More than 2,700 years ago, the prophet Isaiah stood in Jerusalem and described a day when people from every corner of the earth would stream to the mountain of the Lord to learn His ways. This week, delegates from more than 20 countries, from Japan and India to Nigeria, Colombia and the United States, arrived in Jerusalem for the First International Congress of Noahides. There, on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple Mount, they gathered to sign a covenant affirming the God of Israel and naming Jerusalem as the place where “humanity converges with its Creator.”
Rabbi Tovia Singer, founder of Outreach Judaism and one of the most-watched Bible teachers on YouTube, addressed the Congress. In a video interview with this reporter, he described the gathering as the opening chapter of the geula (redemption) the prophets foretold.
“Whereas the going out of Egypt was about the deliverance of a single nation, the children of Israel, the Messianic Age is about the nations of the world coming to the God of Israel,” Rabbi Singer said.
For Rabbi Singer, the city itself is the proof. “This Noahide Congress was not held anywhere,” he said. “It wasn’t held in Far Rockaway or St. Louis. Rather, it was held in Jerusalem.” He quoted Isaiah:
And many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isaiah 2:3)
A Founding Charter and a Court in Jerusalem
The Congress opened on Monday at the Seven Arches Hotel and closes today, Friday, November 6. It is organized by Brit Olam, the Noahide World Center, a Jerusalem-based organization headed by Rabbi Oury Cherki, and carries the blessings of Israel’s Chief Rabbis and the support of ministers in the Israeli government.
The five-day program was built around concrete institutions. According to the organizers’ schedule, delegates spent Tuesday in workshops and walking through the City of David, and on Wednesday traveled to Shiloh, where the Mishkan (Tabernacle) stood for 369 years before the Temple was built in Jerusalem. On Thursday, the Congress founded the first International Beit Din (rabbinical court) for Noahide affairs, with Rabbi Cherki as its chief justice alongside three Jerusalem dayanim (judges) and six regional dayanim, one from each continent. The day closed with a gala dinner and a reception at Beit HaNasi, the official residence of the President of Israel.
The centerpiece was the signing of a Founding Charter, a joint declaration affirming “the covenant of the Prophets and Jerusalem as the sacred site where humanity converges with its Creator.” Working groups drafted a unified syllabus, a structure of regional councils, and programs for community building, education and family life. Delegates who wished to could make their personal declaration as Noahides before a beit din in Jerusalem.
“We are moving from scattered individuals to a covenantal structure, and that is the difference between a sentiment and a civilization,” Rabbi Cherki said ahead of the Congress.
Brit Olam CEO Rabbi Chaim Goldberg described the shift in plain terms. “This is the first time they are being received inside, not as guests, but as builders of the same structure,” he said. “You arrive as an individual; you leave as part of a people-wide structure that knows your name.”
A Noahide delegate from Texas, identified by the organizers only as Rod, called it “a unique opportunity to build the movement.”
“We Are Living in That Time”
Rabbi Singer brought the same message to the Congress floor. Addressing the delegates at the Seven Arches Hotel, he answered the pastors and preachers who tell him in interviews that a gathering like this should never have happened with a refrain: “I’ve got a Bible.”
He then walked the delegates through the prophecies spoken in Jerusalem itself. Isaiah saw the nations streaming to the city and beating their swords into plowshares. Jeremiah, who prophesied in Jerusalem for 41 years, foretold that the city would be called “The LORD is our righteousness.” Ezekiel saw the nations coming to know God when His sanctuary stands in Israel’s midst. Zephaniah promised that the nations would call on God in a safah berurah (pure language):
For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one consent. (Zephaniah 3:9)
“We are living in that time,” Rabbi Singer told the delegates.
He pointed to 27 wars raging around the world while “all eyes” are on Jerusalem, and quoted the prophet Samuel:
And also the Glory of Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man, that He should repent. (I Samuel 15:29)
He said he hoped the Vatican and Dallas Theological Seminary heard those words.
Rivers Running Uphill
What did Isaiah see that would drive non-Jews in Tokyo, Lagos and Bogotá to cross the world and bind themselves to the God of Israel?
Isaiah opens his vision of the end of days with an image that defies nature:
And it shall come to pass in the end of days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. (Isaiah 2:2)
The Hebrew is v’naharu elav kol hagoyim, “and all the nations shall flow unto it.” The verb comes from nahar, river. Water runs downhill, from the mountains to the sea. Isaiah describes the nations flowing upward, against every natural pull, toward a single mountain in Jerusalem. The force drawing them is the presence of God on that mountain.
Isaiah returns to the image in his vision of Jerusalem restored:
And nations shall walk at thy light, and kings at the brightness of thy rising. (Isaiah 60:3)
Rabbi Singer pointed to the prophet Zechariah, who supplies the human detail of that procession:
Thus saith the LORD of hosts: In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying: We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. (Zechariah 8:23)
The laws these nations are taking on, Rabbi Singer explained, predate Sinai and appear in the Book of Genesis itself. Cain was punished for murder before any written commandment forbade it. The generation of the Flood was destroyed for violence and robbery. When Abraham pleaded for Sodom, he was appealing to a standard of righteousness that already bound all mankind.
“Rabbis didn’t invent this,” Rabbi Singer said. “If I produce a shopping list, it doesn’t mean I invented eggs and bananas. I simply put it on the list. The list was always there.”
Indeed, the Seven Noahide laws are all learned from verses in Genesis:
1. Prohibition against murder – B’reshit / Genesis 4:23-24, 9:6
2. Prohibition against idolatry – B’reshit / Genesis 4:26
3. Prohibition against blasphemy – B’reshit / Genesis 4:26
4. Prohibition of sexual misconduct – B’reshit / Genesis 1:28, 4:22, 6:3, 6:12
5. Prohibition against failure to establish courts – B’reshit / Genesis 1:28, 9:6
6. Prohibition against theft – B’reshit / Genesis 6:11
7. Prohibition against eating live meat (e.g. tearing the limb off of a living animal and eating it) – B’reshit / Genesis 9:4
They are even referred to in the New Testament in the Book of acts 15:19.
A Step Up
Rabbi Singer described the Noahide path as a demanding spiritual test with a role of its own in bringing the redemption. Jews keep chukim (decrees beyond human reason) such as kashrut (the dietary laws), Shabbat and tefillin, he noted, and the only possible reason to keep them is that God commanded them. A Noahide faces a different test. Honesty in business and refraining from murder make sense to any decent person.
“The Noahide always has an exit door, which the Jew doesn’t possess,” he said. “When the person says, the reason I’m honest in business, the reason I’m not cruel to an animal, is not because I like the idea, but because the God of Israel commanded me, he is the next level up. And it’s because of the pious among the nations who come to the Jews at the end of days that Moshiach comes. We as Jews are facilitators. We really are a light to the nations.”
Before the delegates, Rabbi Singer called the Noahide path “the oldest religion in the world” and dismissed the notion that it is a “watered-down Judaism.” He told the Noahides in the room that he envies them, because choosing to obey a rational law as a divine command is an act of love toward God.
The Waters of Noah
Rabbi Singer pointed to a word that appears in only two narratives in the entire Hebrew Bible: teva, the word for Noah’s ark. The only other place it appears is in Exodus 2, where the infant Moses is placed in a basket on the Nile. “God is delivering the world through that covenant, and he’s delivering the children of Israel and the world through the Torah, through Moses, who was delivered as an infant in that teva,” Rabbi Singer said.
The Noahide covenant, sealed with the rainbow after the Flood, reappears in Isaiah’s promise to Israel at the end of days:
For this is as the waters of Noah unto Me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee. (Isaiah 54:9)
Rabbi Singer added that the Book of Job, which the Sages counted among the oldest books of the Bible, centers on a righteous Noahide. “He didn’t keep Shabbos. He didn’t keep Sukkot,” he said. “Call it whatever you want, but it is the oldest faith in the world.”
Where the PLO Was Born
The venue adds a layer Rabbi Singer called a Purim-style reversal, a connection he said he was revealing publicly for the first time.
The Seven Arches Hotel opened in March 1964 as the Hotel Jerusalem Intercontinental, built by the Jordanian government during its 19-year occupation of eastern Jerusalem. During those years, from 1948 to 1967, Jews were barred from the Old City and its synagogues were destroyed. An access road built by the Jordanian municipality cut through the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, destroying Jewish graves. Two months after the hotel opened, it hosted the first Palestinian National Council, which established the PLO on May 28, 1964.
“The people who built that place never dreamed that Jews and Noahides would be there,” Rabbi Singer said. “They had no idea that the messianic age would begin there. In fact, the whole purpose of the PLO was to destroy the messianic age, to destroy Jewish presence in Israel. And look what happened. God reversed it, just like on Purim.”
He noted that when the PLO was founded, Judea and Samaria were under Arab rule, and no one attempted to create a Palestinian state there. “What exactly did they want to liberate?” he asked. “The key is that they wanted to destroy all of Israel.”
He compared the hotel to the gallows Haman built for Mordecai, which became the instrument of Haman’s own end. “In the time of Purim, the Jews could have chalked up their good fortune to serendipity,” he said. “Mordecai overheard an assassination plot, got lucky. In fact, the word Purim means a lottery. And God’s name is not in the book. But the Jews were able to identify that the hand of God was all around them.”
He then turned the question to his viewers. “What you’re watching right now, in real time: a war between Israel and Persia, the restoration of the Jews to the land, Noahides saying, I choose the God of Israel above every other. Are you willing to now say that all these events are not serendipity, but rather are the hand of God? If you are, then bend your knee only to the God of Israel, and only swear in his name, fulfilling Isaiah 45.”
By Myself have I sworn, the word is gone forth from My mouth in righteousness, and shall not come back, that unto Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. (Isaiah 45:23)
Why the Backlash
The Congress has drawn a wave of hostility online, much of it from figures on the American right. Last month, Tucker Carlson, appearing on Jimmy Dore’s show, compared the Noahide laws to Sharia and suggested they posed a threat to Christians. Ben Shapiro called the claim “psychotic,” and Candace Owens responded that “Tucker is telling the truth.”
Rabbi Singer said the intensity of the reaction is itself the evidence of what is at stake. “You could put together some sort of Protestant conference in Houston, have a hundred thousand people filling a stadium, and no one would sneeze,” he said. “Why is it that people from around the world coming to Jerusalem, to a relatively not such a big hotel, everybody goes, wait, we have to stop this?”
“They could sniff this out,” he said. “Those who are the enemies of God, they understand that we’re very close now. We have an appointment with destiny.” He identified the opposition with Edom, which in classical Jewish sources represents the institutional power that stands against the God of Israel.
Rabbi Singer noted that the early Christian community resolved the question of Gentile obligations in Acts 15 with requirements drawn from the same universal laws, a passage he said Carlson, raised Episcopalian, should know. “The people who are opposing the Noahide movement, they’re bad faith actors or ignoramuses, and that’s a really bad combination,” he said. “Either he’s a bad faith actor or an ignoramus or both.”
Out of Zion
Isaiah saw the nations flowing uphill to Jerusalem like rivers reversing course. This week they arrived from six continents, climbed the Mount of Olives, and gathered in a ballroom built by a regime that barred Jews from their holiest city, the same room where the PLO was born. There, within sight of the Temple Mount, they came to sign a charter naming Jerusalem as the place where mankind meets its Creator.
“It’s a promise that God made, and it’s a redemption of the world, and they want to do everything possible to prevent it,” Rabbi Singer said. “But you cannot stop the God of Israel, because He’s our eternal rock. He is our only Savior.”
Watch the full interview with Rabbi Tovia Singer on YouTube.