Covenant Connection

Volume 19.2

February2026/Adar 5786

Ever Think About Converting?

Our friend Jack Saunders (1948-2015), late of Cleveland, Tennessee, was a professional soldier, then a Baptist pastor. After years of study, he renounced Christianity, becoming a devout fearer-follower-lover of the God of Abraham and a serious Noachide scholar. He helped me write Rainbow Covenant. He was enormously proud of it and he promoted it constantly.

Prospective Noachides from all over often phoned Jack – he was wonderfully widely appreciated… in a town loaded with Christian pastors, they called him “The Preacher.” He relished the stories that people told him. One of his favorites, from a couple years before he died, came from an active-duty Army officer who’d got a copy of Rainbow Covenant:

Prospective Noachides from all over often phoned Jack – he was wonderfully widely appreciated… in a town loaded with Christian pastors, they called him “The Preacher.” He relished the stories that people told him. One of his favorites, from a couple years before he died, came from an active-duty Army officer who’d got a copy of Rainbow Covenant:

People begin breaking through the defamatory nonsense masking the truth and majesty of Hebrew Scripture and the Jewish cause… and the first thing they think about is enlisting in the cause. Good for them! Good for you! Welcome to the Way of the God of Abraham!

This is so holy … we wish you all the best. But we know, if you’re not already Jewish, trying to become Jewish is one of the last things you should do. Anyone who knows anything about Judaism knows that.

Yes, of course: a non-Jew, a Noachide – every person of every race and nation, all the children of Noach - should commit to loving and serving God, the Living God, HaShem.

How does one serve HaShem? By loving Him, which means respecting Him, by studying and heeding His very publicly expressed Will as diligently as possible; trying to do yourself what He’s told the human race what He loves, values, and wants us to do – and maybe even leading others that way.

If you seriously read the Bible – the Jewish Bible, not the Gentiles’ “New Testament” – the course of service isn’t hard to ascertain.

It means blessing God, not just in words and thought but by following the example of Abraham and doing what He – God! - wants.

It means blessing the Jews. And mankind, and all Creation.

Lots of people don’t know this: it means fulfilling the Seven Commandments of the Universal God-given Law – not just by trying to avoid crime, but doing the opposite of the heinous acts the Seven Commandments prohibit (saving life, not just avoiding murder; doing charity, not just avoiding thievery….)

What it certainly does not mean, except in extremely unusual cases, is trying

to become a Jew oneself.

For a Noachide, like Jack, that would have meant serious separation from his own people,

his own family, and from their customs and their fate (and even their language, to some extent) to join a different people.

Jack was a family man with intense loving attachments to his dearest and nearest. But he

also knew that God – the God of Abraham, and Moses, and all the Hebrew prophets – is

greater than all His Creation, and infinitely more holy, and infinitely more deserving of love, loyalty, and dedicated affection. Jack loved God so passionately, I believe, that he would have sacrificed all personal and family ties, and more – except that to him the thing that mattered most was service.

“I can do more for HaShem, for Torah, and for the Jews as a Noachide, as a

practicing, observant trying-to-be a good non-Jew, than as a Jew. I can do more for

Israel, and for my country, and probably for the world, as a Noachide, than I could as a Noachide trying to be Jewish," he said.

Blessing the Jews

"I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curses thee will I curse, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

Genesis 12:3

So how does one bless Israel?

It’s not always easy, as Jack learned. “Israel doesn’t know what it is. The Jews, largely, don’t know what they have,” he’d say.

It’s true.

“So, I was reading it… I was very moved. I called to my wife. ‘Honey, have you ever thought about converting?’”

“She said, 'Converting? Converting to what?’“'Judaism,' I said."

“NO!”

We Laughed

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
April 2026
Nisan 5786

United States of America