Covenant Connection

Volume 19.3

April 2026/Nisan 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.

___

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

Visit our Newsletter archives for more.

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
April 2026
Nisan 5786

United States of America