Part Two of Two · Chaim Goldberg (for part one, click here)
A Car Door in Tennessee
In 2023, I finished another seminar with a Noahide community in Tennessee. The suitcase was in the trunk, the driver was waiting, and I already had one hand on the car door when Steve caught up with me. Whatever he had to say could not wait for an email.
“You have to understand," he said. “Where I come from, what a man professed and how he lived the next morning were two separate files. Nobody expected the one to obligate the other. And here, these three days, you taught us the connection: the thought, the Emuna, and the deed in practice, one piece. It turned my thinking upside down. And I want you to know, it is good. As hard as it is, it gives the soul rest. In the end I am one person, not a hypocrite. What I know shows up in what I do. Thank you for that."
I shook his hand and got into the car. Somewhere over the Atlantic I understood that Steve, at that car door, had handed me the second half of this article.
Where We Left Off
Last week I told of a virtual room where strangers from the ends of the earth put words, without knowing it, to the prayer of our holiest days: that all that has breath in its nostrils will come to know its Creator. We saw that the Rambam stretches the entire Mishneh Torah between two knowings, the knowing of one person at the gate of the book and the knowing of the whole world at its close, until the earth is full of the knowledge of Hashem, the World Creator, as the waters cover the sea. And we stopped at the hard question:
A knowing that fills the earth sounds sublime. Does it not float? What does it do on a gray Tuesday morning?
Steve answered before I did. The knowing does not float. It drives.
The Map and the Steering Wheel
There is a question I love to ask: what matters more on the road, the map or the steering wheel? The question itself is wrong. You do not choose; you drive. The knowing is the map, the direction, the aim. But a map on its own will not move you an inch. The actual steps, the practical way of life, are the steering wheel in your hands.
And the whole world has a steering wheel like this. The Seven Commandments: the baseline that every human being, from every nation, turns the wheel of his life by. Justice and fairness, basic human decency, reverence for a human life. These are not a “legal minimum." They are the paths that give lives their direction.
It is no accident that in Hebrew the word mitzva echoes tzavta, companionship: through the deeds the World Creator asked of us, we become partners, joined in companionship with the Giver of life. The purpose of the Hebrew nation is not to hand the world a beautiful idea about God. It is to hand the world a way of life, where the idea takes on flesh and blood every single morning. That is what Steve discovered, and what would not let him go until he caught me at the car door. An inner sense of direction, however refined, stays meaningless until it turns the wheel of plain human decency.
Not Rule. Knowing.
There is a mistake that is very easy to fall into: thinking that a nation's purpose means power. The Rambam heads it off outright. The sages and the prophets did not long for that time “so that they may rule over the whole world." The greatness of the Hebrew nation is not measured by what it conquers. It is measured by what it carries. This is the very language of the first covenant at Sinai:
And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
וְאַתֶּם תִּהְיוּ לִי מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ. (Shemot 19:6)
A priest, by his very definition, does not stand for himself. He stands for others. “A kingdom of priests" is a nation whose entire role is a relationship, a priesthood turned toward all of humanity. The Hebrew nation is not the destination. It is the vessel through which the destination reaches everyone. And a vessel, the more faithful it stays to its own shape, the more transparent it becomes to whatever it was made to hold.
Here is a fine point I fall in love with all over again every time. This purpose does not demand that the world change by magic or prove itself with a miracle. Take a plain slice of bread on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Bless it. Eat it slowly. What changed in the bread? Nothing. It is still bread. Yet the one who blessed it is lifted. There is no demand here that matter contort itself; a human being raises himself through the way he relates to the ordinary. So it is with the great goal too. Not force, not conquest, not some magical reversal of reality. A light that lifts the world exactly as it is. That is why the prophet describes the goal not as a hoarding of power but as illumination:
And I will make you a light unto the nations, to be My salvation to the ends of the earth.
וּנְתַתִּיךָ לְאוֹר גּוֹיִם, לִהְיוֹת יְשׁוּעָתִי עַד קְצֵה הָאָרֶץ. (Yeshayahu 49:6)
Light is never forced. It shines, and whoever sees it comes to it on his own. Now you understand why one of the people on last week’s screen described Israel as “a beacon that draws people in, to find their own inner light." He had no idea he was interpreting a prophet.
Not Information. The Saying of Life.
Still, we have to be precise about what this “knowing" is that the Hebrew nation carries, or we will picture it as a pile of facts about God. Here Rav Kook opens a deep window. When the tradition speaks of divine “thought," he teaches, it does not mean the intellect. It means Omer HaChayim, the saying of life:
The saying of life is what life itself says to us through the whole of its expressions.
אוֹמֶר הַחַיִּים הוּא מַה שֶּׁהַחַיִּים עַצְמָם אוֹמְרִים לָנוּ בְּמִכְלוֹל כָּל תּוֹפְעוֹתֵיהֶם. (Rav Kook, commentary on Hod HaKerach HaNora, chapter 1)
The way you read a child’s story from his whole behavior, not only from what he announces, so every person, every family, every nation has a saying of life. Emuna, in this language, is not something you have. It is what you are: the living relation of your very being to the Source of its life. That is why a person can testify that Emuna was inside him before he ever knew what to call it, like a child looking up at the night sky and simply knowing. It breathes in the silence, before the words. And now the seal of the prayer opens up. “And all that has breath in its nostrils shall declare."
The request is not that all creation memorize a formula. It is that the hidden saying of life inside every creature finally rises into voice. Even what is silent is saying something:
The heavens tell the glory of the Creator... there is no speech, and there are no words, their voice unheard. Yet their line goes out through all the earth.
הַשָּׁמַיִם מְסַפְּרִים כְּבוֹד אֵל... אֵין אֹמֶר וְאֵין דְּבָרִים, בְּלִי נִשְׁמָע קוֹלָם. בְּכָל הָאָרֶץ יָצָא קַוָּם. (Tehillim 19:2,5)
No speech, no words, and still everything is saying. What were the sentences that rose from the strangers on that screen, if not the saying of the nations beginning to climb into voice? And what was Steve’s sentence at the car door, “what I know shows up in what I do," if not a saying of life that finally found its words? This is the purpose of the Hebrew nation. To be the place where the silent saying of all creation becomes spoken out loud. Not to force knowing on anyone. To awaken the knowing that is already there, hidden, in every soul that breathes.
And this purpose opens one more thing for every human being: a direct line. The soul turns to its Source with no one in between, no one standing between it and the World Creator. Closeness and full responsibility are placed straight into the hands of the individual, without depending on anyone. The purpose of the Hebrew nation is not to be the world’s middleman to God. It is to announce that the access is wide open. “Hashem, the God of Israel, is King," and all who live will come to know Him, each in his own voice.
Emuna Goes Looking For a Body
And still, an Emuna that stays alone, just “me and the Creator," is incomplete. It goes looking for a body. Picture a beautifully tuned guitar floating in a vacuum. The strings are taut, the wood is perfect, and with no air to carry the sound, it is silent. The community is the air. That is exactly what a nation is: Emuna that found a body, one individual meeting another, a private direction becoming a shared way of life.
Steve did not stand at that car door alone. Behind him was a community that had learned those three days together, and it was inside that togetherness, not in some private flash of insight, that his thinking turned over. The Hebrew nation is not a collection of solitary individuals; it is Emuna that came to life inside one body. And here lives the whole world’s place in the purpose. Not as a spectator on the outside, but as someone invited into the structure where the knowing of the individual becomes whole in the knowing of humanity.
A Horizon, Not a Pocket
A few years ago I traveled with my family in the United States, a country that reminds you how big the world is. One day a long drive lay ahead of us: six children in the car, from age one to eighteen, spirits high. Until the navigation system began to announce, again and again, in its calm plastic voice: “Recalculating route." By the fourth time, the frustration in the back seats boiled over. More hours in the car? Enough already. But every journey to a destination holds surprises and demands flexibility; the main thing is to arrive safely. And a journey that set out four thousand years ago, with the father of the Hebrew nation, has needed more than one recalculation of route. The destination never changed.
One temptation is left to clear away, and it is dangerous precisely for the person who has already tasted something. Whoever hears about a great purpose might think he can “achieve" it, hold it like a finished possession. Rav Kook gives his warning right here:
"When the world falls into the error of thinking that the goal of Emuna is already in its hand, at that very moment it begins to turn away from it."
כְּשֶׁבָּא הָעוֹלָם לִידֵי טָעוּת, בְּמַה שֶׁחוֹשֵׁב שֶׁכְּבָר עָלְתָה בְּיָדוֹ הַמְּגַמָּה שֶׁל הָאֱמוּנָה, מִיָּד הוּא מַתְחִיל לָסוּר מִמֶּנָּה. (Rav Kook, Me’orot HaEmuna)
A horizon never fits in a pocket. The moment it seems to you that the aim is already in your hand, you begin to drift away from it. This is not a flaw in the purpose; it is the secret of its greatness. Precisely because it is without end, every single step toward it carries infinite worth. No generation ever “finishes" the purpose. Every generation receives it alive and adds its own step. And the climb toward the horizon never happens by abandoning the ground. It happens by walking on it, recalculations and all. “New every morning, abundant is Your Emuna" (Eicha 3:23).
And You. Where Do You Stand in This Picture?
You will stand in prayer on Rosh Hashanah and say the words I opened with last week: Reign over the entire world in Your glory. Millions of Jews will say them. My question is only whether, this year, we will hear what we are asking. On the day of judgment, when everything personal hangs in the balance, the Hebrew nation asks for the whole world. Not that the world becomes Israel; the prayer never asks that. It asks that every creature come to know the One who formed it, each in his own voice, in a way of life with its feet planted in the earth.
I have watched that prayer take on flesh and blood. In a virtual room ten years ago, where strangers said it in their own words without knowing. In the Baltics, where school principals told me they are planting it in the next generation. At a car door in Tennessee, where a man named Steve told me his life had finally become one piece. Today I meet the people this prayer prays for on six continents, in more than twenty languages, and their number grows every year.
Which leaves the question with us. A kingdom of priests, we saw, is not a title of honor. It is a job description. And from here, one sentence you can say in the first person, the way I say it: “The prayer of my holiest days is a prayer for the whole world. I am part of the nation that carries it, and I carry it in the way I live an ordinary Tuesday."
Rabbi Goldberg is the CEO of Brit Olam, Noahide World Center, Jerusalem, under the presidency of Rabbi Oury Cherki.
https://noahideworldcenter.org/
Primary sources: “Reign over the entire world," from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy · Bereshit 12:3; 14:13 · Bereshit Rabbah 42:8 · Shemot 19:6 · Tehillim 19 · Yeshayahu 11:9; 49:6 · Eicha 3:23 · Rambam, Yesodei HaTorah 1; Hilchot Melachim 12 · Rav Kook, Hod HaKerach HaNora chapter 1 and Me’orot HaEmuna. The writer is CEO of Brit Olam, World Noahide Center, Jerusalem, under the presidency of Rabbi Oury Cherki.