Covenant Connection
February 2026/Adar 5786 Vol. 19:2
Ever Think About Converting?
Our friend Jack Saunders (1948-2015), late of Cleveland, Tennessee, was a professional soldier, then a Baptist pastor. After years of study, he renounced Christianity, becoming a devout fearer-follower-lover of the God of Abraham and a serious Noachide scholar. He helped me write Rainbow Covenant. He was enormously proud of it and he promoted it constantly.
Prospective Noachides from all over often phoned Jack – he was wonderfully widely appreciated… in a town loaded with Christian pastors, they called him “The Preacher.” He relished the stories that people told him. One of his favorites, from a couple years before he died, came from an active-duty Army officer who’d got a copy of Rainbow Covenant:
“So, I was reading it… I was very moved. I called to my wife. ‘Honey, have you ever thought about converting?’”
“She said, 'Converting? Converting to what?’”
“'Judaism,' I said."
“'NO!'”
We Laughed
People begin breaking through the defamatory nonsense masking the truth and majesty of Hebrew Scripture and the Jewish cause… and the first thing they think about is enlisting in the cause. Good for them! Good for you! Welcome to the Way of the God of Abraham!
This is so holy … we wish you all the best. But we know, if you’re not already Jewish, trying to become Jewish is one of the last things you should do. Anyone who knows anything about Judaism knows that.
Yes, of course: a non-Jew, a Noachide – every person of every race and nation, all the children of Noach - should commit to loving and serving God, the Living God, HaShem.
How does one serve HaShem? By loving Him, which means respecting Him, by studying and heeding His very publicly expressed Will as diligently as possible; trying to do yourself what He’s told the human race what He loves, values, and wants us to do – and maybe even leading others that way.
If you seriously read the Bible – the Jewish Bible, not the Gentiles’ “New Testament” – the course of service isn’t hard to ascertain.
It means blessing God, not just in words and thought but by following the example of Abraham and doing what He – God! - wants.
It means blessing the Jews. And mankind, and all Creation.
Lots of people don’t know this: it means fulfilling the Seven Commandments of the Universal God-given Law – not just by trying to avoid crime, but doing the opposite of the heinous acts the Seven Commandments prohibit (saving life, not just avoiding murder; doing charity, not just avoiding thievery….)
What it certainly does not mean, except in extremely unusual cases, is trying
to become a Jew oneself.
For a Noachide, like Jack, that would have meant serious separation from his own people,
his own family, and from their customs and their fate (and even their language, to some extent) to join a different people.
Jack was a family man with intense loving attachments to his dearest and nearest. But he
also knew that God – the God of Abraham, and Moses, and all the Hebrew prophets – is
greater than all His Creation, and infinitely more holy, and infinitely more deserving of love, loyalty, and dedicated affection. Jack loved God so passionately, I believe, that he would have sacrificed all personal and family ties, and more – except that to him the thing that mattered most was service.
“I can do more for HaShem, for Torah, and for the Jews as a Noachide, as a
practicing, observant trying-to-be a good non-Jew, than as a Jew. I can do more for
Israel, and for my country, and probably for the world, as a Noachide, than I could as a Noachide trying to be Jewish," he said.
Blessing the Jews
"I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curses thee will I curse, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."
Genesis 12:3
So how does one bless Israel?
It’s not always easy, as Jack learned. “Israel doesn’t know what it is. The Jews, largely, don’t know what they have,” he’d say.
It’s true.
Left: Michael Douglas (actor, son of Kirk, 1916-2020, a Jew) and his daughter Carys at the same party. Neither is Jewish; they are, rather, Jew-adjacent. Celebrities, these kinds of people drive the Nazis and Neo-Nazis nuts. Right: Michael Blumberg (former Mayor of New York), a not particularly observant Jewish self-made billionaire, and Diane von Furstenberg, fashion designer – a Jewish lady, despite her goyish name, whose mother barely survived Auschwitz.
The way the System works, the world’s Jewish population will always be tiny, but the Jews will, in every generation, stand out, to a crazy degree, disproportionately beyond the power of their numbers. Jews making news is one of the things that draws people to the Jewish cause. In the arts, science, law, building, manufacturing, and even in the niceties of daily living, the Jews are always trying to bring down Heaven to Earth.
Jew-haters will always cry, “the Jews run society.” While, in fact, there always will be Jews, somewhere, who really almost do seem to run society, who really are important – often absurdly counter-intuitively – even in the most elevated circles.
That’s a blessing, which isn’t entirely a blessing, that comes from never being more than a few generations removed from God’s fundamental service: passionate Torah observance, and the habits and attitudes coming therefrom. When Jews reject Torah, they assimilate ("Jews are a nation only by virtue of the Torah," R' Saadia Gaon); their descendants, if any, eventually marry out, and their “Jew-adjacent” descendants stop identifying as members of Israel, almost in the blink of an eye.
That - a feature, not a glitch, in the constitution of the people of Israel - didn’t deflect Jack, who understood it thoroughly. It shouldn’t deflect nor discourage any of us.
Next time: Lessons in Blessing Israel (and mankind, and all Creation).
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
Rosh Chodesh Adar, 5786
February, 2026