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2026
Covenant Connection
June 2026/Nison 5786 Vol. 19:4
An Alternative to
Institutional Noahism
By James Regehr, PhD, ThD
James Regehr, who lives in Canora, Saskatchewan, Canada, writes to us as an "officially recognized and certified Noahide Righteous Gentile who has since converted to Judaism."
Dr. Regehr has submitted an original essay for publication and we are printing it to provoke thoughtful discussion. Expect follow-up. The author's opinions as expressed within are his own.
[Attached Preamble, first stage: Wikipedia article - "Noahidism"] Outside the Talmud and some ancient rabbinic writings, the earliest mention of the Seven Noahide Laws is credited to RAMBAM (Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1135-1204) in the Mishneh Torah. Starting in the 1990's, a movement developed, advocating for the Seven Laws as the core of a Universal Judaic Religion for Non-Jews, under the supervision, guidance and control of Orthodox Rabbis.
[Second stage of Preamble, Facebook essay, by Russell Kirk:]
The early 2000s marked a moment that could have reshaped the future of the righteous among the nations. There was real momentum. There were real meetings. The images from those gatherings are not symbolic. They are historical. Noahides sat together with members of the nascent Sanhedrin in Israel with the stated goal of establishing a judicial framework for the Bnei Noach. This was not theory. It was an attempt to give form to the Noahide command of dinim, the obligation to establish courts of justice.
Yet what should have become a foundation became a fracture point.
Instead of producing enduring institutions, the effort dissolved into politics, competing visions, and personal agendas. Leadership became fragmented. Individuals used the moment to promote their own authority, their own definitions, and their own direction for what the Noahide identity should become. What stood before them as a historic responsibility was reduced to internal division.
This failure is not minor. It strikes at the core of the Noachic covenant itself.
Among the Seven Laws, dinim is unique. It is the only positive command given to the nations as a society. It is not optional, and it is not theoretical. It is the structural command that ensures the enforcement of the other six. Without courts, the Noahide framework remains morally aspirational but legally incomplete. A covenant without a system of justice cannot sustain itself in the public sphere.
And yet, more than three decades after the modern revival of the Noahide movement, and nearly a generation after those early Sanhedrin engagements, there is still no broadly recognized, functioning Beit Din for the nations.
Vendyl Jones helped reignite the awareness of the Noachic covenant in the modern world. Rabbi Yoel Schwartz served as a central rabbinic voice and was identified with efforts to establish a court framework for the Bnei Noach. But after his passing, there has been no clearly recognized successor who carries that mantle with the same visibility and authority. The institutional continuity that should have followed never materialized.
This raises a difficult but unavoidable question.
Why has the one command that requires structure, authority, and public implementation been left without structure, without authority, and without implementation?
The answer is not that the command disappeared. The answer is that responsibility was deferred. Some waited for rabbinic leadership to build it. Others assumed the time was not yet right. Still others attempted to claim leadership prematurely, further fragmenting the effort. The result is the same: delay, stagnation, and absence of a unified judicial framework.
But the command of dinim does not wait for perfect conditions.
If anything, the lesson of those early meetings is not that the effort should be abandoned, but that it must be approached differently. The foundation cannot be built on personalities. It must be built on structure, humility, and submission to authentic halachic guidance. It must grow in stages, with seriousness and discipline, rather than ambition and self-appointment.
The images from those meetings stand as both evidence and warning. They testify that the opportunity was real. They also testify that opportunity alone is not enough. If the righteous among the nations are to fulfill their role within the Noachic covenant, then the responsibility cannot remain indefinitely postponed. Courts of justice are not someone else’s command to fulfill on their behalf. They are part of their own obligation.
Photos from "a Special Session of the Nascent Sanhedrin," in Jerusalem. In the top photo, our late great friend Jack Saunders, with the healthy white beard, is seated left. We've been friendly for a long time with lots of the people there.
The question is no longer whether it should have been done. The question is whether it will be done now, and whether it will be done correctly.
____________________________
[Dr. James Regehr, "An Alternative to Institutional Noahism." This is the essay at the heart of this issue - a "think-piece" worth discussion:]
1. They had the goal of establishing a judicial framework for the Bnei Noach.
2. They had the goal of establishing a Beit Din for the Nations based on authentic halachic guidance.
3. They said that the establishment of Courts of Justice falls on the righteous of the Nations.
Contrarily, the very nature of the Sheva Mitzvot (Seven Laws), is that they were given to be universal for all mankind—not just for the “righteous gentiles.” In fact, the imperative is that the unrighteous pagans of the nations are the ones who are obligated to follow these Mitzvot!
To establish a Beit Din sponsored by Noahides or the Sanhedrin imposes an obvious Judaic bent when it is based on authentic halachic guidance. However, this completely undermines the integrity and legitimacy of the existence of the nations as distinct from Bnei Yisroel.
While on one hand, as stated, without courts, the Noahide framework remains morally aspirational but legally incomplete, on the other hand, in the absence of authentic halachic guidance, the Nations must grapple with and articulate exactly how the Sheva Mitzvot are to be expressed in their specific ethnocultural national identity.
Even as it has been said that the Torah was written without vowels in order to both allow and foster differing understandings, perspectives and interpretations, so also the Sheva Mitzvot must be kept devoid of “authentic halachic guidance” in order that each people may understand, interpret and express the Mitzvot in their own way.
There must, therefore, be no centralized, sanctioned, judicial framework for Bnei Noach; no halachic Beir Din, and the establishment and control of the Courts of Justice must remain in the purview of the “unrighteous” nations themselves!
The Sheva Mitzvot, however, form the moral aspiration of the nations but they do not encapsulate nor even reflect humanity’s responsibility to God. The Sheva Mitzvot are not about serving God as much as they reflect some basic morality, when it comes to God, and humanity’s responsibility to one another and Creation.
The Sheva Mitzvot express the basic principles of how people are to get along with God, Creation and one another, but the Sheva Mitzvot fall short because they do not express what is truly important.
Hoshe’e HaNavi (Hosea, the Prophet) emphasizes the original and most foundational covenant God has ever made with humanity and he refers to it as the Covenant With Adam, man, all humankind.
Hosea said, “I want you to love Me rather than just sacrifice to Me, I want you to know Me more than I want your burnt offerings. But, like Adam, you broke My Covenant and betrayed My trust. (Hosea 6.6-7)
God’s Covenant with Adam was and remains for us to KNOW God and to LOVE God.
While this Covenant is echoed time and again throughout Torah, the Nevi’im (Prophets) and the Ketuvim (Writings), of Biblical Hebrew Scripture (the Hebrew Bible), in places like the Shema (Israel's call to faith) and elsewhere, knowing and loving God can neither be qualified nor quantified and therefore cannot be regulated, dictated, adjudicated or controlled by authentic halachic guidance.
While some may insist that one can know God through studying Torah, others might say that one cannot know God simply by studying Torah but can only know God by performing His Mitzvot. Dao’id HaMelek, King David, in Psalms 46.10 wrote: “Be still to know that I am God,” suggesting that the only way to get to know God is in quietness and solitude.
To be fair, studying Torah is very good and one is able to know much ABOUT God from it. Similarly, the performance of His Mitzvot is also a way to know ABOUT God … but knowing God is something very different!
Indeed, even the New Testament writer, Paul, told the people of Athens the following:
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He, Himself, gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In Him we live and move and have our being," as even some of your own poets have said. Christianity's Scripture, Acts 17.24-28
Similarly, invitation after invitation is given for us to seek God with all our heart if we want to find Him.
Jeremiah 29.13 says, “You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me with all your heart.”
1 Chronicles 28.9 says, “If you seek God, He will be found by you.”
Long before there was any such thing as “organized religion,” there was God.
Adam and Eve walked with God in the Garden of Eden and talked with Him Face to face as friends. (Genesis 3.9-11).
Enoch walked with God and God took him, (Genesis 5.24).
Noah found grace in the Eyes of the Lord and walked with God, (Genesis 6.8-9).
Isaiah 41.8 says that Abraham was God’s friend and God used to go to Abraham’s home and visit with him— face to face. According to Genesis 18, God (by His angels) even stayed for supper and ate in Abraham’s home with him.
According to Genesis 32.30, Jacob spent time with God virtually "Face to face" and actually ended up physically struggling with God, but they talked and worked things out between them.
Moses used to speak with God "Face to face," Exodus 33.11 says, "as a man talks with a friend."
In those ancient times, Psalm 145.18 says that God drew near to all who would call on Him, and going back to the very earliest of times, even at the time of Seth, the son of Adam and Eve, Genesis 4.26 says that people began calling upon the Name of the Lord.
This is God’s Covenant with Adam—to KNOW Him and to LOVE Him.
As Noahides, it is not your job to form the courts of justice in your land. Courts of justice already exist in every land. They have been established by the people of their lands.
It is the job of the Noahides not to overturn or replace the courts of justice in each land but rather to do what they can to correct or prevent every travesty of justice the courts permit.
It is true that the court and judicial systems of many lands have become corrupt an ineffective. Noahides need to be a voice to help restore their integrity and purpose!
The courts of justice commanded in the Sheva Mitzvot are not religious courts. They are to be the civil courts for that is the place where justice must be present.
The Sheva Mitzvot do not the framework of a religion form. The Sheva Mitzvot are the universal laws for all humanity.
The “religion” of the righteous gentile must be the Adamic Covenant, which contains neither sacrifices, offerings nor sacred rites. It does not utilize any specific prayerbook Siddur nor hymnal. It does not honor festivals or moedim (seasonal holy days) except the recognition of God’s blessing of the Sabbath as a special day each week - although no black letter imperative was given to Adam regarding him remembering to keep the Sabbath holy.
Therefore; being Noahide at present is best described as non-Jews striving to live under the authentic halachic guidance of Jewish Rabbis rather than simply following the Sheva Mitzvot. However, while the Sheva Mitzvot are universal laws for humanity to get along with God and one another, they are not God’s primary covenant with humanity.
It is God’s primary goal the the nations of the world will come to know Him and to love Him.
This job was not given to the Noahides. It is our Jewish sacred duty. We are the ones He has chosen to tell the nations how they can know God for themselves.
Yes, God has told us much about Himself in our Bible but that is not the only way to come to know God! He can be known through Creation itself. He can speak to people through dreams. There are no limits to the number of ways that people can know and experience God!
Maybe, as Jews, we should focus our efforts less and less on Noahides and the Sheva Mitzvot and more and more on helping the nations know God!
By James Regehr, PhD, ThD
What do you think? We'll discuss the points raised here in later issues. We welcome your input.
MD
Detroit
June 11, 2026
_________________________________________________________________________________________ He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the LORD (HaShem) demands of you: Only to do justice, to love loving-kindness (chesed), and to walk humbly with your God." - Micah 6:8
Covenant Connection
April 2026/Nison 5786 Vol. 19:3
Considering the Current War
We are living in sacred times. They’re certainly unusual. The People of Israel still struggle to develop their toe-hold in the land of promise. In this current stage – following the re-establishment of Jewish life in the coastal sliver of the Land of Israel, old Cana’an, or Philistia (what Ancient Rome named Felix Palestina, “Happy Palestine,” after banishing the Jews from Cana’an/Judea) – it’s a four-front war:
• War with Persia (Iran, “the Land of the Aryans”).
• War with Persia’s surrogates, the Persians’ Arab fellow Shi’ite Muslims in southern Lebanon.
• War in the Land’s own Judea and Samaria with the so-called Filistin or “Palestinians” in the Land’s historic hill country, the heart of it, who – with considerable chutzpah (that is, gall) - claim the whole land as their own and call the Jews foreign invaders.
• And, war in Gaza, with another set of chutzpadik so-called Filistin or “Palestinians,” who attacked Israel in the notorious dastardly attack of October 7, two years ago.
That’s just the kinetic, physically violent, “hot” part of the struggle. Still, that’s a lot, considering that Israel is smaller than Chicago – in the size of its economy and population – in an area smaller than Lake Michigan. But the stakes are high, too, to say the least:
We’re taking about the prospective fulfillment of the whole Biblical story, the completion of many cycles of Jewish history – entry, exile, struggle, exile, return, exile, modern return, and continuing existential struggle – proceeding, we hope, to the glory of a blessed Millennial fulfillment: to Apocalypse!
We’re taking about the prospective fulfillment of the whole Biblical story, the completion of many cycles of Jewish history – entry, exile, struggle, exile, return, exile, modern return, and continuing existential struggle – proceeding, we hope, to the glory of a blessed Millennial fulfillment: to Apocalypse!
Used in this sense, by the way, apocalypse is a good thing, signifying a great fundamental Revealing.
_________
People talk about Revelation – apocalypse – coming all in a flash, suddenly, but that’s rarely the way of the world. Usually, truth works its way out slowly, incrementally. Consider, for instance, the great scientific discoveries of Louis Pasteur. Most of his fellow scientists, competitors, never even recognized the truth of them. Rather, they kept on teaching their old stuff until they died or retired early, with fewer and fewer students.
One revelation coming from Israel’s war in Gaza is that sometimes even supposedly reliable experts will spout risible – laughable, contemptible – nonsense. In all of human history, no territory has ever been fortified and customized for war like Gaza under Hamas. Never, ever, has anyone built tunnel networks remotely as deep and extensive – next to them, the fortifications of Okinawa and Iwo Jima by the Japanese in World War II are insignificant - and expensive, as the multi-billion dollar fortifications of Hamas. Destroying them - as they must be destroyed, lest they be used again for evil - is a huge job. That doesn’t make that job, or the rest of the physical erasure of Gaza’s terror networks, “genocide”!
I remember staying in one of the settlements, a kibbutz or collective farm, just outside Gaza – and visiting Gaza City – some years ago. The people there never imagined how deeply the people of Gaza hated them. Many of my kibbutznik hosts were butchered on October 7.
The Perennial Question
When a tree falls in a forest where nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? That’s sort of a trick question: there’s never “nobody around.” The Supreme Being, HaShem, the Lord of Abraham and all the Jewish prophets, is always present and aware. As He (we say “He” because HaShem is an active, rather than passive, intelligent Power, despite being beyond sex or gender) lives on Earth and on every planet, asteroid, speck of dust and breath in every galaxy and space in this and every universe. That’s just part of what being God means: He’s involved – not as a part of but as a completely independent Being - with everything that He sustains, while He sustains everything, and, accordingly, knows everything about everything.
This is not pantheism. A false teacher recently told me that it is. But the great Maimonides – Rambam, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (c. 12th Century) - wasn’t telling Israel anything that the prophets hadn’t already recognized when He explained these things: that HaShem, the Lord, is no more divisible than a geometric point; that He is a unity, a single Being, beyond anything material and beyond any thing or force that’s unified, eternal, and all-knowing, because He’s involved in sustaining everything.
People will sniff, “Well, He’s not in the bathroom.” Or, “He can’t tolerate indecency.” But claiming that God suffers from crippling delicacy insults Him, and “all-knowing” means all-knowing. Of course we humans – mere animated stardust, as we are – have a hard time with such truths, but it’s good to remember that God is really, genuinely One, and that the One God Who hears things like trees falling on planets in the remotest galaxies is also the One Who’s intimately involved with you, yourself. He unites Creation with His unity.
Why bring up these matters of theology? Because we’re talking about Israel, which exists as both nation and people – the two are ultimately one – to help raise all humanity to greater God-consciousness.
You are My witnesses, says the Lord, and My servant whom I have chosen
- Isaiah 43:10
I will also give you for a light unto the nations, that My salvation may be unto the end of the earth. - Isaiah 49:6
The cause of Israel against those who would annihilate Israel is strong enough based on the pure, secular merits that it shouldn’t need to depend on religious belief, but the fact is that religious belief – or, anyway, ultimate beliefs, based on anti-Jewish worldviews – is determinative. I’ve concluded that theology is everything in the larger struggle.
People convinced that the Jews are just another grubby bunch of people amongst all the different so-called nations dislike the Jews’ pretensions to nationhood, national rights, and historical rights - let alone Divine rights! - vis a vis other groups who want the so-called Holy Land.
People convinced, like both Muslim and Christian supersessionists, that the Muslims, or Christians, have superseded the Jews as God’s “witnesses,” His principal missionary people, hate the thought of the Jews returning to the Holy Land (in apparent fulfillment of Holy prophecy).
People convinced that the “true owners” of the so-called Holy Land are supposedly indigenous, or native, Arabs, rather than Jews, consider Zionism – the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, bringing the Jews back to Mount Tzion in Jerusalem – to be mere window dressing for the stale old story of white racist usurpers, colonialists and imperialists seizing “native” lands.
“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.” Yasser Arafat, 1980
Here In Detroit
A couple of weeks ago a naturalized American citizen of Lebanese background took a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks, and some firearms, and smashed it into the nursery school/day care of the Detroit area’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel. His brother back in Lebanon was serving as an officer in Hezbollah, the Iranian-directed paramilitary, but had been killed the week before in an Israeli air-strike, along with his wife. So he was trying to kill as many Jewish children as he could. He got bogged down, though. The Detroit Jewish community has been spending millions on security, these last few years, and security guards inside had just been drilling under the auspices of the FBI. They stopped him. After a short standoff, trapped in his truck, he used his own gun to kill himself.
A little later, somebody posted on Facebook: “Of the 3,000 people murdered on 9/11, there are roughly 30,000 grieving immediate family members, somewhere like 100,000 grieving extended family members, and about half a million grieving close friends and immediate colleagues. How many of them decided to shoot up a mosque?”
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March, 2026
Nisan 7, 5786
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.
Covenant Connection
Vol. 19.1
January 2026/Teves 5786
Coming Back Jazzed’
I visited the Far East earlier this year and came back jazzed, almost breathless. China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand… flying back from South Korea across the International Date Line, starting on Tuesday at 9 AM - and arriving back home in Detroit at 9 AM, still Tuesday!
"All these nice people!" I thought. "Hundreds of millions of human beings sick of their crummy old religions, detaching themselves from them; ready, even if they don't know it yet, to come under the wings of the Divine Presence [the shechina] ....
I’d had all these conversations... The Bhutanese guide, for instance, high in the Himalayas, telling me that, but for schlepping foreign tourists to them, he didn't bother much with temples, shrines and statues.
"I believe in Karma," he said. "And I believe in God."
Asian idolatry is quite picturesque, but you see a lot of dust on the idols.
The man-made religions are fading, fast. Teaching their childish concepts – that an intangible, unimaginable god is a contradiction in terms; that anyone who isn’t committed to the favored religion is “utterly depraved”; that unquestioning belief always trumps thoughtful skepticism – they were bound to wilt under modernity.
I don’t know if people consciously miss God, or any particular god or gods. But they are certainly worried – sometimes even despairing! - about the future. Thailand was always steamy but now, in the 21st century, it’s even hotter. The Himalayan glaciers are melting. Sea levels keep rising. What mother wants her children to follow in the old ways, to become Sherpas - load-carrying human mountain mules – or poor farmers, hustlers, impoverished laborers, or sex workers?
Three generations after World War II, Western Civilization – call it Modern Civilization? – permeates everything. Billions of people own smart phones. They are radically different from their mostly illiterate, unlinked, impoverished, mostly agricultural pre-war forefathers. Torah culture and Hebrew contributions have helped immeasurably in creating this world. In many ways, it’s better.
On the subject of Western Civilization, someone posed a question to the Dalai Lama. (I visited his palatial bedroom in Lhasa, Tibet, where his local followers still come, dressed in their thick woolen clothes, bringing tributes, throwing cash at his old bedstead. But he had to flee Tibet before the advancing Chinese Communists.) “What do you think of Western Civilization?” they asked.
“I think it would be a good idea,” he said.
People saw my yarmulke – my kipa, or skullcap – and asked me, “What are you?” I’d say “Jewish,” but that meant nothing. “Hebrew,” I’d say. “Not Israeli, Hebrew.” That clicked. Nobody knew much about the Jews or Judaism but everybody knew something.
The Chabad House in Bangkok, Thailand took my traveling copy of Rainbow Covenant for their library. I celebrated Shabbos/Shabbat there, with a couple of hundred traveling young Israelis, and Jewish and non-Jewish characters from… basically, everywhere. The Shabbos before, I’d wanted to visit the Chabad House in Kathmandu, Nepal, but they’d just been attacked by a terrorist bomber.
That’s a weird thing to need to report.
One thing that travel’s taught me: what the world doesn't know about Israel, and the God of Israel, is 'way more than what it does know.
Islam Versus Torah
Jews – Hebrews – are news. People keep hearing of the country of Israel and the People of Israel.
Thanks a lot, Muslims!
Almost a billion Muslims today - including their Organization of Islamic Cooperation (57 countries, 49 of them majority Muslim) and the Arab League, with its 22 member countries, speak as one on this question, officially, unanimously:
Every inch that the Jewish People claim as the Land of Israel is now and forever will be “Palestine”; while the entirety of Palestine rightfully belongs, not to the Jewish people nor to any Jews but solely, exclusively to “Palestinians,” who are not Jews.
Who are the Palestinians? People from throughout the “House of Islam,” from Indonesia, Malayasia, India, China, Pakistan and Turkey, from the Philippines even to the island of Manhattan in New York and the city of St. Paul in Minnesota, and the whole Arab world, proudly shout, “We are all Palestinians!”
If you ever had any doubt, this is jihad, an Islamic religious crusade, a struggle waged on behalf of Allah, Islam and everything holy, to conquer and overcome an impediment to Islam.
In this case, the enemy is Judaism itself. As the re-establishment of Jewish life in the Land of Israel – Zionism – lies at the heart of Judaism, not just as an objective but as a principal goal and a fundamental value, the object of this particular jihad is to snuff it out, to annihilate it. This is Islam at its most ambitious: to finally kill off Judaism as a living force.
This map helps set out the nature of the cause. See that little Israel-shaped smudge in the middle?
Below, this is part of the steel and razor-wire wall – there are multiple barrier walls and
ditches, and guard towers, beyond it – that Egypt has erected, in Gaza, against their
beloved brethren, the Palestinians.
That’s the plot: the international Islamic conspiracy. Islam insists that “the Palestinians” are solely Israel’s responsibility – that it’s up to Israel to guarantee the happiness of the world’s fastest-growing population, subsidized by the entire Muslim world, by somehow absorbing it within the tiny confines of New Jersey-sized Israel.
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I believe that God “doesn’t make no junk,” as the saying goes, and that the people of the world aren’t stupid. And that they’ll soon see through this cruel, cynical conspiracy. I believe that the “Historical Monotheism” that’s the religion of Abraham – the devoted worship of the One God of Abraham, the living Creator of everything and the holy, loving, omniscient, just God of history, Israel and the entirety of the cosmos – will finally “catch on” among all the peoples that He created.
The enemies of Israel and Jewry always end up losing. From ancient Egypt to Philistia and Edom to Assyria and Babylon, to Greece and Rome, to Spain and Russia and Germany to the Arab world, and now – today! – modern Iran, they all end up in long-term decline, defeat and degradation.
___
Nobody defames and wrongly characterizes religion as strongly and lengthily as people have defamed and wrongly characterized the religion of Abraham. (I don’t call it “Judaism” in this context, because the religion and way of life involving the exclusive worship of the Living God isn’t just a sect connected to a tiny little bunch of people called Jews.) But I think the peoples of the earth will finally come to see through the defamations and the nonsense.
This Concerns Me
Nothing bothers me more than this: the claim that, in Torah, “in the Jewish religion,” God lacks room in His heart for non-Jews. That the great unified system for all humanity that is the Torah - designed to lift the whole world and its people up to ever-more refined and higher spiritual and moral levels - begrudges non-Jews God’s love, That He made the Jews “the cool kids” in all things while relegating all the rest of the human race to lesser or more common status.
Human beings aren’t capable of infinite love; so, people think, is the One God incapable.
(People persist in “making” God in their own image.)
This is blasphemy.
Every individual of every nation is “made in the ‘image’ of God” and invested with the potential to accomplish spectacular acts of infinite holiness and merit. Prophets of God and servants of God and lovers of God can come from any nation – [Hebrew] Scripture speaks of non-Jewish prophets and saints and elevated souls as an everyday thing. The idea that the God of Abraham would begrudge anyone who isn’t descended from Abraham His esteem and love would appall and infuriate Abraham himself.
Granted, Jewish people have special advantages in the love and esteem department. Men and women whose lives are shaped by Torah, who grow up under the Torah’s precepts – who eat kosher food and keep Shabbat and the kosher traditions that exist for human refinement, including studying the precepts and praying the prayers of God-consciousness – should, obviously, be refined thereby. But that doesn’t preclude anyone of any nation from finding his or her own way to God and holiness! Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln grew up in Hebrew households, but the holiness of their deeds credits all humanity.
Back at the end of the Bronze Age, it took the People of Israel more than ten generations to even begin to finally eschew the idolatries of their forebears.
Are the peoples of our modern world ready now to follow the Unimaginable God? We hope so. We surely have some way to go. Will they ever be ready? The prophets assure us: YES.
I expect the real story here will eventually – we hope, soon – resonate with all the peoples of the Earth.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit, Michigan
January 2026
2025
Covenant Connection
Vol. 18.4
May 2025/Nisan 5785 2025
‘Hail to the Mother Goddess’
[Arab League 2025 Cairo Summit, reported by NBC as "US and Israel reject Arab alternative to Trump's Gaza plan," March 5, 2025]
- Psalm 92:2
2025
Vol. 18.3 March 2025/Adar 5785
Covenant Connection
Vol. 18.3 March 2025/Adar 5785
Biblical Belief
"The Jews were the only ones whose sacred Scriptures were held in ever greater veneration as they became better known," (Fr. J.B. Bossuet, Archbishop of Mieux, France, 1681); "The Bible: the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed" (T.H. Huxley 1892); "Our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1845).
"To have bound this New Testament, so completely rococo in taste, with the Old Testament into one book, as the Bible, is perhaps the greatest piece of audacity and 'sin against the Holy Spirit' which literary Europe has on its conscience." - 1885"In the Old Testament of the Jews, the book of Divine righteousness, there are men, events and words so great that there is nothing in Greek or Indian literature to compare with it." - Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887
From even before the ancient Greeks until the 1950's, most of what passed for "science" didn't just reject but actually ridiculed the Bible's teaching of the universe created "ex nihilo," out of nothing, as preposterous. "You claim the universe came into being from nothing but God's will and you dare to call yourself a scientist?" It should have been a great big deal when proof of "the Big Bang" from radio telescopes collapsed that attack, but people blew it off. The fact that the Biblical Creation story, of all mankind's "creation myths," should be confirmed by modern science as having always been right, or as close to the scientific truth about Creation as anything could be, shouldn't be ignored like that. Especially when its contrasted with ALL the world's other origin stories or Creation myths, involving disgusting warring "gods," vomiting demons, rape, incest, and racism.
When Genesis relates that God - "Elohim" (literally, "the Powers" that Be; the "High Ones") - "created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and that the Lord God - "HaShem/Y-H-V-H/Adonoi [this is the famous Tetragrammaton, the ineffable four-letter Name meaning "He is/He was/He will be"] Elohim" - "made heaven and earth" (Genesis 2:4), the different names are proof, supposedly, of different authors with different styles.
This is a big deal. People attack the Bible to defeat its central message, that the God of Abraham and Moses is, in fact, God. Paraphrasing Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the secularists' idea that the universe came into being by accident, by a random fluctuation in the quantum field, that there is no God that knows we exist, that our moral convictions are self-serving means of self-preservation and our spiritual aspirations are mere delusions, doesn't seem particularly attractive but it's easier for a great many people to accept than the alternative: belief in the One God.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog," reformed Christian, coiner of the term "agnostic" and agnosticism, on our subject: "There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, as tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law." (1870)
That's quite a prophecy! Contrast that to Christian prophecy, such as it is. How to tell the "end times"? "There will be powerful earthquakes, famines and plagues from place to place" (Luke 21:11). Daring, eh? When are there not earthquakes, plagues, etc.?
If God drives Israel off the Land of the Israel, no other people will supplant the Jews, to settle there and make it thrive. Rather, "the land shall lie forsaken without them [the Jews]," "while she [the land] lies desolate" (26:43).
Before the Jews came to the Land of Israel the Canaanites and Philistines and other peoples managed to make live on the land. After that, following the Jews' exile, no other people ever thrived there. Many peoples came and went. Yet, despite the myths of Palestinianism, the Land of Israel without the Jews did lie desolate and forsaken, a dry, malarial, howling waste. It was infamous. Mark Twain, visiting in 1868, remarked on its barrenness, asking, "Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?" (The Innocents Abroad,1869) The Turks and Arabs never did well there; they knew it was the Jews' land and firmly regarded it as cursed (See Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial; the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine (Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 155-161; Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution (St. Martin's Press, 1978), pp. 146-148.)
2025
Vol. 18.2 February 2025/Shevat 5785
Getting Deeper Into the Millenium
Bitachon - Trust in God
One of the best things about this job is receiving insight from God-fearing Gentiles - b'nei no'ach. Dimitar V. Kosev, an old dear friend, a Noachide author in Kazanlak, Bulgaria, was responding to this statement:
Greater than all the prayers one can say to HaShem, bitachon is greater.
Bitachon is a major Hebrew Torah-study word signifying trust - like trustfully falling back into trust-worthy hands.
Dimitar comments: "Bitachon is not a blind sheep-like Christian trust. It is a high level of awareness that 'it could not be otherwise'."
Basically, he's saying that Bitachon is "woke" or enlightened awareness that it's impossible that HaShem isn't the "hands-on" Master of all Creation.
We trust and believe in HaShem, in other words, because any world-view other than that would be absurd.
Getting Deeper Into the Millenium
More and more gets clearer as we get deeper into the Millenium. Even Israel’s Arab enemies may be becoming a little more aware – at least to the extent of recognizing that opposing the Jews in all things puts people in the company of the worst causes and criminals in all of human history. We're seeing early signs that the Arab bloc of 22 or 23 Muslim-ruled Arabic-speaking countries is flagging in its long-running crusade to annihilate Israel. Despite lots of howling to the contrary.
It's about time! Never has there been such a struggle: more than a score of sovereign nations ganging up on one nation, not to win a point, punish or restrict a country but, generation after generation, decade after decade, to utterly annihilate it; to enforce worldwide boycotts against it, refusing to even recognize or talk with it or do business with it, and working ceaselessly to undermine it, by all possible means, including war after war after war.
Just look at this chart:
All over a country smaller than New Jersey, or “tiny” El Salvador (El Salvador is always described as “tiny”); less than 600-times the size of the Arab countries that have been trying to erase it.
It's interesting: Cicero, the famous ancient Roman, a notorious Jew-baiter, mocked Israel's God - which is to say, God - for the smallness of the Jewish Holy Land. "He must be only a very small and weak God," Cicero teased, for only reserving such a dinky country as the Land of Israel for the Jews, "for His own glory!" After all, what is Canaan - the Holy Land - but an insignificant dot on the map?
[We wrote before about finding this factoid in the sermons of the famous Depression-era Detroit-area "radio priest," Canadian-American Fr. Charles Coughlin. Celebrated for the founding of a great basilica, the Shrine of the Little Flower, the Church finally silenced Fr. Coughlin over his outspoken support for Nazism.]
Yet as we see, the Gentiles keep howling (Isaiah 17-24; 52:15) against Israel...
But give the haters credit for consistency. Palestinianism – keeping the Jews from fulfilling God’s mandate to re-establish Jewish life in the Land of Israel – is genuinely a rotten cause: certainly one of the worst causes ever known. Its core premise (the late leader of Hezbollah – recently blown to Hell by a Jewish bomb – passionately taught this): that the Jews being in the Holy Land is a life-threatening foreign evil in the heart of the Arab world, and the duty of every right-thinking person - particularly, of every Muslim, and every Arab – is to help destroy it.
In this conception, which has achieved the most remarkable popularity, it would be better to have no life on the land than to tolerate an Israel. This fact is reflected in Iran's nuclear policy, indeed: better to poison the land with atomic weapons and keep anyone from having it than accept the reality of Israel. It’s why Palestinians cheered Saddam Hussein’s rocket attacks on Israel back in the 90’s, despite expecting that they carried poison gases or nuclear radiation that would have killed them too. It’s why they cheered the rocket attacks from Gaza, the Yemenite Houthis, Iran and Hezbollah, in 2023 and 2024, that were designed to ignite fire storms and burn the recently re-born forests of the Holy Land: not because they want the land for themselves but just to wreck it for the Jews.
We expect the charm of this argument to fade over time. In fact, we think we're already seeing signs of it, even among the Arabs themselves. Who wants to be linked to such patent unholiness?
Palestinianism
No Torah-Jew can look at October 7th without remembering Genesis 34: a lawless non-Jew raping Dinah, Jacob's daughter; his savage people positively accepting of his animalism; wiped out by her seething Jewish brothers, who explained, "Should they treat our sister as a whore?" But the Arab peoples, in polls taken immediately after October 7th, from Kuwait to California, overwhelmingly praised the "liberation operation." Only among the Arabs in Israel did a significant minority - almost 40% - object, on the grounds that payback would hurt. But even then, only a tiny number of respondents, fewer than ten percent of those who called Hamas' attack a mistake, objected to Hamas' tactics, the raping and murder of Jewish civilians.
Elsewhere, outside Israel, including native Arabic-speakers in America and Europe, the support for Hamas was solid: more than 80%. The people of Gaza and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and southern Lebanon promoted endless videos of nearly delirious celebrations. Across the Arab world, these became entertainment.
Watching grizzled Arab men grinning and laughing at the videos of Jewish women and girls suffering, the killing of their dogs, and the murder of young men, was jaw-dropping.
One thing to understand about the October 7th attack: it wasn't all that reckless. Only after Israel responded did the Arabs' "wiser heads" begin denouncing it as "suicide." Hamas and the other parties to Iran's so-called Axis of Resistance [against Israel and America] really thought it would work; that they could pull off at least enough of a win to cripple - and ultimately bury - Israel. Nobody in the Arab camp really knew how Israel might respond.
The world's Jews were indeed divided. In Israel, I myself got unwillingly caught up in a flag-waving anti-government. This generation of Israeli teenagers had never been tested in a full-fledged war. ("Will they even bring themselves to fight?") Hamas and Hezbollah had been gearing up an Israel-obliterating war for decades, sinking uncounted billions of Arab and Iranian petro-dollars into arsenals, fortifications and military training - and also, always, into fomenting hate. Iran, a profoundly misled non-Arab Muslim country of more than 90-million people, armed to the teeth and nationally committed in their "Axis of Resistance" to Israel's annihilation, cried for war. They closely coordinated with each other. With or without the help of Egypt - which, incidentally, has recently been arming ferociously against Israel, building and stocking vast underground fortifications and arsenals in Sinai, as near to Israel as feasible - and Syria, and the rest of what the Arab world calls "the confrontation states" against Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran thought they were winners.
Getting the Jew-Haters Away From the Jews Foils the Arabs' Plot
Nothing changes perspectives like losing. After the Dinah-incident in Genesis, the Gentiles of ancient Canaan acquired respect for the children of Israel. On the Jewish side, the Jews got new insight on the forces arrayed against Israel after October 7th, and the country of Israel has been fighting, rightly and truly, as if everything depends on it.
The Jews have lost patience with our many enemies and the Arabs have acquired fresh insight into why.
Apocalypse means "unveiling," "revelation." For people with Torah-educated eyes, we've seen revealed clearly fulfilled prophecies - concrete affirmations of black-letter Torah. Only an idiot would ignore the fact that, for instance, the Torah's warnings to the Jews concerning a phony nationality, "a vile nation that is no nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21), future "sticks in your eyes and pins in your sides" if Israel doesn't get them off the land (Numbers 33:55) - God's land, the Jews' Holy Land - that they fiercely claim as theirs, isn't, after all, just airy-fairy ancient nonsense. That itself constitutes an unveiling.
Of course the unfolding promise of assembled nations joining in a world-wide conspiracy to erase even "the name of Israel" (Psalms 83:5) seems pertinent. We've seen nations like Ireland and South Africa, and hundreds of millions of idealistic youth, worldwide, take up the cause of Palestinianism. That it's a horrible cause, based on risible nonsense, phony history, absurd arguments and great tidal waves of stinking but expensive Arab propaganda profoundly lacking in truth, that a little sober consideration and maybe just a little more basic information should reveal to be nonsense, hardly affects its trajectory. Against Palestinianism, Israel's cause is very widely despised.
But the Arabs themselves may be becoming more conscious of the promise that they who oppress Israel will suffer horrible civil wars: God will "feed them with their own flesh." (Isaiah 49:26) Since, after all, today's Arab world is wracked with civil wars! Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Sudan… Karma's a bitch, as they say (in Hebrew, mida k'neged mida, measure for measure): people encouraging "Palestinian" envy, blood-lust and the slaughter of civilians are surprised when just exactly such evil attaches itself to them.
They should know better. Gentiles should inform themselves enough to at least read the Bible's Book of Genesis - it should be on the reading-list in every nation everywhere - including the general guarantees and major cosmological truths just from Genesis 12:3 and 7:29: Attention! You who bless Israel can expect to receive blessing! You who curse Israel, expect to be damned!
The cruelty and perniciousness of Palestinianism, of the Arab world's plotting to destroy Israel by creating, arming, multiplying and indoctrinating the Palestinians, subsidizing their nurseries and obstetric clinics while paying them to forge themselves into the tip of the Arabs' spear, feeding them the nonsense of Arab "true" ownership of the Holy Land, has come into better focus. While the Arabs and - more recently, Iran, along with the internationally-funded UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) - have poured hundreds of billions into creating a phony "Palestinian" identity in the disparate, and recent, populations of non-Jewish squatters who've ever passed through the Holy Land - the claims of Palestinianism can still be seen as increasingly risible bullshit. Especially as we watch the whole Arab world and even distant Muslim countries like Indonesia refusing to extend ANY kind of welcome to their own supposed beloved brethren, desperate "Palestinian" refugees, who'd like to flee the devastation of the war that they started.
This is such a shame: Palestinianism, the most horrible of bad causes, has perverted the natural cultural hospitality and generosity of the Arab peoples so that it’s absolutely unthinkable to simply help out a Palestinian with a home or a job, because the whole point of Palestinianism is to forge the Palestinians into the tip of the Arabs’ spear against the Jews. The Arabs’ “help” to Palesinians is restricted to multiplying their population, subsidizing their obstetric clinics and food relief – none of the “Palestinian territories” are anywhere close to self-supporting – and arming, training them for war, and inciting them in Jew-hate. They have nowhere to go," the world cries, for the people of Gaza - fenced off from the rest of the world by the Arabs themselves!
We must note: America has shown what it's made of. I've never been more proud of America for the help we've given to the freedom fighters of Israel - and, incidentally, to the freedom fighters of Ukraine. If America hadn't stood by Israel in the on-going struggle against the lying nonsense of the Arab cause and the horrid tyrannies of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., not just with supplies but with the active help of the U.S. Navy, and other agencies, a lot more Jewish lives would have been lost. And Syria would still be a torture chamber.
One of the most ferociously anti-Israel of all the Arabs' anti-Israel "confrontation states," Syria's been in a state of declared war with Israel since Israel's founding. The degenerate Assad family would still rule Syria if Israel - with a certain amount of help from allies - hadn't eliminated Iranian air defenses and decimated Hezbollah. If the grotesque residue of a mess that is post-civil war Syria has any kind of future it's due to Israel.
People in their hatred ignore their own religion. The Qur'an itself, in the name of Allah, repeatedly declares "Palestine" to be the possession of the Jews (Suras 5:21, 10:93, 17:7, 17:104, 21:5, and probably elsewhere as well. The earth belongs to Allah, it teaches; He bequeaths it to whom He wills; and it is simply His will that He bequeathed the Holy Land of Israel to the Jews, and only to the Jews.
They also ignore plainly secular facts. The name Palestinian comes from Pilishtim, for instance; Hebrew for "invader"! Today's "Filistin" have no more connection to the ancient Philistines, or Cana'anites, than to Genghis Khan or Wyatt Earp.
Everybody with eyes has seen that the Palestinians' methods for "winning back" Palestine run heavily towards mind-boggling savagery. We're not through suffering through the phenomenon of people who take up Palestinianism suddenly blowing up buildings and murderously driving planes and trucks into innocent people. But even beyond that, lots of people have discovered that there is nothing - not one thing - in Palestinianism that's good for Palestine or for Palestinians. At the same time, lots of Arabs have noticed that their claims against the Jews keep getting dismissed as lying garbage.
Hamas' chief hostage negotiator declared last month - the 2d week of January - that the rape, torture and murder of Jewish civilians is "a source of pride for our people, to be passed down from generation to generation." This is the kind of the thing that almost – almost – makes the other enemies of the Jews, the Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, the Communists, the Cossacks – look relatively peaceful.
The Jew-Haters Don't Want Their Plot Against the Jews Foiled
Naturally, people who mostly don't believe in the God of Abraham keep insisting that the Jews must give up most of the Holy Land for Palestine. This, even while the God of Abraham Himself has stated, again and again, "Don't!" "You shall not try to carve up the land that I have promised you"; "You shall not forge any kind of compact or covenant to convey away any part of the land to foreign (non-Jewish) claimants"; "Disaster will be befall you, Israel, if you oppose HaShem in such matters." Exodus 23:32-33, Exodus 34:12, and Deuteronomy 7:2. God condemns Israel for failing to scrupulously heed this call (Judges 2:2).
Despite all the world's bellowing for Palestine, history seems to be moving visibly towards restoring HaShem's "Presence" to the Holy Land. This is a principal goal of Torah, clearly, and of all Hebrew Revelation. It seems obvious that it certainly should be important to B'nei Yisroel, the People of Israel, and B'nei Noach: all the rest of humanity, the world's nations, the goyim, who want to serve HaShem.
After all the fighting since October 7th last year, it also seems obvious that Israel needs to complete the work of making the Jew-haters understand that Israel's not going anywhere, and that their dastardly deeds must be punished. President Trump just invited Jordan and Egypt to accept some refugees from the "demolition zone" that's Gaza and they promptly adamantly refused. There are some two million people looking for housing after their people's attacks from Gaza, but the leaders of the Arabs keep insisting that "they are purely, only, the Jews' problem." So it should be obvious what they and the rest of the Arab world are up to: to destroy Israel through the bullshit of "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people."
Israel's taken the summit of Mt Hermon in the North of Israel, from Syria. Israel doesn't owe Syria - a terrible neighbor, by every measure - any deference. The Sykes-Picot Treaty after World War that suggested borders between the Holy Land and Syria isn't holy and definitely not Divine: Israel must keep the summit, not just by Divine right but to teach the Jew-haters that their evil actions have consequences. If Syria wants to improve relations with its next door neighbor, Israel, let it restore the bones of Eli Cohen, the soldier of Israel and master-spy, to his family and his nation. And say goodbye to the summit of Mt. Hermon. They can come ski on it, as visitors, when peace comes.
Ultimately, Jews will return to Gaza. God will restore His Presence there - apart from the evil degeneracy of the Jew-hate of Palestinianism. In the meantime, as President Trump has said, recognizing the obvious: it's a demolition zone. The people who are in Gaza now have no future there. If they try to rebuild, they - Jew-haters - will just go on to attack Israel again. So whatever they build there will fall. No weapon forged against Israel will prosper (Isaiah 54:17).
Future Generations Won't Believe This
Anybody, Noahide or Jew or Arab, who wants to see the people of Gaza thrive, should be pressing the Arab countries to take in their own people, to settle them, as citizens with equal rights, in their own vast territories. Let them stop subsidizing the evil propaganda that lies to them that their only possible future depends on eradicating the Jews.
It's the same in Lebanon, the same in Judea and Samaria - the "West Bank" - and Jerusalem, and the same for all the Arabs in Israel. If they want to live there as loyal citizens who adhere to the basic rules of all civilization, the 7M or Seven Commandments of the Noahide Revelation, and swear sincere allegiance to Jewish Israel, they have a future there. Otherwise, who in the world would want to live anywhere near the kind of people that they have shown themselves to be? People who applaud the maiming, rape and murder of Jews, and people who are OK with it.
They need to go forge lives for themselves somewhere else, where maybe they can redeem themselves. The world has a vast capacity to be improved by the love and labor of hard-working people, and the vast territories of the Arab world could welcome scores of millions more people. The good people of the world should be doing what we can to make it happen, speedily in our time.
Ultimately, we expect Scripture to be fulfilled: that the Name of the God of Israel should be declared sovereign over all the nations - that not just the Egyptians (Exodus 7:5 and 9:16) but all the world (Ezekiel 28:26) shall know that HaShem, Lord of Israel, is God.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
January 29, 2025
That through them [the Holy Land’s foreign squatters] I [the Lord] shall prove Israel, whether they shall keep the way of the Lord to walk therein, as their fathers did keep it, or not. Therefore the Lord left those nations, without driving them out hastily; neither delivered He them into the hand of Joshua.” – Judges 2:22
2024
November 2024/Cheshvan 5785 Vol. 18.1
A Universe in Thirteen Words: the Seven Laws of the Rainbow Covenant
Jews, the Descendants or Children of Israel, are called to live by the Bible's Ten Commandments' laws, involving a total of 613 Scriptural black-letter laws, including the laws that make the end-of-the-week Sabbath compulsory and make Israel a nation apart. This is Israel's obligation, arising from the Covenant of Sinai, including the entire Law of Moses - the Torah, the Divine "Teaching," "Guidance," "Way" or "Law."
Non-Jews or Gentiles - in Torah parlance, the Descendants or Children of Noah, the vast majority of the human race - are subject to an older covenant and a simpler, much more straightforward body of instruction, which doesn't compel Sabbath-observance: the Seven Noahide Commandments, the Code of the Rainbow Covenant.
The Rainbow is the symbol of this, the Bible's First Covenant - a solemn, binding, eternal contract - between the Sovereign of the Universe and all the Earth, including the whole human race.
In Genesis 9, the One and Only Living God speaking to Noah and his family, puts all humanity on notice: "This is the token of the covenant which I make between Me and you and every living creature with you, for perpetual generations: I do set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of the covenant between Me and the Earth (Gen. 9:13).
The word "covenant" - in Hebrew, b'rit - appears here seven times.
It's always noteworthy when Deity "speaks" to mortals. Ten generations earlier, the Bible says, He "spoke" to Adam and Eve, the first true humans, according to the Bible. At that time, He revealed the basis of the Rainbow Covenant: that He, God, created man "in His image" (Genesis 1:26-27).
All the Rainbow Covenant's Seven Commandments logically follow that first revelation, that every human being exists in "the image" of God. Basically, the Seven Universal Laws of the Rainbow Covenant make the prior universal revelation, to Adam, operational.
Many nations have traditions that roughly correspond to these precepts - the so-called Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would be done by," is just one example - but only Israel, thanks to the Teachings of Moses, kept the whole tradition alive. Genesis 9 is a memory-retrieval device, a mnemonic, declaring the word "covenant," or "b'rit," seven times, reflecting the Rainbow Covenant's Seven Commandments.
Israel's famous Torah, in the ancient Talmud Bavli, the so-called Babylonian Talmud, sets them all out (in Tractate Sanhedrin, 56a). The Seven Commandments are simultaneously a comprehensive body of law, and a framework for every nation's laws; a philosophy, a moral code, and a compelling, elevating, dynamic, logically harmonious worldview.
Dinin. Vrachas HaShem. Avodah zorah. Giluy aroyos. Ushpachos damim. Ugzal. Ever min hachai
They probably sound puzzling, these bare words, "naked" as they are, but this is a dazzlingly sophisticated body of wise law. These are the Seven Rainbow Covenant Commandments, the Universal Law, Heaven's basic rules and instructions for living a moral, fully human life.
Against all the contrary ideas and philosophies of savage paganism and of tyrannies of all time, these are the fundamental principles of human righteousness.
Starting with the latest of the Universal Laws, the last-mentioned above:
1) Ever min hachai. In English, "Torn Limb," signifying: "Do Not Tear a Limb From a Living Animal to Eat It."
It sounds strange, doesn't it? But it's a whole philosophy in just three words. Life and the Earth are real. The pain of animals matters, to the Lord God Himself. He will not suffer people, created in "His image" and designed to serve Him as His stewards over Earth (Genesis 1), to treat His creatures with gratuitous cruelty, to devour them or any part torn from them as wild animals might, as monsters would, while they're living.
The gift from God of life, and His supreme, exalted gift to us of dominion over this planet, of stewardship over Earth, is not just a license for savage piggishness.
This commandment - to kill your food before you eat it - applies to all the higher animals with developed nervous systems. That is, it applies to all mammals, and many birds, who would suffer from such cruelty.
This commandment casts light on the Torah's famous dietary ordinances governing the People of Israel, such as those banning consuming meat and milk together (the very symbol of a mother's love together with her slaughtered calf), against inflicting needless pain in the slaughtering process, and against human consumption of blood. It also relates to the Torah obligation of feeding one's animals before one himself eats in the morning.
Like all of the Seven Commandments, this prohibition is or should be obvious, a "no-brainer." Eating like a monster, cruelly, oppressively, and in a manner calculated to inflict needless pain, is something that no one should want to do. It's something that no society should condone. Pursuant to the following law, every society should pass and enforce a prohibition against it.
The Seven Commandments, unlike most of the Ten Commandments, are meant to be enforced by courts and laws and police. The laws that Noahides devise - such as commercial laws, insurance laws, or even parking regulations - are, with the Seven Commandments' very basic, framework prohibitions against seriously oppressive crimes, nothing if they're not enforced.
2) Dinin, or literally "laws." This is the Anti-Anarchy Commandment, the Law against lawlessness. Everyone - every adult participating member of society - is Divinely obligated to stand up for justice, fairness and equity on Earth and fight against oppression and injustice. Humans must necessarily organize ourselves into societies - this is the pro-government Commandment - and do what we can to ensure that our societies operate justly. Laws, police and courts are fundamental to all civilization.
3) Vrachas HaShem This is the Law against sacrilege, or [against] "blessing the Name," as this is euphemistically phrased (really, the violation is "cursing" the Name - the Divine Name).
The Rainbow Covenant, like the Torah, teaches that people have the power both to sanctify what is holy and Godly - people's deities, in this case, whomever or whatever they may be - and disparage or profane them. The reputation of Deity - whether the deity in question is the Infinite Sovereign of the Universe or, God forbid, a pagan god or gods - and what people think of Him, or them, is in our hands. To disparage or profane what people sincerely revere as holy is itself unholy. Ultimately, the reputation of Deity depends on living human beings.
This Commandment is so closely related to the following Commandment, against Idolatry, that it's like the two legs of a man walking.
In the modern world, and liberal, rule-of-law countries like the United States, this,and the following Commandment, would normally apply only to terribly, egregiously oppressive violations, like torturing or murdering people to exalt a vicious so-called deity.
4) Avodah zorah. This is the Commandment against Idolatry - or, really, literally, "against Weird Service" or "Weird Worship." The great sage Maimonides - Rambam - put this prohibition first among the Universal laws. But it's connected to the prior Law and resembles it. Worshiping or "serving" a cause or deity by performing acts that no deity worth worshiping would ever countenance - like torturing or cruelly oppressing innocents to glorify somebody's perverse conception of Allah, for instance - is both blasphemous (a violation of the Law against Sacrilege) and Idolatrous.
5) Giluy aroyos, or Sex Crimes. Human beings are sexual beings. Using sex to diminish and oppress others, to infringe their right to not be forced, coerced or pressured into sexual relations, or to force sex on animals, is sordid, forbidden, blasphemous, and less-than-animal misconduct.
6) Ushpachos damim, or murderous bloodshed. This universal prohibition corresponds to the Torah's "you shall not commit murder" (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 6:17), and the early black-letter revelation in Genesis: "Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the 'image' of God made He man" (Genesis 9:5-6). This precept has bearing on matters including suicide, "assisted suicide," and fetal abortion - since the Torah recognizes that there is some sanctity even in womb-bound humans - as well as capital punishment and warfare.
7) Ugzal. Larceny, usurping what's not yours, defiles the Earth. This commandment corresponds to the Torah's "you shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15). Volumes could and have been written about the extent of this prohibition: it covers commercial crimes, and defamation, kidnapping, and even rape. It prohibits, like all the Universal Commandments, savage oppression.
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Notice that all these "Noachide" or Seven Commandments Laws are negative, "You shall not," prohibitions. Unlike the Torah's Ten Commandments, they're designed to be legislated into criminally enforceable law, administered by police and courts. Which in fact they partly have been, in the nations' law codes: in no nation is it lawful to murder children to glorify any deity, even though some nations - we're thinking particularly of Iran and the nations of the Arab League, in their endless struggle to annihilate Israel - practically encourage it.
No nation and no person is virtuous unless it, he, or she, do the opposite of what the Seven Commandments prohibit. To refrain from murder is not particularly praiseworthy, for instance, but it is indeed virtuous to try to save the life of one in danger. To refrain from larcency isn't all that wonderful, similarly, but charitable giving really is good. Further, unquestionably, one way to determine what is good and virtuous is to reference the world's only other Divinely given set of laws, the Torah, which should be regarded as the Universal Laws' other face. All Divine legislation is related to all other Divine legislation. And "Happy is he who heeds Your Commandments, your Torah and Your word." (Siddur).
In the Torah, the whole Book of Genesis, the Book of Exodus, up to the Revelation at Mt. Sinai, and Numbers 22-24, constitute terrific learning material for Noahides, along with all the rest of Bible: Psalms, Proverbs, the Histories and Writings and all the prophets, etc. The Bible exists, partly, to help Noahides, or Gentiles, orient themselves towards the people and the phenomenon of Israel.
We need to emphasize that, every person existing in the "image" of Divinity, that democracy, one man, one vote; government of the people, by the people, for the people, strikes us, at least, as the highest and most righteous type of government. One aspect of every nation's sovereignty is the right and obligation to determine the details of its own laws for itself. The Seven Commandments are all general prohibitions which point the way to that which is good, "and what HaShem (the Living God of Israel, the Lord of all Creation) demands of you - to do only that which is just, to love generosity and kindness, and to walk humbly with" Him (Micah 5:28). Within the framework of the Seven Rainbow Covenant Commandments, each nation is obliged to forge its own path to what is good.
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Why Anti-Semitism?
Israel's obligation to help raise up the nations, scholars say, is one of the reasons for the Jews' dispersal among the nations.
From "Rainbow Covenant: Torah and the Seven Universal Laws"
The cartoon here is a tongue-in-cheek version of Isaiah's "Suffering Servant of the Lord -Israel, the Jewish People, Jacob, God's "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6) - among the nations.
Recently, discussing the phenomenon of Jew-hatred, we asked, sarcastically:
"Why would anyone hate acolytes of a religion that claims to be radically different and better than all others, making us better than all others, and gives us a basis for declaring all others to be lacking, while offering them no real way to join us cool kids?"
It seems only natural that people should feel inclined to presume such people to be guilty, before considering the genuinely extraordinary facts of history and world-affairs.
As the Jewish people confront Iran and the myths of the 22-countries of the Arab League - that the Jews' ancient Holy Land, the size of tiny El Salvador, or the state of New Jersey, is really a sacred Muslim trust, a wakf, belonging to the followers of Islam and to no one else, while the Jews are strangers, "colonialists" and interlopers in the Middle East, who really need to pack up and move "back" to Poland - it seems appropriate to mention two things:
1) With some notable - and very praiseworthy - exceptions, the Arab peoples have been extremely ungracious to the Jewish people, from before Islam began, and then even more so subsequently. The Persians - the Iranians - haven't been excessively hospitable either.
In our times, hundreds of millions of petro-dollars from the Arabs' and Iranians' vast oil wealth have poured into the cause of convincing the so-called Palestinian people - the descendants of the different Arab sojourners and squatters who claim to have ever lived for any length of time in the Jews' Holy Land - that the Jews' Holy Land is rightfully entirely and exclusively their property.
These deluded people have also been convinced that the Jews are solely a European people who have no connection to their Holy Land nor to any part of the Middle East - and that Zionism, the element in Judaism that calls the Jews back to their indigenous homeland, is merely a modern "colonialist" and purely racist movement.
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2) All of Iran's and the Arab League's chatter about Jews being European colonialists who should go back to Poland is ridiculous. This map helps tell the story:
Notice the vastness of the Arab countries' territories. Israel, just north of Egypt, south of Lebanon, is barely even visible. The ancient Roman orator Cicero used to ridicule the Jews and Judaism, saying that the God of Israel must be only a very tiny, very weak God, Who could only give His people, the Jews, such a tiny little country as the Jewish Promised Land. But it's far too much, it seems, for the Muslim world to tolerate!
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
November 2024
The Torah is a unitary program for all humanity.
Let all who walk the earth recognize and know that You alone are the God over all the kingdoms of the earth. - Siddur, morning prayer
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September 2024 Vol. 17.10
New Website work-in-progress 
Israel is Goliath and Palestine is David, Christean Amanpour said on her international TV show, "Amanpour and Company." She was talking to Israeli author David Grossman, who is a prize-winning novelist and a renowned Jewish "peace activist." Grossman insisted: "Despite everything, we must show faith. We must defeat the Jewish Messianics with the Two-State Solution."
That anybody could look at this map - "The Green is the Arab world. That Tiny Speck is Israel" - and claim that the real problem between Israel and the Arabs and the Arabs' allied Muslim countries is that Israel is too big.... We are not prophets but we predict that future generations will ponder this in wonder. It's like believing the Nazis' crazy lies about the all-powerful Jews as they murdered them.
The famous Ancient Roman orator Cicero disparaged the Jews and Judaism - and particularly, the Jewish Holy Land - with mordant humor:
"The God of the Jews must be a little God, since He has given His people such a little country."
[By the way, I found this quote from the famous Jew-baiting pagan Cicero in a book of sermons from the infamous Jew-baiting Depression-era "radio priest," Fr. Charles Coughlin (may his name be erased). This was from one of his 1931 sermons - when he hadn't yet developed into the raving anti-Semite he became.]
That the King of the Universe should set aside a tiny land - a/k/a Cana'an or Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel, no larger than the state of New Jersey or the barely significant country of El Salvador (invariably described as "tiny El Salvador") - for the Jewish People is, to me, a sign of His greatness, signaling as it does that He loves our species, mankind; that He wants us to be happy; and provides us with a defined objective that's practically achievable. Even though it drives the world insane - with "wise" commentators fulminating against the Jews' "illegal occupation" of "Arab territories" - it can somehow, still, with God's help, be practically realized.
Creating conditions where the Lord of all Creation can "walk" among His people in the Holy Land of Israel is the principal objective, politically, of the Torah - the principal principle. The idea is, obviously, that foreign peoples suffering from the myriad crazy pathologies of paganism - the endless cruelties to the weak, to women and children and animals; the oppressiveness; the meanness and all the unholy stupidity of Jew-hating Gentiles - shouldn't poison the one tiny land.
One of the oddest things about the Arab countries' - and now some of the most powerful non-Arab Muslim countries, like Iran and Turkey's - program, of declaring the Holy Land to be a sacred Muslim wakf, or trusteeship, is that it's utterly devoted to making Israel (that is, the successful re-establishment of the Jews in the Jewish Holy Land) fail. Because a successful Israel is and would be an affront to Islam. So, rather than trying to better the lives of the so-called Palestinians (the ridiculously misleading name of the phony nation of Arab squatters, whose problems could be solved in a week, with all the Arabs' vast wealth and empty lands), they actually try to poison the land, scheming to dry it out by diverting or poisoning its water, or blasting it with nuclear bombs. Let us remember, it wasn't so long ago, when Saddam Hussein sent missiles screaming into Israel from Iraq - missiles which were thought to carry poison gas or nuclear warheads, which would have destroyed the "Palestinians" too, the "Palestinians" got up on rooftops and cheered! Lest the Jews succeed - Allah forbid! - and the Land of Israel fulfill its sacred destiny as a genuinely exemplary place, a land of genius and decency, to help redeem the whole world.
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We tried to publish this map several months ago. We had problems with our Internet hosting. We changed carriers and modified the website... and that's been a messy process, too. Now we're beginning, I hope, to get things together, and we expect vastly better results and a wonderfully improved website... soon.
Thank you for your patience.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
September 2024, Elul 5784
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
April 2024 Vol. 17.7
We are the Party of Freedom....
The comedian Dennis Miller has claimed that the Arab world is like a football stadium and Israel like a book of matches on the 50-yard line. The Jews keep offering the Arabs, two, three, even twenty matches - "the two-state solution," "land for peace" - but the Arabs keep refusing. They don't want just a few matches. They want them all.
That’s no joke. Practically all the polling that's ever been done on the subject confirms it. Among so-called Palestinians, support for Hamas' October 7 pogrom, for instance, ranged from "extremely support" by about a third of respondents, to "strong support" by another third and "support with some reservations" (worried about future payback) by all but a few percent. (In no polling among the Arabs - not just "Palestinians" - outside Israel is there any kind of constituency for a "two-state solution.")
The huge crowds around the world chanting "Free Palestine!" think they are pro-freedom. "The Palestinians" are supposed to be the revolutionary "Stick it to the man!" party of liberty. Imagine! That the outrageously chutzpadik scheme cooked up by the Arabs' medieval-minded clerics and tyrants - its long con, its big scam, its multi-generational confidence game, jamming together a phony nation out of the wildly disparate non-Jewish herders, wanderers and squatters who'd ever passed through the Holy Land, calling them "Palestinian refugees"; barring them from permanently settling anywhere except in Jewish Israel, to create, forge, fatten, multiply, indoctrinate and arm a whole made-up nation just to sacrifice it - to crush Israel and annihilate Judaism, would win over so many!
You wonder how these folks could ignore the larger story - of Israel's struggle against persecution and European colonialism, British imperialism, Turkish and Arab despotism, the depredations of the Nazis and the Communists, to try to create an exemplary society in a neglected semi-desert region smaller than New Jersey. How could people support such a transparently artificial cause, fronted by such a murderous anti-Western "vile nation that is no nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21) as the so-called "Palestinians," as the Arabs' and Iranian clerics' Palestine scam?
Obviously, part of the problem is anti-Semitism. Not just the outlandish, Nazi-inspired propaganda that the Muslim countries pump out by the car-load - new sets of the Czarist-era "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," movies, music, plays, poems, kiddy shows, and streaming videos of Jews baking matzos with the blood of Gentile children, learned commentaries by talking heads proclaiming Jews and Judaism to be Satan's slaves - but, IMHO, more of an envious free-floating resentment of world Jewry.
Consider Israel's "mission civilisatrice," its "civilizing mission." The Jews' role on earth is to serve all the nations of mankind as an elder brother (Exodus 4:22), as witnesses to the reality of the Living Yah, the Creator and Master of all things (Isaiah 43:10), as His designated "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6). Alas, that project's insulting, unless one's personally on-board with it: the Jews' mission is to help fix others' deficiencies - or at least refine them somewhat - to elevate Gentiles so they're more like Jews. Is it any wonder that people thus regard the Jews as guilty unless proved innocent, thinking that they, the Jews, have a much too high opinion of themselves? (It calls to mind a quip that may or may not be from Winston Churchill, defining anti-Semitism as "hating the Jews more than necessary." Hating the Jews too much is creepy, in other words, but one must hate us somewhat.)
Then there's the injustice factor. Injustice makes people crazy. It “brings wild beasts into the world, filling it with violence" (Mishnah, Pirke Avot 5:12).
Our esteemed counselor Rabbi Katz always tells me to avoid politics but, frankly, to hell with that: when, following the Great Recession, not a single banker, rating agency, regulator or crooked money-man who'd helped cause the debacle went to jail - the Obama White House explaining that it couldn't focus on that kind of thing while it was busy trying to save the economy - millions of Americans decided that "the whole system's rigged!" and itched for anyone who'd "shake things up." That great failure helped shape America's politics. Similarly, the "Palestinians" and really all the Arab League's pro-Palestine chumps, their "useful idiots" and sympathizers, naturally perceive injustice in "Palestinians'" suffering. It's just that they lazily swallow the Arab and Iranian propaganda archetypes, the utter baloney of primitive native people oppressed by powerful Jewish interloping colonialists, concluding - despite the reality of the matter, that the Arab League simply determined to sacrifice their fellows, dashing them like firewood against the only nation on earth that's guaranteed to be eternal - that the people of Israel are mere strangers in the Land of Israel, tyrannical conquerors, racist occupiers of "Arab lands."
Time and Memory and History
On top of that there's the factor of memory, and story-telling, and perceptions of time and history. People of different cultures naturally process time and history with different mental structures. Jews have a more intimate relationship with ancient history and the prophet Abraham than most non-Jews would ever imagine, due to our prayer-life; Jews who pray walk in Abraham's footsteps every day. Religious Jews all live with visions of someone, like his grandson Jacob, our father "Israel," watching us over our shoulders - an old ancestor but a vivid character, worrying for his descendants and the cause that bears his name. To the Jews, history is continuity, part of a religious mindset, and our connection to the past in every generation is fundamental to our consciousness. Our current affairs, our daily activities, and the continuity of reality, are part of Israel's sacred history.
Christians don't have that. The 33-years of Jesus' life matter more than all of history put together. Muslim's don't either. The life of Muhammad, Islam's founder, and the years of his followers immediately after his death, matter more than anything. Whatever else ever happens is radically less-important. We could go on and on about the Arab and Qur'an-influenced peoples' lack of historicity, their vague time-sense, and the blasé constant lying, such a striking feature of the world of Islam (See "The Arab Mind" by Raphael Patai, 1983 rev’d. edition, pp. 65-72). Let’s just say, that while non-Jews' relative lack of an acute historical sense or adult regard for facts tends to handicap them in secular and business matters, vis-a-vis the Jews, it's also very frustrating for Jews, since weighty historical facts and truth have much less impact than they might.
Younger people, suspicious of "history written by dead white males," have a tendency, supposedly, of disregarding historical arguments involving facts that aren't already known to them. So, for instance, the millenia of Gentile persecution of the Jews generally come down to them foreshortened, with the entire history of the Jews and Israel in the world presented as Jews versus Nazis and the Holocaust. Which, alas, is not enough to help them recognize recurring historical patterns, nor even distinguish between such actual freedom-fighters as the defenders of Israel and the Jew-hating anti-Western phony revolutionaries created by Islam’s most-medieval minded clerics and the cynics of the Arab League.
Where to Go
If Patai's "The Arab Mind" is correct in its thesis that only transactional arguments based on personal advantage, honor and shame - as opposed to appeals to historical truths, ideals and moral principles - the only way to get the Arab peoples to stop polluting the world with ship-loads of racist, anti-Semitic hogwash, including the loony suite of "patriotic" lies that's Palestinianism, is: 1) to shame them: to convince them that decent people have gotten wise to their lies, and that it's past time for them to start treating the phony nation that they created as real human beings, not sacrificial objects - and let the “suffering refugees” settle finally in their own almost-empty countries; and 2) Point out that by attacking Israel they have been ruining themselves, stuffing billions of Arabs and Muslims full of stupid racist Jew-hate and sub-rational magic-thinking, and falling farther and farther behind Israel, and subjecting themselves to the Bible's special curse for they who oppress Israel, continuous civil wars ("I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; they shall be drunken with their own blood," Isaiah 49:26)
The Arab world generally applauded Hamas' October 7th pogrom, as did very many of the world's Muslims. Since then Israel's fierce response has the world's attention - even the attacks from Hamas' "Palestinian" ally Hezbollah, shooting rockets into Israel's northern cities, seem very secondary. The people of Gaza, steeped in the "Palestinian" cause, chose Hamas over the equally appalling Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Gaza became Hamastan, the apotheosis of Palestinian irredentism ("never to be appeased") and revanchism ("revenge"), more loaded with lethal, genocidal Jew-hate than Nazi Germany. (The Nazis didn't drill their youngest girls and boys to physically murder Jews.)
The Stakes
My worst fear is that, if the world doesn't get this right, how will the human race ever deal with problems of climate change and the movement of billions of people? How can the West deal with tidal waves of Muslim refugees, loaded full of Jew-hate? Who will help the refugees of the future, who will need to be resettled? UNRWA, the United Nations' agency for "Palestinians," started out 70-years ago with a couple of hundred thousand "Palestinians," and now has more than 5.5 million on its dole - with no one resettled! Gaza and the rest of the "Palestinian" centers are all huge obstetric centers/nurseries, with the world's highest live birthrates, subsidized by UNRWA and the Arabs.
If the world followed the UNRWA "model" with future refugees... then the hundreds of millions or billions of our fellow men who will surely need help due to coming climate change - and probably we too, if we can't get such stuff right - are doomed.
I'm deeply dismayed by the awful jurisprudence that went into some legal “thinkers’” pronouncement that the return of the Jews to Judea and Jerusalem is a war crime; that the Jews illegally "occupy" the old League of Nations' mandate lands, despite seizing them from no sovereign authority at all; capturing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in wars waged against the Jews by practically the whole Arab world - applying the Fourth Geneva Convention's so-called anti-Nazi law, forbidding murderous Nazi-like forcible population transfers, to declare the heartland of Israel "occupied" and a crime for a Jew to live in Judea. It's such a clear perversion of law! In fact - as a law never ever applied to anyone, except in this regard, prohibiting the long prophesied return of the people of Israel to the land of Israel - this "anti-Nazi law" exemplifies the principle that Palestinianism makes people stupid.
The Arabs' Anti-Jewish War is evil. How many times have the assembled Arab peoples with their armies or their designated sacrificial lambs, the "Palestinians," dashed themselves against Israel, to annihilate it? If they had won even once, there wouldn't be an Israel. They keep trying…Why won't they let up?
Causes
Yes, of course it starts with hate for Judaism. The Arabs' claim that the Jews - "so-called Israel," the Muslim clerics called us - weren't and couldn't be the true "first born" of Allah (because Allah had called the Arabs to be His special people instead of Israel). The Jews' exile from the Land of Israel was the proof that Allah had damned the Jews. So the Jews' return from exile, the beginning of the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures' prophecy, starting around the end of the last century, was intolerable to the Arabs' awful leaders' stupid sense-of-self.
If facts and history could convince anyone, the accusations against Israel and Judaism - Christianity's claims to be "the religion of love" by dishonestly suppressing the Torah's "love your neighbor," "love the stranger," and "love HaShem", while claiming Jesus, not the whole Jewish nation, as Deity's sacrificial offering to the nations....; and then Islam's claims that Muhammed's followers fulfill the role of Israel under Allah's heavens - are idiotic. But the Jews also have to recognize that today's messy situation couldn't have happened if we had done better.
It's not just the obvious things - treating Palestinianism with all its lies irresponsibly respectfully, letting the Arabs completely off the hook in accomodating their own brethren, related to them by language, religion, history, customs and blood; letting the world community set up a whole special agency to reinforce psychotically irredentist, revanchist, completely artificial national feelings in "Palestinians"'; even experimenting with co-governing fast-multiplying millions of people raised to hate and kill Jews... - but, at least partly, a failure of Jewish confidence.
Is there or isn't there a God over all the Earth? Are we or aren't we His witnesses? Do we or don't we represent El, HaShem, the Living Yah of Abraham, Isaac and Israel? Christianity and Islam - not to mention all the later gods of the nations - are bankrupt and absurd, but we, Israel, are still flailing around over how mankind (all the Noachites, or Noachides, or Noahides, noting that we even lack common, agreed-upon terms) should serve HaShem.
Conclusion
We're going to have a challenging next few months, as Israel tries to liquidate the enemy that unexpectedly hit us with that last pogrom - obviously, in retrospect, we should have expected it, because that is the whole point of Palestinianism - while the world mourns the suffering "martyrs" of Palestinianism. As I write, Israel's accused of deliberately starving Gaza's children, insisting that - regardless of Gazans' psycho commitment to "martyr" their loved ones and even themselves to stab or bomb any Jew, including any Jews who’re trying to help their children! - Israel feed and medicate and clothe and house them. They cry about their own people, "They have nowhere to go!" when Egypt and Jordan insist on it: the Arabs could easily take all the “Palestinian” children and adults into their vast countries, but they won't. They could provide medicine and food to their brethren without getting suicide-bombed - unlike the Jews! - but they don't.
“Palestinian” misery won't be ended by giving away what the world is demanding - the escape of lethal blood-drenched enemies, and the delivery of Israeli real estate, to help the Arabs win the next-coming war.
The only way the suffering of "Palestinians'" can be avenged is by holding the hate-filled clerics and tyrants of the Arab and Muslim worlds to account, recognizing what they're doing and requiring them to stop their shenanigans and stop inciting evil. They love the "Palestinians," whom they deliberately created, and armed, and incentivized, so much: let them take them, finally, into their embrace.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March 31, 2024
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
March 2024 Vol. 17.6
Einstein and Gaza... Agnostic Einstein stumbling upon traces of "the infinitely superior spirit" coursing through "the incomprehensible cosmos," venerating the "superior reasoning power" he discovers, but still falling prey to "Newtonian" errors... ironically, errors that Sir Isaac Newton himself, a disciple of Maimonides, avoided... Concerning my own stubbornly skeptical journey to conscious service to that Power... "Then We Had a War"- the information power of the Six-Day War and the wonderful educational value of the Arab world's disgraceful struggle to erase the one nation on earth that's guaranteed to be eternal... Amalek, the Anti-Semite - the evil cosmic force that's not all bad... Busting the Arabs' con; simple, obvious solutions to "these intractable problems"....
Albert Einstein tells you again and again in his writings how he - along with other sincere scientists, he says - keeps finding in the study of the cosmos, "behind all the discernible concatenations," intimations of "the infinitely superior spirit [emphasis added] that reveals itself,” he says, “in the little that we can comprehend of the knowable world."
“It's subtle,” he says, “intangible and inexplicable." “It evokes a deeply emotional conviction in the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe." (“The Ultimate Quotable Einstein,” Princeton, 2011, pp. 324-5).
He venerates this presence, he says. He calls it "cosmic religion," "a worship of the harmony and beauties of nature." In fact, he claims that it's already become "the common faith of many physicists." (ibid., p. 329). "I will call it the cosmic religious sense.” He says, "This is hard to make clear to those who don't experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order revealed in nature" (ibid., p. 330).
As a prophet wrote (Psalm 8:3), "When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established...."
In truth, Einstein suffered a ridiculously pro-forma early childhood Jewish education in Germany, so he ended up believing, to the end of his life, that "the Jewish God" was anthropomorphic, as he put it. That is, he imagined that "the Jewish God" is a figment constructed in the image of man, like a man-made idol. “People make their gods in their own image.”
That kind of nutty mischaracterization of Jewish belief – an uninformed de-limiting of all that's holy - is common with Jewish atheists. So is Einstein’s other big theological mistake: accepting the idea, supposedly based on Newtonian principles, of a rigid cause-and-effect universe ruled by an implacable "blind watchmaker." The idea is that a Deity or First Cause initiated all Creation but then, in doing so, legislated Himself out of a job. That is, the Creator, having set the Universe on its course, left Himself with nothing to do and no way of subsequently affecting, changing, or influencing anything at all. Ultimately, it’s another way of saying that God abandoned the world – that, practically, speaking, “there is no God.”
Oddly, Sir Isaac Newton himself, whose teachings helped inspire that nonsense, didn't believe anything of the kind. Newton’s library and papers have been available for study since 1936. John Maynard Keynes, the great economist and polymath, purchased and perused them. In a renowned lecture, delivered by his brother just a few months after his death, he recognized in Newton a disciple of rabbinic Judaism and, particularly, Maimonides (known as Rambam to religious Jews, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon - RMBM.) ("Newton, the Man." J.M. Keynes, London, 1946).
Newton read Maimonides in Latin but taught himself Hebrew to better know and please the Deity. As for Maimonides, the great 12th Century elucidator of Torah from Sinai, didn't just teach metaphysics but also… physics!
Maimonides instructs: All reality - this and any and every other universe - depends for existence on a great Guiding Intelligence. All is not one. One Creator unifies Creation and He alone sustains its every particle, force and atom, but the Creator and His Creation are not the same. All things and beings are dependent on Him but He is not dependent on them. His essence is completely unlike them. He Who is infinite is no more divisible than a geometric point. He has neither similtude nor peer. "To whom then will you liken Me, or shall I equal?" (Isaiah 40:25). Because He sustains everything, He knows everything - with no forgetting! As for favoring and sustaining the cosmos’ ineluctable natural laws, which He Himself devised and cherishes, He retains the capacity (as the study of quantum mechanics, even in Einstein's time, began to intimate) to alter at will the course of Creation and everything within it.
The fate of matter isn't written in stone; subatomic particles can change their orbits or gain or lose a proton, for instance, for, apparently, any reason; the causation of a sunspot, hurricane or tidal wave - or, say, the appearance of a parking place - depends on invisible, indeterminate forces and, basically, "only God knows what." God's will, in other words, is everything.
Clearly, Einstein made up his mind based on wrong information. Even the Einsteins can make mistakes! People get the facts wrong all the time. Only HaShem is omniscient.
I mention this because I, too, heir of passionately devout Jews, was an atheist, and mistaken. I had more Jewish education than Einstein did, as a baby-boomer kid in America, but "God" - the word "God," a relic of German paganism, is a little misleading; as I found out later, Hebrew's much better for conveying the spiritual nature of Deity - struck me as a figment, a phony, wishful idea, and the Bible's stories about Creation, describing things that no mortal could have witnessed, childish. That the Hebrews' Scriptures are the world's only Scriptures that become more convincing the more one gets into them doesn't matter much to a Hebrew who won’t take them seriously.
Then We Had a War
Until the Six Day War - the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 - I didn't feel much affection for the Jewish people. But, watching the palpably angry, over-stuffed Arab and Communist ambassadors to the United Nations on TV, vocally enabling the aggressors in the Arab armies' biggest-ever war to crush “the Zionist entity,” I saw when they abruptly got word that Israel, amazingly, was winning. And they suddenly all became pacifists, calling for an immediate armistice! It was literally jaw-dropping, and hilarious. l remember saying, "Being hated by such disgusting clowns for being Jewish can’t possibly be all bad!”
That war sensitized me to Jewish peoplehood. But I still considered the religion - and all religion - nonsense. I could see religion was historically important so it needed to be studied, but I still went around feeling that, as I’d say occasionally, "I don't have a religious bone in my body." Until, at 19, I read a piece on revolution.
Young people in the early 70's talked about revolution all the time. "The First Revolutionary," by Dr. Wilfried Daim, a Viennese psychiatrist and Catholic writer, was the first thing that I remember reading that treated the Bible as seriously as any other work of literature. It forever blew apart the lie, for me, of religion being "the opiate of the masses" (the words of another Jewishly-ignorant Jewish atheist, Karl Marx). It showed that the Exodus, even beyond being a model and inspiration for human liberation and revolutionary freedom movements ever since, is also the story of a wildly radical revolution, an almost unimaginably liberating upset in human society.
That piece, as moving as it was, would have fallen on sterile ground if it hadn't first been prepared by the spectacle, earlier, of the evil in the Arabs' and Communists' anti-Israel crusade. My religion today - which I regard as the greatest blessing, connecting me with my Maker while I'm still able to learn and serve Him - was made possible by the Arabs' crazy Jew-hate.
Even then, I wasn't a Torah-Jew. But the Arabs kept the war going, and the "Old Testament" prophecies, as I could see from my studies, are utterly unique. One always hears from academics that they were all created by committee - that Documentary Hypothesis, Biblical Critical stuff, about the Torah's origins. But then, if you approach them seriously, on their own terms, you encounter the surprising holiness of Torah and its prophecies. By then, as a young adult, I’d served on lots of boards and committees. I finally realized that I couldn't conceive of any human committee ever coming up with anything remotely like them.
Imagine a committee ruling, “[If you, Israel, fail to follow My instructions to you in the Land that I give you] I will punish you with a non-nation; I shall provoke you with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).
[If you, Israel, fail to rid the Land of Israel of co-claimants] "they shall be pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides and they shall vex you in the Land" (Numbers 33:55).
It was a spiritual education. Since 1967, watching generations of leaders and thought-leaders politicians pushing "land for peace," "two nations for two people," and the perennial "two-state solution [sic]" claptrap, against the explicit Torah prohibition, [You, Israel] "shall not make any covenant with [co-claimants of the Land of Israel]" nor try to divide it up (Exodus 23:32), and the dire promises, "or I shall to do to you what I had thought to do them" (Numbers 33:56), or "I will provoke [you] to anger with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21), impressed me and many others, Jews and Noachides, indelibly. (The ambiguous thundering pap of Nostradamus and all the other phony prophets, of all the world's religions and pseudo-religions that I've looked at, isn't remotely like it.) With time, and study, and great good-fortune in getting decent Torah-teachers, many of us, including me, became serious students of Torah and - we hope! - conscious servants of HaShem.
After October 7th, we've also got what looks increasingly like a study of the ongoing relationship, repeated throughout history, of Israel vis a vis much of the rest of humanity. A vast international conspiracy including Amalek, the jealous anti-Israel, and the Ishmaelite or Arab world, including Philistines and Lebanese, to "cut off" Israel "from being a nation," to erase even the memory of Israel's name! (Psalm 83). As we see from Hebrew Scripture, from history, and current affairs: the enemies of Israel – who are the enemies of all humanity – have energy and savagery, and numbers!
The Point of All This
The point I want to make here is a revelation based on my own personal spiritual trajectory. People who reject HaShem and the Torah - like Einstein did, like Karl Marx, like little moi, former young atheist - operate under false factual premises. So do the enemies of Israel, the "Palestinians" and their boosters, including all those peoples listed in Psalms 83. They've bought into the scam, the lie of Palestinianism – all about a human-constructed "vile nation that is no nation," that mysteriously can't be allowed to settle peacefully and permanently anywhere in the world except to annihilate Israel.
It's a ridiculous and more or less obviously transparent con; a giant and enormously cynical, cruel scam. Even the most well-meaning people who speak of "the two-state solution [sic]" - which, according to recent polling, at least 90% of Israel-adjacent "Palestinians" reject (they say they want one state, with no Jews) - are simply chumps for the scam, advancing the con. The whole point of it is to cripple and finally annihilate Israel by whittling it down. But the Arabs’ program is so transparent… and truth has a way of coming out - of emerging into the light.
If not for the Arabs' war against Israel, I wouldn't be here writing this today, nor - God forbid - be any kind of Torah-Jew. Amalek, the anti-Israel, the spirit of the Nazis and Hamas and Al-Qaeda and Fatah and Haman, is as evil as it gets, but Amalek, which is, after all, God's creation – a wonderous feature of the cosmos, ordained from the Beginning, even though its members need to make a completely free-will choice to enable it - serves a positive function, not just a horrid one.
Consider how Amalek must have heard story after story of how a mighty invisible God was toying with Egypt, a neighboring country, with plague after plague and fantastic manifestations of supernatural power. Even then, and even while the flower of Pharaoh's army was still rotting on the Red Sea's beaches, Amalek spied Israel rushing inland, the strongest people pushing ahead, while the weakest, the women with children, the aged and infirm - "the weaklings," Moses called them (Deuteronomy 25:18) - lagging behind (Exodus 17:8). Israel had just been wondering, idiotically, "Is HaShem with us or not?" (Exodus 17:7).
Amalek surely asked, What kind of people march through desert with no regard for their weakest members? And immediately determined: “Those people aren't that holy!" They must have thought: The gods made a mistake in choosing them. We are holier than they are. We are the chosen, and we’ll prove it!
That’s how it is with Amalek. The Nazis, for instance, saw the Jews divided over religion, and about returning to the Land of Israel, and vulnerable, and determined to destroy them, as supposed pretenders to God's favor; Hamas, similarly, saw the Jews divided, questioning themselves and their role under Heaven, over-confident in mere physical walls and fortifications, and attacked... It's a hallmark of Amalek, in all times - in every generation - to deliberately target the weakest Jews, the infants, the children, the women, in a world where armies normally attack only other armies.
It should be obvious that the only way to settle the supposedly impossibly "intractable problem" of Palestinianism is to reveal the Arab League's hoax to be the cynical, evil scam it is and to shame or force them into fixing the problem that they themselves created. If they want to be honored by civilized folk; if they want to be regarded as decent people, not murderous racists, murderers and misogynists; if they want to be regarded as sane, and capable; if they ever hope to grow their people past Jew-hate, they need to stop pumping themselves and the world full of stupid anti-Semitism, with all its Nazi trappings. And, obviously, they also need to start treating their own people decently: not as pawns, that is, with the doomed assigned destiny of furiously dashing themselves forever against the Jews - the world's only guaranteed-to-be eternal people! - but to settle them as full citizens in their own vastly underpopulated countries. To give them a shot at a decent life, having nothing to do with crushing the Jews.
It's not that hard a problem! America's Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, a major component of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, suggests itself as a model for fixing the Arabs' mess. Israel’s experience with what does and doesn’t work in settling millions of Jews in what used to be the barren Land of Israel - including all the needy refugees who came to Israel fleeing murderous hatred and persecution by the Arabs – could be valuable too. If little Israel could do that, so can the Arab League countries do it for their own.
Planet Earth could use the labor, wit, youth and talent of the “Palestinians,” turned to re-greening God’s Creation. And the world could use more truth. It’s amazing what problems caused by mistakes of fact and lies can be solved or ameliorated by the simple application of truth, and reality’s healing light.
Alas, after Hamas goes the way of Haman and Hitler's Nazis - may it happen speedily, in our time! - the envious, "holier than thou" spirit of Amalek is bound to persist on Earth until "Shiloh comes" (Genesis 49:10). That is, until Israel more fully realizes who and what it is, and stops needing the bloody goad of Amalek to bring its members devotedly to HaShem's fully conscious service.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March, 2024
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
February 2024 Vol.17.5
Cracking the Arabs' Palestine Scam....and more
January 2024 Vol. 17.4 Incontrovertible. Want incontrovertible, indisputable proof of an inhuman world-historical conspiracy against the re-establishment of the People of Israel in the Land of Israel? Check. The Arab countries' cruel, heedless malevolence: breathtaking. We explore solutions ("What Do We Do Now?"). Earth's fate depends on getting this right... Plus, an addendum, "People Have Asked," how to help Israel in crisis: some practical suggestions...
The Arab countries, and now Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia (non-Arab Muslim countries) crank out the crap daily, by the ton: recycled ridiculous Jew-hating absurdities, arguments and false facts, including preposterous re-assertions of the Nazis' 90-year old spewings from enemies of humanity like Julius Streicher (Der Stürmer) and Joseph Goebbels (Hitler's Minister of Propaganda), and from crackpot anti-Semites like Detroit's Henry Ford (The Dearborn Independent, "The International Jew"), to snow the world and blind it to what should be obvious:
With inhuman malevolence, cruelty and cynicism, the Arab League countries - the original 21-countries - have perpetrated a remarkable scam, a con, a confidence "game," upon mankind. They've conjured up a synthetic nation, an artificial ethnic group with fierce nationalist pretensions, from their own people, with a made-up past and a horrific future, to defraud the world by beguiling it with false facts, to rally it, to undermine Israel, challenge Israel face-to-face, and ultimately destroy Israel.
If you want Nazi propaganda, including sexy shots of leather-clad Nazis, find it readily throughout the Arab world. If you want concrete proof of what's going on here, in this plot against the world, just look at Egypt's and Jordan's immediate declarations, following the Hamas-staged October 7 (Simchat Torah, "Torah Joy," the ancient Hebrew holiday celebrating the Revelation of the Torah) pogrom, by Gaza's "Defenders of Al-Aksa" (the Muslim shrine that sits atop Solomon's Temple), which proves it:.
Israel prepares its military response. Everyone knows that Hamas' millions of civilian subjects in Gaza are going to need help - particularly, a place to flee to. No Muslim country offers to accept a single soul from Gaza as a refugee. Every Arab country bars all of them absolutely from their borders - Egypt, for instance, penning them in with steel and threatened violence - while both near neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and then the whole Arab world, collectively, adamantly insist that, whatever war threatens their precious brethren, the "Palestinians," they cannot be moved; that all Palestinians everywhere are solely Israel's problem; and that the only conceivable response to their problems, beyond feeding and arming them, is to give them the Jews' land, either carved off from Israel or simply completely eliminating Israel.
"Welcome to Egypt!" The Palestinian side of Egypt's Gaza border. Thanks to The New York Times (Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
"Palestinians stand at a border fence with Egypt in a tent camp set up on the Gaza side of the border." The New York Times, Thursday, January 25, 2024.
This has been going on for ages. The Arabs' "Nakba," Arabic for "Catastrophe," struck the Arabic-speaking peoples back in 1949, when the Arab League's alliance including the armies of Syria, Egypt, Jordan (then "Transjordan), and Lebanon, with support from virtually the whole of the Arab world, failed to wipe out Jewish Israel. (The Jews were supposed to be cowardly, the opposite of warlike; a pushover, easy to "drive into the sea.") The Arabs who heeded the League's call to evacuate, pending the promised complete elimination of the Jews, became the world's first "forever refugees." The great catastrophe, in this equation, isn't that the neighboring countries completely refused to absorb them, but that they didn't get what they wanted: the Jews dead or at least driven out of Israel, and the Jews' property for themselves.
Supposedly, the Nakba is Palestinianism's formative event. But the scam's real foundation was and is the collective determination of the Arabs' to sacrifice all these people, their supposedly precious brethren, including their descendants, to the original evil cause.
"Try and try again" is the essence of the con. Its formula for success: "persistence in hatefulness."
In this week's news we see more unwinding of the plot: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, called UNRWA, the only permanent United Nations agency devoted solely to the problems of one ethnic group, got caught recently: hundreds of its Gazan agents are Hamas! That is, beyond the UNRWA workers who merely sympathize with Hamas' awful goals, these UN employees belong to, serve, are paid by, and owe their primary duty of loyalty to Hamas.
Recognizing that the Arab League's managed so successfully to put its people on the UN's payroll, a New York Times writer insists, calling incidentally for abolishing the agency, what at this point seems like a truism:
"[The Palestinians] have been kept perpetual refugees as a means of delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will exercise what they believe is their "right of return," effectively through the elimination of the Jewish state." (Bret Stephens, "Abolish the U.N.'s Palestinian Refugee Agency," January 31, 2024)
Land-Love
"Nothing is as good now as it was then. The water [in "Palestine"] was so sweet and healthy that a dying man drank from the village spring, washed with it, and was healed on the spot," the "Palestinian" grand-mother said. "The houses were as big as palaces!" said her grand-daughter. "The land was wonderful, and the sky was always blue." [From a Detroit News review of mine of David Grossman's "The Yellow Wind" (3/27/88), about the manufactured "Palestinian dilemma," as he called it).
Over more than 70 years, UNRWA and the Arab League have worked to create a people whose feelings for the Land of Israel compete in intensity with the Jews'. (The Jews' love for their Holy Land is deeply entrenched in the religion, in the prayers and rituals and customs, over thousands of years. The Arabs lack anything like that, but they've been trying, with tons of published programing and teacher-training.) And we spoke before how, the Arab countries being the hopeless kinds of places they are, corrupt, the "cause of the Palestinians" seems like the freshest, truest, most self-sacrificing cause on earth (despite the Palestinians' leaders' caustic habit of skimming off billions in aid dollars to themselves). Meanwhile, in Gaza, the con, under Hamas, assisted by Iranian money-men and military trainers, has accomplished even more than Hitler's Nazis could: turning most of Gaza's able-bodied boys and men into wanna-be Jew-exterminating SS storm troops.
Chumps for Palestine
Rewarding this breathtakingly malevolent con with any measure of success is unthinkable. Especially when it's a scam that unfits human beings for survival, for the future and the challenges of future climate change.
More than 130,000 impoverished people a year have been trying to enter Europe. They're looking for work and a better shot at the good life, from the awful places - many of them in the Arab world - that they've left. The Arabs among them have been scam-infused. But Jew-hate unfits people for decent company. The magical, conspiracy-thinking, fact- and logic-denying nature of it makes Jew-haters bad neighbors. Europe can possibly be forgiven for trying to keep them out.
All the Arabs' countries, and the whole Muslim world, want development. But their own dirty con has infected them with pathologies. How are they going to fare in the world, devoted as they are to Nazi crap and all this nonsense? You don't have to buy into the Bible's Prosperity Gospel, that God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse the Jews (Genesis 12:3, Numbers 24:9), to believe that Jew-hate brings down trouble on the haters.
In the next 75-years, regardless of all the arrested development already resulting from this con, just about half a BILLION people are projected to lose their homes to rising seas. If we can't get the matter of a few million so-called Palestinians straight - when less than a month's worth of the Arab countries' windfall petro income would suffice to settle all of them - then we'll never be able to deal with 500-million genuine refugees.
The Arab-Israeli (or really Arab-Jewish) War is not intractable. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is phony and not in any way insoluble. We - the human race - need to learn from the lessons of the last 70-years and resolve to not let the malevolent, awful Jew-haters of the Arab League make us chumps for Palestine.
The Current Mess
Palestinianism makes people stupid. International law is not the farrago of badly reasoned group-think that people often claim it is. It's unearthly, for me, to hear supposedly estimable legal thinkers weigh in on "occupied Jerusalem" or "the illegally occupied West Bank." The Jews' dramatic, against-all-odds liberation of the old League of Nations Mandate for Palestine territory, smaller than New Jersey, which never belonged to any Arab entity, is no war crime! Zionism is nothing remotely like South African apartheid, ethno-nationalist imperialism, white racist colonialism, or Jewish supremacy masquerading as a legitimate liberation movement.
You can see this clearly in their works. Zionism makes the desert bloom and invents new technologies. Palestinianism hijacks planes and kidnaps innocents, and makes the world more dangerous.
Zionism is a legitimate liberation movement. Palestinianism is the opposite - the artificial creation of the Arabs' degenerate kings and sheiks and dictators, and plutocrats and fascist-minded ideologues.
Yes, it's pitiful watching young people who claim to worry about the environment cursing the one country on earth that plants more trees than it loses, very literally making the desert bloom, while they bless the petro-Arabs' cause and accuse the Jews of racism. They lack historical knowledge. They see what they think are freedom fighters in the Palestinians!
Israel, the land of the supposed-to-be cowardly Jews, is blamed for causing ruination to the civilians of Hamas-land, despite Hamas' constant war-crimes. Trying to recover the hostages that Hamas kidnapped and (if it hasn't already murdered them, God forbid) is holding, the world is struck by the havoc caused as the Jewish Army proceeds. It may help to note what value Israel puts on its own - whether they be foreign guest workers or visitors for pleasure, Arabs, Druze or Jews. For one common soldier, kidnapped by Hamas (Hamas ignoring all cease-fire agreements, as is its way), Israel turned more than 1,300 enemies over to Hamas. For all the horror involved in the loss of human life, that ratio - 1,300 to one - is something to keep in mind as the IDF strives to free the more than 100 hostages still in Hamas' clutches.
This current mess - watching normally smart people gassing idiotically about "the two-state solution" and "land for peace" and "why can't Israel just get along with its neighbors?" - invokes, for me, the shade of Mark Twain, beholding the follies of his age, then cursing "the damned human race." Watching college administrators and college students cheer for Hamas, when I'm thinking of how Palestinianism murdered our beloved Bobby Kennedy (Sirhan Sirhan considered him too "pro-Israel"), the innocent Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, 9/11's World Trade Center innocents... and....
Palestinianism is the one cause advocated collectively by ISIS, Yemen's Houthis, Iran's mullahs and its Revolutionary Guard, Islamic Jihad, all the countries of the Arab League and now all Muslim countries, and formerly by Al-Qaeda, Fatah, Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Soviet Russia. If the world can't see clearly enough to "judge them by their works"....
Thank God, the Bible - Hebrew Revelation - and the Torah give us hope. With hope we can accomplish anything. Without it, and the Bible's profound optimism, we'd be sunk.
Michael Dallen
Detroit
February 2024
2023
December 2023 Vol. 17.3
Crying 'War Crime' against the Children of Israel liberating the Land of Israel is so ridiculous; we're evidently living in a sacred time in the era of new Biblical Books. But Gentile philosophers have been thoroughly crazy, as you'll see in "Philosophers" and "Philosophers on Law" on Divine versus man-made law - and more ridiculous treatment by philosophers. "Milk and Meat" exemplifies one kind of divine law: "Expel the Aliens" (Number 33), which is a law with a clear rationale and obvious context. Discussing Amalek. "The Arab League Conspiracy" to knowingly sacrifice a whole people in the genuinely stupid cause of annihilating Israel. "From Time Immemorial," Palestinianism obscures the vivid fulfillment of remarkable prophecies. "Lies and More Lies" about Palestinianism. "The Arab League" explores the nature of the fraud and the Arabs' need to fix their own disaster. "After October Seventh," revealing the ridiculousness of the Two-State Solution Land-for-Peace ideas. If we wish the "Palestinians" well, help free them from their brothers' evil plot. "Solutions": evil won't succeed. Resettling the Jew-haters where they can make something of themselves and work and help make the world more livable will show mankind a way to successfully handle other migrations and mass movements of difficult people with unlovable cultures...
Crying 'war crime!' against the long-prophesized re-connection of the People of Israel to Judea, the Land of Israel... Calling Israel’s ages-old struggle to return, "white-settler imperialist colonialism"... and the land's liberation and hard-won modern revival, "ethno-colonialist white-racism," "illegal occupation," and even "genocide"....
You couldn't write this stuff.
We've gotta hand it to the nations of the Arab League and the other Jew-haters who've accomplished it.
We should definitely expect these things, which are so weird, to be recorded for all time as an extension of the Bible. The Holy Book will undoubtedly be supplemented in time to come - as with the late introduction to the canon of the Book of Esther, say - with spectacularly instructive fresh revelations. Possibly some of the earlier historical Biblical Books, like Chronicles and Judges, will be relegated to background-reading. So it follows that when we hear, "Nobody could believe" the wild ironies and preposterous absurdities of our days – just one stand-out item: ordinary people, unquestioningly confident in their own righteousness, justifying appalling barbaric attacks against ordinary Jews, as in the Nazis' time and nowadays - it's quite reasonable to expect it to end up Biblical, as canonized sacred history, in the ever-developing saga of Divine Providence, human free will, and the fate of Israel.
We certainly appear to live in such times. Future generations will study them and wonder!
Philosophers
In the context of absurd reactions to Israel and Torah, consider the subject of Philosophy: an outstanding mix of related nuttiness.
Some examples: Voltaire insisting that only Jews were descended from Adam while everybody else was "pre-Adamite," who should be separated from the Jews because of what he called "the horrible immorality of the Bible." Immanuel Kant, a central Enlightenment philosopher, declaring the Jews to be "a nation of cheaters," enslaved to purely material, amoral considerations, so utterly incapable of participating in an ethical society. Hegel calling the Jews "indissolubly bound up with the Land of Israel and inextricably connected to the God of Israel," and, thus it follows, utterly unfit for Christian society.
The towering German philosopher Martin Heidegger was literally a big fan of Hitler and a member of the Nazi Party. Arnold Toynbee, a supposedly great English “wise man” - my personal favorite, who reigned in my childhood, soon after the end of the Nazis' war against "the Jew" ("the anti-man," in Hitler's phrase) - decreed the Children of Israel to be mere "fossil people," who'd missed the boat as to Jesus and have been pointless ever since. (Presumably nagging data-points like Freud or Marx or Einstein, or Nazi Germany's crusade to utterly exterminate them, didn’t bother him.)
Philosophers on Law
In the same vein, modern philosophy makes a sharp distinction between man-made law and Torah, or Divine Law. The fundamental qualities of man-made law - apparently, the ancient Greeks first said this - are, supposedly, intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutably, or permanence. On the other hand, Divine Law, because it's grounded in Revelation, needn't be any of those things, philosophy teachers teach (they really teach this!) so it carries no - that is, zero - presumption of rationality, truth, universality, nor immutability. "Don't expect it to make any sense," in other words. Which suggests that Jewish people who try to fulfill these laws are blindly but stubbornly obedient to arbitrary, capricious, irrationality.
Modern philosophy is so nuts... This shouldn't be hard: Abraham, the father of the movement called Israel, confronts God, demanding, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?" (Genesis 18:25). Jews praise God: "You, HaShem our God, gave us the Torah of life and a love of kindness [chesed, "loving kindness"], righteousness, blessing, compassion, life and peace [shalom, "completeness," "perfection"] (Jewish prayerbook, Sim Shalom). "God's seal is truth" (Talmud, Shabbat 55a).
Man studies God's laws to gain insight into the thinking of their Author and the underlying nature of reality. An unjust Divine Law or an irrational, false, impermanent or vain one, is a contradiction in terms.
Indeed, one expects Divine Law to be MORE just, penetrating, truthful, universally applicable and permanent than the laws devised by mere human kings, courts or legislators. We study Divine Law to deepen our understanding of all existence.
But that's not the philosophers' take. They regard observant Jews more as sheep. "How could any rational person bother with a bunch of supposedly Heaven-made commandments, rules and instructions," professors ask, "that don't even purport to be reasonable, that date back to the Bronze Age?"
Let's quickly examine two examples of such laws. Both are black-letter Scripture, Moses' Laws from Sinai. Only one connects to any kind of explicit Scriptural rationale.
Milk and Meat
A basic rule of Torah-interpretation, an invariable principle, holds that the Written Torah contains no excess words, nor even a single surplus letter. Yet the Torah warns Israel no fewer than three times, "You shall not cook a kid [a suckling, a young goat, sheep or calf] in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19, 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21). So this is obviously a significant matter to God. Happily, we can look to the Oral Torah for greater understanding. Which teaches that it is unholy - it is unrighteous, and certainly insensitive - to eat meat cooked with the milk of any mother at all. In fact, the Rabbis teach, expanding on the Black-letter Torah's ban on cooking meat and milk together, Israel may not mix meat with milk in any manner, for any purpose (Talmud, Hullin 115b).
Obviously, milk means growth and life for the young of all the higher species. Milk is a symbol of motherhood. It represents the providential mechanism by which the higher creatures, including man, lovingly sustain their own kind - their weakest ones, their youngest.
So, thinking about this... Slipping cheese, made from a live mother's milk, onto meat - the dead flesh of a mother's child – is that an act of great good taste or elevated morality? Jews may kill and eat the clean (kosher) animals and may take their milk from them as well - milk coming from a clean source is itself clean - but does anyone need the added triumph of adding insult to their injuries by devouring both their life's milk together with their flesh? Plainly, non-Jews, in the exercise of human dominion over planet Earth, may do so - no Divine law forbids it - but, in this as in other matters, it seems, God holds His "people of priests" to a more refining standard.
The law against eating milk and meat together is called a "Chok," a "statute," in that the Law itself does not reveal its rationale - we don't know exactly why God legislated it. Does that - the lack of a stated rationale - make it vain, irrational, impermanent, or false?
Expel the Aliens
The Torah declares: "Speak unto the Children of Israel... "you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you...” the Torah commands. “And you shall drive out the inhabitants of the land and dwell therein, for unto you have I [God] given the land to possess it... But if you will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that you let remain of them be as pins in your eyes and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein you dwell. And it shall come to pass, that as I thought to do to them, so will I do unto you" (Numbers 33:51-56).
Later, in the Song of Moses, Ha'azinu (Moses’ amazing farewell Teaching), "Give ear, o ye heavens, and I will l speak...."), the great man predicts how God will respond if we fail to follow His Law. Channeling the LORD: "They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people [a lo-am, a nation that is no nation]; I will provoke them with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).
In Psalms we have the enemies of God and mankind taking "crafty counsel" against the Jews. The historical enemies of Israel, including Ishmaelites (Arabs), Amalekites and Philistines combine in a vast international conspiracy to "cut them off from being a nation," to erase even the "remembrance of the name of Israel" (Psalms 83:5).
Of course Amalek, the anti-Israel, is germane here. Amalek, history's vicious pogromist, the psychotically jealous Jew-hating spirit eternally inherent in the like of Nazis and Hamas, is related to Esau, Jacob's brother (Genesis 27), and Haman, the Hitler-figure in the Book of Esther. The Torah command to expel the enemy aliens obviously relates to the several Torah Commandments against Amalek (see Exodus 17:8; Deuteronomy 25:17-19).
Regarding those Biblical commandments, and their seeming harshness: the Black-letter Torah often come off as coldly severe but it's really more of a cream-puff. It's holy - and full of loopholes. In fact, this is not a bug but a feature, the inherent nature of a Law that must be studied, not just scanned - including legions of God-given logical exceptions to the laws, which soften them - which ensure, for instance, that no one ever gets executed for eating a shrimp cocktail. So, speaking of expelling enemy aliens, for instance, no Torah authority anywhere would ever require the expulsion of a decent law-abiding resident - even a child of the leader of Hamas! - who sincerely pledges his or her allegiance to Jewish Israel. [See Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Melachim 6:1]
With Divine law, unlike man-made law, it's impossible to know everything behind it - the laws' rationale, their complete reason for being. But clearly, part of the thrust of this Scripture is keeping the Children of Israel in the Land of Israel, and helping them succeed despite all Jew-hatred.
The Arab League Conspiracy
Anyone can read a Bible and the Arab world's intellectuals are no exception. Possibly they merely stumbled onto Palestinianism, but some of them certainly read Numbers 33, and liked it, and decided to make it come true. About the time that their countries drove out their ancient Jewish communities, shortly after the Holocaust, they came together and plotted. Israel’s Arab enemies determined to concentrate their own brethren in special camps as close as possible to Jewish Israel.
Who ever heard of "refugee camps" existing generation after generation? Instead of letting their supposedly beloved brethren settle in ANY of the 22 countries of the Arab League - collectively, more than 650 times larger than "Palestine" - as equal citizens, allowed to do things like work there, or own land there, they pushed them into camps: to count the days until the promised time for "driving the Jews into the sea."
People who had been Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, Jordanians and Turks, mostly, became "Palestinians." (Before that, the Jews in pre-state Israel were called Palestinians. The Romans had renamed Judea "Felix Palestina," Happy Palestine, after the Roman-Jews wars, after exiling all the Jews; the original Palestinians were the vile Philistines of the Bible. In Arabic, the Palestinians are Filistin, Philistines.)
The cruelty is breathtaking. With immense cynicism, defying the appalled advice of all the international refugee-resettlement experts, the Arab countries, advised and helped by other Jew-haters, invented a new nation - a people supposedly indigenous to the Holy Land! Not to help it to accomplish good deeds but, rather, to indoctrinate it, fatten it, multiply it and arm it, to throw it against Israel, to sacrifice it as their spear-tip for annihilating the Jewish state.
This Arab-Israeli War! It’s unique in history: never has there been a war like it! Look at ancient enemies, like France and Germany, China and Japan, Rome and Persia… never have countries combined together like this, to utterly annihilate a neighbor, denying the neighbor's very existence, boycotting it, attacking it, generation after generation, as the countries of the Arab League have done with Israel. The nearby "confrontation states," Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, initiated and lost multiple hot and horribly costly wars against Israel, but – even after all that - still train against Israel as the "main enemy." Now, in the last few decades, the world Shi'ite movement, which purports to be Islamic and dominates Iran and Yemen, keeps pledging to violently obliterate Israel. While Muslim Turkey talks all the time as if it wants to, along with Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
From Time Immemorial
How did the Arab "Palestinians" become so connected to a land as to peculiarly belong to it, supposedly, like its hills and lakes and mountains? How did people famous for "quietly slipping away" with their tents manage to attach themselves to this one particular place like coral? In fact, actually, many thousands of Muslims today consider this nuts.
Islam is pretty clear on the subject of the Land of Israel belonging to the Children of Israel, while denying any right in the Land to the Arabs. The "crafty counselors" of the Arab nations, in their hatred, didn't care that Islam's abhorrence of Israel is ridiculous. The Qur'an itself declares the Land of Israel to be the Land of Israel - of and for "the Children of Israel." So it's contrary to Islam to push Muslims into fighting Israel to keep Israel from succeeding in the Land of Israel.
The Holy Qur'an, as it's called, declares: "And We [Allah] said thereafter to the Children of Israel, 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land'" (Sura 17:104). The Prophet [Muhammed] himself says to them, "O, my people [the Jews], Enter the Holy Land, which Allah has assigned to you" (Sura 5:21).
From where does all this hate in our time come? Probably from dumb pridefulness and ego. After all, if the Torah is true, that means the Jews - the supposedly cowardly, cheating, animalistic, criminal, weak Jews, as the Qur'an tells the story - were and still are the special people of HaShem. Which means that they remain God's special "witnesses." Which means that the Arabs and Muslims aren't. Which also means, ultimately, that they've got profoundly wrong ideas about Allah and reality.
In creating the Palestinians, the Arab countries also obviously inflicted acute antisemitism on their people, and on their fellow Muslims. Presenting the "brave Palestinians" as the world's purest, truest suffering selfless warriors for Allah and Islam, the Arab world injected itself with passionate hatred of their enemies. Palestinianism is simply the photo-negative of Zionism. To be pro-Palestinian is not to desire the good welfare of the so-called Palestinians but, rather, success for them in their mission: the complete elimination of Israel.
What a lousy mission! What a lousy cause!
Lies and More Lies
Clearly, a principal theme of the Bible is the Land of Israel's unique connection to the People of Israel. It's also a feature of history - a fact that the belligerent lying narrative of the Arabs' is designed to obscure. After the ancient Bronze Age's Cana'anites, nobody but the Jews ever succeeded there.
Mark Twain, visiting Palestine a little before modern Zionism began bringing the Jews back in numbers, spoke of its dreary emptiness, it's out-of-the-world quality, asking, "Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?" (The Innocents Abroad, 1869). The Torah promises, in one of the most daring prophecies in the Bible, that the Land of Israel, with the Jews exiled, will remain mostly empty, a wilderness. "Your land shall desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy its sabbaths, as long as lies desolate, and you be in your enemies' land" (Leviticus 26:34). God will preserve it desolate will it awaits the Jews (Leviticus 26:43). It’s a spectacular historical truth and also a cosmic dynamic: whenever Israel is separated from the Holy Land, the Bible promises [right at the end of the Bible, closing out Chronicles], the Holy Land will remain untilled and barren, "enjoying its sabbaths" (2 Chronicles 36:21).
By the way, you'll notice when you see photos of "the Occupied West Bank," as it's called - Divinely liberated Judea and Samaria - the barrenness and emptiness of the rocky rolling hills. That's because the Arabs, and the Turks and Mongols and Egyptians and Kurds and Circassians and Romans before them never did very well there. But, after the Jews began coming back in numbers, the Arab population, partly from immigration, partly from lavishly subsidized "natural" increase, exploded. Yet the land outside their fast-growing cities, their palaces and their slums, remains mostly desolate, without the Jews.
The Arab League
Besides supplying their Philistine brethren with Jew-hating propaganda, weaponry, rocket tubes and rocket fuel, and enough food and aid to encourage the continuing population explosion, the 22 countries of the Arab League, with more than 650 times the land of Israel, ALL absolutely banned ALL of them from settling down with them as equal citizens with recognized human rights. Usually, they refuse to even let them work!
That's been the rule, generation after generation. They've all refused - as they accuse Israel of committing "genocide" against the Palestinians - to take them in. Cynically, cruelly, they simply keep insisting that the only place on earth where their brethren properly belong is Jewish Israel. To them, obviously, the name of the game is imposing their brethren on Israel. To defeat Israel according to the Bible's own published formula for defeating Israel!
After October Seventh
One good thing about theOctober 7th Simchas Torah pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, and the continuing rocket fire into Israeli population centers from Lebanon as well as Gaza: it proves that the so-called "two-state solution" is ridiculous.
Parenthetically, October 7th might also be said to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that Isaiah 53's "suffering servant of HaShem" is anybody but the People of Israel collectively, given the pogromists' crazed, specifically anti-Jewish viciousness, and the atrocious suffering inflicted. Who’s the inheritor of Esau’s wrath, of God's eternal war versus Amalek? Whom do the Nazis, the Arab terrorists, Communist tyrants, ISIS, Hamas, Iran, etc., hate more than they hate the Jews? Who can doubt that the Jews whom they so hate are the true Israel of Isaiah?
No sane person would ever hand over the highlands of the Holy Land to anybody who admires and praises pogromists. Who would seek to live near Hamas, nor anywhere close to anybody who even likes Hamas? But that, according to the evidence - including polls and mosque-sermons and man-in-the-casbah interviews, online commentary, newspaper commentary, etc. - is more than 80% of all adult Palestinians in the Middle East. More than a quarter express "extreme admiration" of Hamas' pogrom. So in the name of peace, for the good of the haters as well as the hated, nobody should allow Jews to live anywhere near such people. Which means the "two-state solution" isn't a solution but only a formula for endless violence. Which means that, in the name of peace, the Arab nations need to finally stop trying to annihilate Israel, and start taking care of their own. Not just by supplying them with weaponry and copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!
I admit that my main interest is the Jews, not the so-called Palestinians, but it should be obvious that being used as a sacrificial offering to destroy Jewish Israel is no path to success for them, either. If you wish them well, help them free themselves from the Arab nations’ evil plot.
Solutions
Usually when I mention getting the Arab countries to stop screwing over their own people in their shameful crusade to annihilate Israel, folks reply, "Ain't gonna happen." However, these folks probably aren't prophets and don't foresee the future prophetically.
Prophecy's hard. We remember when the Kaiser of Germany met Theodore Herzl, a father of Zionism: "Herr Herzel, for your plan [for a sovereign state for the Jews in their Holy Land] to succeed, no fewer than THREE empires [Russia’s, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkish empires] would have to die." That was in 1898. All three were gone by 1918.
The Arab nations’ plot can't be allowed to succeed. Decent people can't be expected to want to live anywhere near people of bad, vicious culture. A good definition of a bad culture is a Jew-hating culture. People who hate Jews make bad neighbors, because that sickness spreads and they will ultimately set themselves up as the enemies of all mankind.
The Arab countries have cynically fomented, cultivated, subsidized, broadcast and manufactured Jew-hate now over more than a century. You can't expect the Jews to solve that problem when they're the chief victims of it. Nor expect them to fulfill whatever legitimate (non-genocidal) aspirations that the Jew-haters may have. Making the Jewish people responsible for the happiness of Jew-haters is ridiculous. The Arab countries ginned up this mess on their own and the world can't let them impose the burden of their folly on Israel, nor on anyone but themselves.
We have good reason to hope. Relying on truth and other Torah values - above all, the fact that God made all men in His image - and the resilience and richness of planet Earth, mankind can save itself along with the Earth.
One thing we can expect in the future is mass movements of different peoples, in their millions, fleeing droughts and floods, tidal waves and climate change, earthquakes, wars, anarchy and oppression. If we can deal wisely with the so-called Palestinians we can deal wisely with all such challenges, particularly, what can be done with people whom no one wants?
We suggested before that the world can use the genius of Palestinians, their youth - they're one of the youngest populations on Earth - and energy and numbers, to help save the world, to restore life and fertility particularly to the vast waste places of the ridiculously underpopulated Arab countries, who've been cruelly trying to sacrifice them in their misbegotten war against Israel.
In a world where people need labor, young, healthy, versatile and honest workers, they, and the other peoples whom no one wants, should be allowed to redeem themselves through labor. Culture, we know, is malleable. It changes in the historical eye-blink of one or two generations. People can heal themselves.
The key to the human future will be dealing with this issue, the world's Jew-hating Arabs against the Jews. We mustn't reward the Arab countries for their evil. If we can crack open the Arab world's plot against the Jews it'll take us directly to the solutions for other misused, under-used, and currently unwanted people. In all things, if we can address the problems of the world and our fellow men honestly, as God wants, the future is bright.
Mankind needs truthfulness, fairness, compassion and wisdom for tackling the human population issues of the future. Sometimes people need to move - as the Jews moved from the Arabs' and other Muslim countries, and from Europe, and all over. The Southern and Western Asian and Central American and African peoples fleeing war, drought, bad government and anarchy needn't remain paupers. The world can afford them and the so-called Palestinians a never-ending supply of rewarding, productive, necessary work.
No people is completely immune from the historical imperative to need to move. Nobody has an absolute entitlement to occupy any portion of the planet! Change your place and change your mazal [your "stars," your fate or destiny] is ancient Jewish folk-wisdom but it seems appropriate in the circumstances. The so-called Palestinians need to change their mazal.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
December 5, 2023
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
November 2023 Vol. 17.2
"Palestinians Over God, International Law, and Eretz Israel. Israel becoming re-established in the Land of Israel, which seems to be prophecy fulfilled, is alleged to be, basically, a war crime, violating International Law. We analyze that here....
You know you’re dealing with powerful stuff: ancient prophecies about modern history and current affairs, stated and stated emphatically by the Jewish people and the Bible’s prophets over millenia, and then, mostly in modern times, transformed into action.
It didn’t have to go this way. For many, many centuries it seemed like it wouldn’t, the Jewish People coming back to the Land of Israel, Eretz Israel:
"I shall plant them upon their own land, and they shall be no more plucked up" (Amos 9:15)
"He that scattered Israel will gather and guard him as a shepherd his flock" (Jeremiah 31:9)
"All nations shall call you happy, for you shall be a delightsome land" (Malachi 3:12)
"He will assemble the dispersed of Israel" (Isaiah 11:12)
"the ransomed of the LORD shall return with singing to Zion" (Isaiah 35:10)....
These are nation-specific, unique, compelling prophecies, and we today aren’t just humbled and astonished but blessed to see them being fulfilled, spectacularly, in our time - in just the last few generations.
The Jews - particularly after the Holocaust - are back in Israel in numbers. Most of the world won't see it this way, but when you talk of Hebrews settling and improving the Land of Israel, building homes there, you're talking about something extremely unexpected, despite it being prophesized.
The return of the People of Israel to Israel is a profoundly remarkable and certainly at least arguably miraculous phenomenon, or sets of phenomena, "making the deserts bloom," astoundingly and against all expectations winning fierce wars, succeeding economically, creating a free society... This is something having all of the earmarks of something proceeding from Providence.
Opposing Providence is not smart. These are primary Biblical themes, from the very heart – the oldest and holiest parts - of the Bible. They are generally perceived as being indisputably sacred to Christians of every domination and - naturally - to Jews.
Even beyond that, any reasonably well-informed person and every believing (or even half-believing) Jew or Christian should be able to recognize that God, the Ultimate Power, or anyway, at least, Something Entirely Mysterious, has had a hand in making this happen.
It is, very evidently, His will - expressed clearly enough in Biblical prophecy, for sure, but also in the modern history of Israel and the modern-time "Wars of the Lord" (See Numbers 21:14, and Exodus 17:14)... of the countless battles fought, and in the astonishing flourishing of the Land - to convey complete dominion of the little Land of Israel to one people and one people only. It's not a huge land - it's just a sliver of Eurasia near Africa - but it's wholly given over, not to the Children of Ishmael, the Arab Nation, which claims it, and not to any other nation, either, only to God's "first-born son," ("Israel is My first-born son," Exodus 4:22), the Jewish People.
Leave it to the human race to screw it up
The basis for claiming that the People of Israel's return to the Land of Israel is a war crime - which is, at this writing, the prevailing opinion among informed and supposedly enlightened humankind in our time – is radically thinner, more shaky and insubstantial than any reasonable, dispassionate onlooker would guess.
The nations tried, after World War II, to codify a ban on doing what the Nazis did, involving forcible transfers, deportation and harsh resettlement of civilian populations. The Nazis did this sort of things particularly to Jews, of course, and this is a law - Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention “relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” dated August 12, 1949 - banning nations from doing what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Besides seeming a little like "closing the barn door after losing the horses," this statute, ironically, has never been applied at any time in any context - except ... against the Jews!
Worldwide, evil governments savagely uproot different populations, of "foreigners" or their own populations, banishing them, forcing them to relocate, killing, torturing, robbing and raping them - but Article 49 has only ever been invoked against ... guess who?
It should go without saying that the scholars and diplomats who devised this piece of legislation were highly literate men and women entirely familiar - Biblical literacy in Europe was nearly universal - with the Bible's myriad promises to Israel and man, that the Jews should and would be returning to the Holy Land, to reestablish Israel in the Land of Israel.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, even any atheists among those jurists probably felt averse to creating any more trouble for the Jewish people, as by preventing any re-establishment of Jewish life in any part of the Land of Israel that any other nation claimed. And it follows, and it's very evident, that they wrote the law carefully, deliberating over every word, to keep it from being perversely misused.
But just give folks a chance to mess up good things....
Whether the People of Israel have acquired tenure in the Land of Israel through inheritance, or Biblical decree, through purchase from human land-holders, through settling and improving abandoned wastelands, or – obviously - through conquest in desperate defensive wars, this is undisputed:
Not one inch of the land where Israel is sovereign, which used to be part of the Turkish Empire, was part of or belonged, legally, to any sovereign country!
Gaza wasn't Egypt. The heart of the Holy Land, Judea and Samaria, a/k/a "the West Bank" of the Jordan River (as the Jordanians named it), was occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan by force of arms but didn't legally belong to it. The Golan Heights in the north was never "internationally recognized" as being inherently Syrian.
This matters. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention was carefully written, to criminalize Nazi-like oppression, where a powerful country steals - expropriates - another country's territory. NONE of the real estate now being described as illegally occupied by Israel belonged to other countries!
Incidentally, this is a little off-point, but anyone with a globe or world map will recognize that we're not speaking here of vast territories.
The whole of "Green Line Israel" (Israel after the 1949 armistice), plus "the disputed territories," could fit within Lake Michigan, or the state of New Jersey, with room to spare. The Arab world is not land-poor! But as far as Israel's enemies are concerned, the whole of the Holy Land is "disputed territory," given the Jew-haters' oft-expressed ambition to "liberate" it all - that is, to "cleanse" it entirely of Jews - "from the river to the sea."
Most of the world, despite Article 49's clear wording, and plenty of expert jurists' emphatic declarations that Israel never "illegally occupied" anything following the 1967 Six Day War, firmly adheres to the profoundly asinine proposition that Article 49 applies to Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and Gaza, and that the presence of Jews in Jerusalem and Judea is a war crime.
“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies.” That’s it. That’s Article 4.
Written and designed to ban Nazi-style ethnic cleansing through government-compelled forcible population transfers, those few words have been absurdly re-interpreted to turn pious Jewish civilian families' hopeful purchasing of mortgages in the historic heartland of the Jewish People, to live Jewish lives there - into criminal violations of international law, or, basically, war crimes.
This is ridiculous. The popular catchphrase, heard every day on television, in newspapers and the internet, "illegally occupied Jewish settlements in the West Bank," is a grotesque caricature and mind-blowing perversion of law.
If Article 49 were ever applied to the settlement of the Americas as it is to the return of the people Israel to the land of Israel, it would damn all the white pioneers, immigrants and settlers as war criminals!
Against the plain Nazi-fighting intent of the framers of the law, obviously, later generations came up with a much more “woke,” “anti-colonialist” transformation of it.
This ridiculous result insults even the idea of man-made law! It puts in doubt man’s capacity to self-govern.
If Israel returning to Israel, against all the claims and obstacles and viciousness of all the myriad Jew-haters, constitutes colonialism, then we had all better re-think what is colonialism!
By Michael Dallen
First Covenant Foundation
Detroit
November 2, 2023
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
October 2023 Vol. 17.1
Middle East Game Plan - now we're engaged (again) in a great war... Specifically pertinent prophetic teachings, including "pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides". (Those who hate Israel needn't live in Israel.) Amalek, the anti-Israel... General Scriptural principles are particularly pertinent right now... Laws for Noachides... Noachides in the Land of Israel, legal standards, requirements, and violations. Godly Worshipfulness - Techniques. Follow-up from Last Month. Dialogue with Jewish people's Conservative and Reform movements... and more.
September 2023 - Vol. 16.5
Salvation Coming! Earth's future is bright! Getting real. To "recognize and know" the LORD is a discipline and a goal. Ad Astra, To the Stars. Noachides and the Sabbath. Noachides, dear to God. Sacred tools and techniques - let's hear from you. The world's birthday: Happy New Year! More
August 2023 - Vol. 16.4
Noachide Sabbath - Colloquy involving Dr. Robert Buxbaum, Rabbi Michael Katz, and Michael Dallen. Should a Noachide, a non-Jew, celebrate or keep a Sabbath (Shabbos)? If so, when, how, and why? A conversation...
The point of the warning here is, I think: nobody should use the religion of Israel against the God of Israel, to diminish His Name or the honor due Him. Nobody honors God by worshiping a non-god. A Noachide should either accept, philosophically, all the precepts of monotheism and become a conscious servant of HaShem or leave His Way entirely alone.
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Our Father, the merciful Father, Who acts mercifully, have mercy upon us, instill in our hearts to understand and elucidate, to listen, learn, teach, safeguard, perform and fulfill all the words of Your Torah’s teachings with love.” - Hebrew Prayerbook, morning prayer. First Covenant is a U.S. IRS 501(C)(3) educational foundation, a non-profit corporation. |
July 2023 - Vol. 16.3
Prosperity Gospel - Four different promises - absolute Divine promises of direct reward for good conduct - applying to everyone of every nation. Leviticus 18, "I AM THE LORD." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless them that bless you." Psalm 41, Proverbs 19, "THE LORD will deliver him..." (here's Prosperity Gospel with a bite!). Psalm 92, respecting God's surpassing mighty holiness. and more
June 2023 - Vol. 16.2
Eternal: the Seven Noachide Commandments. The "Justice" Commandment, dinim, the "pro-government" Commandment. No messiah/no "redemption" will diminish or end human obligations and privileges to establish, defend, maintain, and perfect good government. Don't expect the obliteration of politics - nor of deluded self-interest - or controversy in the future; don't expect the obliteration of work. Noachides and Jewish input regarding government. Book review: Dr. Robert Buxbaum reviews "Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions." The author is a self-described "agnostic heathen," calling monotheism "child abuse" and positing, instead of a Creator, an "inflation." The negative dogmatism of the modern academy. Finally, a short obituary of Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich died May 28, 2023. Late beloved scientist insisting that "a super-intelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos".... and more
March 2023 - Vol.16.1
If God Does Not Exist (If God does not exist, nothing matters. If God does exist, nothing else matters)
Proving the case for God .... Apocalypse: Nice future or weird Gentile fever dreams? ... God's Personality"... God's Fury ("Fury is not in Me") .... Ukraine... Messiah and the Future ... Amalek, the Anti-Israel, Haman and Hitler ... and more
2021
January/February - Vol. 15.3 Agents of the Revolution. "Servants of HaShem." This is how the Hebrew Revolution works. See the people: Amar'e Stoudemire, athlete in Israel, and - may they rest in peace, Dr. Andrew Brooks and Larry King... The Book of Joshua: "God chooses his servants from who's available." Joshua was a general and a Jewish George Washington, but not a Shakespearean or Lincoln, and certainly not a Moses. By the end of Joshua, you see that institutionalizing the Hebrew Revolution after Moses is going to be a slog.... "Next Issue, Judges": Israel usually skips over most of Scripture (you can see from this listing of what's read when), but there's priceless information for Noachides and Jews to learn from there... Stay tuned for some fresh lessons from Judges, Samuel, and Kings... And more
2020
December 2020 - Vol. 15.2
Saul Was a Jerk - King Saul was a Jerk. Rabbi Michael Katz doesn't like such talk, but Saul was a divine joke about Israel. The Lord's anointed, he did well for a while but hung on stubbornly and lawlessly past his time, committing awful crimes and bringing down a terrible military catastrophe on Israel. The prophet Samuel lectured Israel on the evils of monarchy - the Torah commands Israel to establish a good government, not tyranny - and his language in this Scripture helped spark America's Revolution. Israel picked a monarch who was a booby prize, George Washington without the substance, and Israel is still arguing about what deference is due... and more.
October 2020 - Vol. 15.1
Owns Everything? - Conversation: Deity is Knowable (Isaac Newton thought so. (Discussion with skeptical Noahides). Owns Everything? (God is the Ba'al, the Possessor?). 'Vanity' in the Book of Ecclesiastes. God's Eyes (What's the ancient liturgy getting at?). "Congregation of Peoples" from Isaac'sancient prophetic blessing, and More
September 2020 - Vol 14.12
Life After Death -What Happens When You Die? What Is the Essence of a Human Being? … Dust. Wind. Liquid. Nefesh. Sheol. Fire. Heaven. Neshama. Soul of Fire. God’s Coming Name. Kaddish… and More
August 2020 - Vol. 14.11
The Natural Condition of Mankind: extremely high level of God-consciousness. (Sixth and seventh Month of the Plague.) "Faith" is confidence in rational analysis. Pagan skeptics, philosophers, and clergy - and their remarkable evidentiary double standards brought to bear against overwhelming proofs - the more you learn, the more you know and the more you see - that HaShem, God, is Who He says He is... and more.
July 2020 Vol. 14.10
Fifth Month of the Plague... "Treating Scripture Like a Joke." Prophecies that seemed dubious, if not preposterous, when they were issued thousands of years ago: fulfilled! ... Little things that the ignorant and misled are missing... Coming into a genuinely conscious one-to-one relationship with God - GOD! - Himself ... Alas, what happens when someone "gets" it? When the seeker, bewildered by convincing proofs of God, turns to trusted clergy and philosophers? More
June 2020 Vol. 14.9
Sivan, 5780: Fourth Month of the Plague... Sivan, the Twins' Month - and the author... One Year Ago, Jack Saunders... "If Jews Were Any Good" - If Christians thought Jews were any good, they wouldn't be Christians... Punishments - criminal sentences and Nohide Law... Prophecy vs. Palestinianism, ancient promises, historical fulfillment, and mythic baloney... Prayers & Consciousness... The Prayer Word 'Selah,' what it teaches, how it works... and More
May 2020 Vol. 14.8
The Three Not-Quite Universal Laws... Beyond the Seven Laws we know about, are sorcery, emasculation, or mixing species in the Torah’s “forbidden mixture,” which are all forbidden by the Torah, so abhorrent that every nation should ban them? Some great Torah Sages believed so. But by studying their thinking, you see why it’s the Seven, and only the Seven, that has a claim on all humanity and more.
April 2020 Vol. 14.7
Gobsmacked - the Karma Quotient II, Gobsmacked by God... The Coronavirus really brings out the rule of God: you can all but see "the God that hides" in action. Hashgacha protis, Providence, manifests in the day-to-day how a conscious servant of God responds. "The world was created for me" - Talmud. God's humor and sense of irony: a necessary part of His holiness. God's wrath. The Master of a trillion galaxies a "creampuff"?...and More.
March 2020 Vol. 14.6
The Karma Quotient.... The Karma Quotient connects to the eternal Torah truth that God proclaimed three times at Sinai, "You shall not have any gods before Me." It's part of God's "Name." It's "Divine Communication at a Very High Level." "Even Moses May Have Puzzled Over This." "So, this is the Ratio." "God's Love." "Good, Good God." Prayer...and MORE
February 2020 Vol. 14.5
The Cool Kids..... Who are the Cool Kids, B'nei Noach or B'nei Israel - Jews or non-Jews? Getting with God using the same basic technique as George Washington and the prophet Abraham; the God Who made each one of us in his Image graciously invites our company. But does God's love for Israel mean He can't spare any love for any non-Jews? People's extraordinary, awful, blaspheming misconceptions of God's Name and refusal to learn from Jewish teachings. How do you get amongst the "cool kids" with the eternal holy power that manages creation? Universal Translator - help us with this new feature and MORE.
January 2020 Vol. 14.4
Who is Israel? News, back from Israel, Who is Israel? Black Hebrews. Universal translating button; helping out the Jewish Army; tankers’ memorial; Fathers of Zionism, Black racism and Black Hebrew Israelites; reflections on the Kokomo congregation… and MORE.
2019
December 2019 Vol. 14.3
FIXING RUSSIA. Moscow and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin’s Russia has become a capital of white nationalism. Militarizing what the Torah calls loshon hara, weaponizing modern communications to spew falsehood, defamation, and character assassination, Russia disgraces its new “gods” and values. Russia needs fixing. RESPONSE BY RABBI MICHAEL KATZ. PARIAHS. No wonder Muslim refugees and immigrants are feared. HONOR. “Be a blessing,” God commands Abraham and all of us to answer His call to live an extraordinary life of honor...more.
November 2019 Vol. 14.2
True Dwellings of the Holy (Vol. 14:2), Fleeting Temples, abounding holiness; Tower of Babel, love vs. punishment; The Kokomo Congregation, continued: Concerns, issues, expectations, and hope and… more.
October 2019 Vol. 14.1
Kokomo Congregation … Indiana congregation “gets” the rhyming word music in Holy Scripture and ancient liturgy – could this be a portent of the Messianic Age? They call themselves Jews. Who knows their spiritual flight path? How to get to success: the key to righteousness, from Micah 6:8. Images of Kokomo… and more.
September 2019 Vol. 13.13
“The Enemies” DEEP TEACHINGS: Whoever you are, Jew or non-Jew, attack others’ privilege, power, or command. Expect trouble. Challenge the old ways at all? Denounce caste? Expect hatred. Attack tribalism, racism, and xenophobia? Expect hatred. Blast cruelty? Injustice? Oppression? Expect hatred. Blast stinginess and meanness? Expect hatred. Lewdness? Expect hatred. Blast, the whole might-makes-right thing? Expect hatred. False ideas, ideals, gods, superstitions? Expect hatred… People will cheerfully join and become Nazis and Inquisitors against you…. Compare the status quo defending the New Testament with the radicalizing, revolutionary record of the “Old.” The Torah directs and energizes irresistible forces against immovable objects (“the old ways” of injustice and tyranny). History teaches: expect spectacular results – like the American and French Revolution and the Civil War (not to mention the Scientific Revolution)... When Gentiles take up the Old Testament, revolutions follow..... and more.
August 2019 Vol. 13.12
Hating Hebrews: Mysteries... Weird characteristics of anti-Semitism. No one cares about Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bernie Madoff any more than they credit the Jews for all the creative innovators, geniuses, and saints. Stalin and Henry Ford didn't let warm personal relationships with Jews detract from their fierce generalized Jew-hatred. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia... Martin Luther was a brilliant fascist-minded, counter-revolutionary foe of peasants and Torah-inspired freedom movements. Jews were commanded to incarnate the holy and decent revolutionary radical, liberating, egalitarian, eternally progressive precepts of the Torah.... and more.
July 2019 Vol. 13.11
Mighty Cosmic Forces. While the churches shrink, "Judaism," Israel's holy path and the Path of the Righteous Non-Jews, is the outlier. Indeed, it's constantly the outlier, the unique religious, moral, cosmological, cultural, spiritual, and sociological movement in history. People claim Judaism is as phony as the rest of them, but you can't call revelatory data points ridiculous. Mighty cosmic forces reveal themselves in the bundle of phenomena making up the great phenomenon called anti-Semitism... The amazing cosmic physics that brings blessing to HaShem and His causes and cursing to those who hate them... Where are the Philistines, Babylon, Assyria, Rome, Constantinople, Zoroastrians, Crusaders, Czars and Soviets? How well did the Nazis do for Germany? ... The Providential system is outlined and foreseen in a few clear words from ancient prophecy. George Orwell's insight. ... "From one new moon to the next," be ready for sudden progress.... more.
June 2019 Vol. 13.10
Jack E. Saunders, Aleinu Man (1948-2019). Articles: Godless vs. God-filled, two schools of thought - with some elements in common. The Aleinu prayer is a statement of faith and philosophy. What kind of man was Jack Saunders? Passover/Pesach and Pentecost/Shavuos. Saunders' pictures and more
May 2019 Vol. 13.9
Angels, Afterlives, Contraception, Anti-Semitism, and... New Book! Just out: "From Rehovoam [Solomon's son] to Nehemiah [building the Second Temple]"... Angels, or "messengers"... Afterlives (say 'No!' to ghosts)... Abortion and contraception... Anti-Semitism: leave it to Israel and Torah and God to attract enemies from both the left wing and the right wing... the recommended corrective... and more
April 2019 Vol. 13.8
CONFIRMING PROVIDENCE. God is the hero here, but it's through the works of His "firstborn" (Exodus 4:22) that He displays and confirms His reality, reliability, wisdom, and eternity - and how His plan is supposed to work. "Sabbath Enlightenment," the 25-hour mental hygiene break, is a good time to read. "Six Men": from Gone With the Wind to The Twilight Zone to ballet and modern art, to artificial intelligence, to local real estate development: they are all advertisements for God and clues that we ignore at our peril. Godly values are unbeatable values that have supercharged the Jews... and more.
March 2019 Vol. 13.7
PROVING PROVIDENCE. Proofs of God's reality and the power of Torah abound, but they're often more visible to Jews than to Noahides. "The principal Jewish sport is reading lists of names" - since Divine truths lie behind them. "The fewest of all peoples" (Deuteronomy 7:7) and the Torah of matriarchal descent. Who is really Israel? "Old Israel" v. "New Israel." Noahides invited to this great and holy cause... and more
February 2019 Vol. 13.6
SCRIPTURE: FIVE GREAT PRIZES. Five precious gems of Torah: "From My Altar," "Tooth for Tooth," "Doctors' Bills,” "Milk and Meat, and "How To...." This month, we focus on and celebrate five prize passages from the Revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai: Exodus 21:14, 19, and Exodus 21:24; Exodus 23:19, and Deuteronomy 12:21... and more
January 2019 Vol. 13.5
UNFOLDING DEUTERONOMY, CHAPTER 4. The mysterious, lovely Divine "statutes" are becoming clearer in our time. The Bible's moral laws - the Noahide laws - are all logical laws, versus the statutes, which 1) aren't logical laws and 2) don't command Noahides. But as science lights up the remarkable goodness of the statutes, the statutes increasingly inform and can potentially elevate both Noahide and Jew... Two very powerful ideas from Deut. 4... Divine Spirit & Aleinu... Divorce or Covenant? The "Suffering Servant of the Lord," Isaiah 53, et cetera... Beware of censoring free speech and thought. (What people call "hate speech" isn't necessarily so)... and More