oct. 7. I found myself at the March for Israel in Washington, standing among thousands of Jews and our allies. We were surrounded by Israeli flags, overwhelmed by a sense of fierce love and camaraderie. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something familiar. Chabad boys were out in force, whipping out tefillin and wrapping the arms of men for the mitzvah. And somewhere in the crowd, I saw them. The yellow flags.
My daughter inherited the symbol. She did not inherit my baggage.
My immediate thought was a weary roll of the eyes: of course. I figured it was just the fringe Chabad teenagers who’d always done this—waved the flag, made the same point. I kept walking along the less-crowded periphery of the gathering when suddenly, those kids with the flags crossed directly into my path. To my utter surprise, they were not who I expected. There were girls in pants. Boys with longer hair and tiny knitted kippot. One girl had every fingernail painted blue and white. She twirled the yellow flag overhead with those impossibly long nails, laughing with her friends. These weren’t the Chabad teenagers I had assumed them to be. They looked Modern Orthodox. Maybe some weren’t Orthodox at all. They simply looked like Jewish teenagers. Looking at them, I realized that whatever they thought about the Rebbe—and I had no idea what that was—they clearly weren’t carrying the history I had attached to that flag. They were wrapping themselves in a symbol and wearing it with the same unabashed Jewish pride as the Israeli flags draped over everyone else’s shoulders. In that massive display of Jewish unity, which was decades removed from the 1990s and the bitter theological wars of my early shlichus, I found myself feeling something I never expected: I was cautiously charmed.
Later, scrolling through social media, I saw those same yellow flags being waved by Jewish students at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the face of antisemitic encampments. As I kept seeing the flag in the hands of random Jewish teenagers, I felt my own certainty loosen a little. The flag hadn’t changed, but a new generation had picked it up and transformed it into something else.
For this new crop of flag wavers, the yellow flag was an in-your-face expression of raw Jewish pride despite everything—and perhaps because of everything. Stenciled across the front was the word Moshiach, written in bright red. Moshiach is not a flat translation of “Messiah.” It carries the weight of an entire peoplehood and centuries of Jewish longing. It is our specific brand of hope. Our resilience. The dream of a world finally repaired. It isn’t a concept borrowed from an outside world; it belongs entirely to our own story. After all, we have been waiting for Moshiach for thousands of years.
We have been disappointed by false versions of redemption before, but this was different. This was a teenager in my friend’s daughter’s class at a Modern Orthodox school in L.A., wrapped in a yellow flag, saying, I am Jewish. I am proud. I believe there is something better coming. And then, there was my daughter in the photo, that same yellow flag wrapped like a tallis across her shoulders, standing onstage as the color-war captain of the winning team at camp, effervescence splashing onto my screen.
I didn’t conduct a formal study of the kids in Washington, and I haven’t even been able to ask my own daughter; she’s still at camp with restricted phone access, blissfully unaware of my overthinking. But looking at those photos, I know what I see. I realized my daughter loved a symbol I had spent my adult life avoiding.
Sure, there was an element of mischief. But looking at those pictures, I no longer saw a teenager trying to get a rise out of her teachers. I saw a girl who had found a way to wear her Judaism with joy.
Teenagers have a funny way of doing this. They take the things adults have spent decades complicating and ask simple questions. They look past the arguments, the egos, the history, and sometimes even the lunacy. They see what is underneath. My daughter saw something I couldn’t see because she wasn’t carrying the same pain. She inherited the symbol. She did not inherit my baggage. I spent 30 years crossing the street whenever I saw that flag. (Not literally—but emotionally.) My daughter packed it instead of face glitter.
Maybe that is the ultimate gift each generation gives to the one that follows. Younger people hold what we carried, and they look at it with fresh, untraumatized eyes. And sometimes, they remind us why we bothered to carry it in the first place. I have often wondered what parts of the Chasidic milieu my children would inherit from me. The melodies? The recipes? The stories? I never imagined they would inherit the controversies, too—and make their own meaning out of them. But I find myself wondering whether that, too, is part of redemption: not forgetting the past, but refusing to let it have the final word.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/flying-the-yellow-flag?
