Rabbi Chaim Goldberg is the CEO of Brit Olam, Noahide World Center, Jerusalem, under the presidency of Rabbi Oury Cherki. https://noahideworldcenter.org/
Part One of Two ·
One Virtual Room, Voices From Every Corner of the Earth
About ten years ago I sat in a meeting I have never managed to forget.
It began with a workshop here in Israel, run by Tim Kelley, built around one enormous question: how does a person find the single purpose that he alone was created to carry? Tim and I grew close, and some time later he invited me to something rare. This time it was online. People from every corner of the earth, religious and secular, looked into one another’s faces on a screen, gathered around a single question. Not a question about me. Not about America, not about India. They had come to put words to the purpose of Israel.
I sat in front of my screen and listened. Then, one sentence after another, from the mouths of people who had never once opened a Chumash, the same thing began to rise.
“Israel is a penetrating light through the darkness of lost love." “The sacred heart of humanity." “Israel’s blessing is to transform pain and fear into love and forgiveness." “Its mission is to transform the human spirit and bring an end to the pain carried from ages past."
For a moment I did not know if I was about to cry. These strangers, with no Torah and no shared tradition between them, were feeling their way through the dark, and they landed, almost word for word, on the very thing my people have been praying for thousands of years, on its holiest days of all. They did not know they were quoting a prayer. I knew. I left that virtual room shaken, and for days I could not free myself from what I had heard.
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, on the days when you would expect a nation to turn inward and plead for its own survival, the Hebrew people open their mouths and ask for something else entirely:
Reign over the entire world in Your glory, be exalted over all the earth in Your splendor, and everything made shall know that You made it, and every creature shall understand that You formed it, and all that has breath in its nostrils shall declare: Hashem, the God of Israel, is King, and His kingship rules over all.
מְלֹךְ עַל כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻלֹּו בִּכְבוֹדֶךָ, וְהִנָּשֵׂא עַל כָּל הָאָרֶץ בִּיקָרֶךָ, וְהוֹפַע בַּהֲדַר גְּאוֹן עֻזֶּךָ עַל כָּל יוֹשְׁבֵי תֵבֵל אַרְצֶךָ. וְיֵדַע כָּל פָּעוּל כִּי אַתָּה פְעַלְתָּו, וְיָבִין כָּל יְצוּר כִּי אַתָּה יְצַרְתָּו, וְיֹאמַר כֹל אֲשֶׁר נְשָׁמָה בְּאַפֹּו: ה' אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מֶלֶךְ, וּמַלְכוּתוֹ בַּכֹּל מָשָׁלָה.
From the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy
Listen to the wording. “Everything made." “All that has breath in its nostrils." Nothing less than the whole world. And at the peak it does not say “Hashem our God." It says “Hashem, the God of Israel, is King," that all who live will come to know one kingship. In that virtual room I heard the request come back to me from the outside, from people who had never heard it once. That is what I want to lay open here, over these two weeks: the purpose those strangers were reaching toward, the purpose the whole existence of the Hebrew nation is built upon.
The Name Itself: The One Who Stands on the Other Side
Start with the name. Avraham, the first, is not called “the believer" or “the righteous one." He is called HaIvri, the Hebrew:
And the refugee came, and told Avram the Hebrew.
וַיָּבֹא הַפָּלִיט, וַיַּגֵּד לְאַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי. (Bereshit 14:13)
Our Sages heard in that word not a family lineage but a stance:
Rabbi Yehuda says: the whole world stood on one side, and he stood on the other side.
רַבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר: כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלֹּו מֵעֵבֶר אֶחָד, וְהוּא מֵעֵבֶר אֶחָד. (Bereshit Rabbah 42:8)
An Ivri is the one who stands on the other side. Not in order to cut himself off from the world and leave it to its own devices; the exact opposite. Sometimes you have to stand alone in order to hold something the world cannot yet hold on its own. The separateness is never the goal. It is the vessel.
I learned what that stance costs, and what it pays, in an airport at two in the morning.
Riga, 2018. We had just finished three days of a seminar in the Baltic states. I was there as a school principal, teaching education to a hall of education professors, school principals, and government officials, and I was there wearing a second hat as well, as a man who teaches the Noahide idea: a covenant that binds all humanity together, and the role the nation of Israel carries within it.
Now we were through security, the terminal nearly empty, and we sat down over a cup of coffee. My colleague, a man who had accompanied Shimon Peres for five years to dozens of countries around the world, suddenly opened up. “All those years," he said, “I believed our job was to take the values of the enlightened world and plant them in young Israel. And you surprise me every time. For three days you stood there explaining the values of the nation of Israel, and the professors, the principals, the government people drank your words with thirst. For me everything is upside down. They are eager to hear from us."
I sat there with my coffee and heard the midrash breathing behind his words. The whole world on one side, and he on the other side. It is not easy to stand alone before distinguished, impressive audiences, or in foreign parliaments, and lay out the Hebrew moral vision with a straight back. And this was not my first time in those halls. Principals who knew me from earlier seminars had told me: “We may be too old to become Noahides ourselves, but the next generation will be. We are planting in them the ideas you bring."
I argued with them, of course. There is no such thing as too old; as long as a person is alive, he can change and add good to the world. But their sentence stayed with me, because it told me that standing alone was doing its work. Avraham stands on the other side so that someone will guard one truth until the hour is ripe for it to spread to everyone. And already in the very first words spoken to him, it is said outright:
And through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ כֹל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה. (Bereshit 12:3)
Identity and purpose are one thing here. To be a Hebrew means to be turned toward “all the families of the earth" from the very first moment. The people on my screen did not know this verse. They felt it. And the principals in the Baltics, planting it in their students, felt it too.
What Actually Has to Reach the World
Fine. But what exactly is meant to pass through this nation into all of humanity? Here I love to open the great book and point at something almost everyone walks right past. The Rambam opens the Mishneh Torah, a thousand chapters of law, not with a deed to perform but with knowing:
"The foundation of foundations and the pillar of all wisdoms is to know that there is a First Being, who brings every existing thing into being."
יְסוֹד הַיְסוֹדוֹת וְעַמּוּד הַחָכְמוֹת, לֵידַע שֶׁיֵּשׁ שָׁם מָצוּי רִאשׁוֹן, וְהוּא מַמְצִיא כָּל נִמְצָא. Rambam, Yesodei HaTorah 1:1
Look at the verb. Not “to believe that." To know. And look at what is missing. The Rambam brings as his source “I am Hashem your God," and stops. He does not add the rest of the verse, “who took you out of the land of Egypt." At the very gate of the book of the nation of Israel, the foundation of foundations is phrased in language every human being alive can stand inside, before the private story of any one people. This knowing is not the property of Israel alone. It is the doorstep of every human being.
How does that same book end, a thousand chapters later? Not with victory, not with power, but with the same verb, opened now to the whole world:
"In that time there will be no hunger and no war, no envy and no rivalry... and the occupation of the entire world will be solely to know Hashem... as it says: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Hashem, as the waters cover the sea."
וּבְאוֹתוֹ הַזְּמַן לֹא יִהְיֶה שָׁם לֹא רָעָב וְלֹא מִלְחָמָה, וְלֹא קִנְאָה וְתַחֲרוּת... וְלֹא יִהְיֶה עֵסֶק כָּל הָעוֹלָם אֶלָּא לָדַעַת אֶת ה' בִּלְבַד... שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: כִּי מָלְאָה הָאָרֶץ דֵּעָה אֶת ה', כַּמַּיִם לַיָּם מְכַסִּים. (Rambam, Hilchot Melachim 12, on Yeshayahu 11:9)
The whole book is stretched between two verbs: knowing a single person, and knowing the entire world. That is exactly the space my nation lives in. It is the people stretched between the two, carrying the knowing of the individual and aiming it toward the knowing of all humankind. Look at the closing image. “As the waters cover the sea." Not a drop that gets handed over. A sea that covers everything.
Where the Real Question Begins
And precisely here I have to stop, because this is where the real question begins. “To know Hashem," the World Creator, can start to sound like something that floats: a lofty state of mind, beautiful and useless, with no grip on the ground. If the purpose of my nation is to fill the earth with knowing, what does that knowing look like on a completely ordinary Tuesday morning, in a kitchen, over a plain slice of bread?
What do the Seven Commandments, given to every human being on earth, have to do with a map and a steering wheel? And what did a man named Steve, who caught me at a car door in Tennessee seconds before I left for the airport, understand about all of this in three days, something that took me years to put into words?
That is exactly where we will begin in my next article, part II.
The writer is the CEO of Brit Olam, Noahide World Center, Jerusalem, under the presidency of Rabbi Oury Cherki. https://noahideworldcenter.org/