Hi! We hope you like our latest newsletter. You'll see that we've got a new format - and also a new name! We mean to be getting newsletters off to you more often and more regularly. How often? We can't say yet. Please be patient. Remember that it took us this long to get just to this point.

You may not be aware of the new look of our website. If you are aware of the changes we made in the format, you may not be familiar with the added content. We've added a lot of content. If you haven't been checking in regularly please take a look at the new offerings. Click on the link here: www.rainbowcovenant.org.

We invite you to send in your own material, comments, letters and suggestions. Your complaints too - but please, let them be constructive and polite. Both politics and religion tend to trigger people's "righteous wrath" - a phrase which, in most cases, is oxymoronic. And here our cause is both political - in the sense that we want to make the world better and have certain ideas about how to go about that - and religious.

Now about the name change. We speak of the Universal Covenant, the Noahide Covenant, as the Rainbow Covenant. That was our name since we started. We sponsored the book - The Rainbow Covenant: Torah and the Seven Universal Laws - in that name. We are trying to take the rainbow back for G'd and holiness. But, as you know, groups and causes that have nothing to do with the rainbow covenant have claimed the rainbow for themselves, since at least the second half of the twentieth century. "New Age" or neo-pagan faiths have tried to bring themselves under the cover of the rainbow. So have various homosexual activist "gay rights" groups. So did the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a less than completely honest black nationalist political figure, with his Rainbow Coalition.

Enough. The eternal symbol of G'd's covenant with all the world has come to be confused with too many other things. Of course we will always recognize the rainbow as G'd's symbol, a sign of faithful holiness, rather than as their symbol. But the Rainbow Covenant is also G'd's first covenant with all the world and we have legally changed the name of this foundation to reflect that. This foundation is now the First Covenant Foundation. We have already reserved the appropriate website domain names.

Don't worry, you will still be able to reach us as the Rainbow Covenant Foundation on the Internet. Address a letter to the Rainbow Covenant Foundation, by traditional postal service or through the Internet, and it will still come to us. We will remain who we are and our mission will remain the same, we will simply be referring to the Rainbow Covenant by another of its names: as the First Covenant, and that will be our name as well.

A point of Torah: some people will argue that G'd first entered into a covenant with Adam and Eve, before the Noahide Covenant. That argument has some merit. Regardless, if that's true the Noahide Covenant is merely its renewal and extension. If the First Covenant was with Adam and Eve, the Maker of all things just extended it to Noah and his family and it remains the First Covenant.

Check out the new material on our website! One new article you probably haven't seen yet is very interesting: "Staring at Rainbows" by Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim. But we have a lot of new material up - check it out!

James D. Long will speak at:
Congregation Young Israel of Woodmere 
859 Peninsula Blvd.,Woodmere NY 11598
7 pm on Sunday, December 18, 2005

Schedule Michael Dallen to speak 
with your group or organization,
or arrange an interview by calling
Phone: (313) 891-1920 
or
e-mail: MDallen @ 1stcovenant.com