slatestarscratchpad:

Young people in the Galilee Sea Area are being increasingly drawn to the so-called “righteousness community”, a movement of twenty-something fisherman types with exciting new perspectives on virtue, Scripture, and the end of the world.

The righteousness community is based on the orations of Yeshua ben Yosef, a self-taught rabbi who developed a cult following with his concerns about an impending Armageddon. According to ben Yosef, problems with Temple sacrifices and over-adherence to the ritual law will lead to a “Judgment Day” in which God comes down to punish sinners and throw them into a lake of fire. Although it sounds far-fetched, celebrities like Saul of Tarsus and Joseph of Arimathea have thrown their weight behind it, saying the threat of Judgment Day is “very plausible”.

Ben Yosef wondered: what if God, instead of wanting strict compliance to Pharaisacal principles, actually wants us to love one another with all our hearts? And what if those who fail to practice this, far from fulfilling God’s will, will actually face His wrath when He returns to judge His creatures? Frustrated that mainstream theologians failed to pay attention to these concerns, he thought he could best spread his message by creating a culture of righteous behavior. The righteousness community is an attempt at creating that culture, and has attracted a diverse crowd interested in divine judgment. The community has also come to discuss and sometimes emulate ben Yosef’s other interests: universal love, Messianic fervour, consorting with prostitutes and tax collectors, and stories about lakes of fire that sound like they come straight from fantasy books.

The righteous take a somewhat paradoxical approach to keeping hold of their humanity. Believing that all people are sinful, many think that in order to shed our wickedness, they will have to abandon their bodies to become perfect spirits in Heaven (our physical selves are, for the vast majority in the community, not intrinsic to who we are). One of the righteous, Simon Peter, say he believes that not only could we someday live forever, but we could purify our souls so as to abandon human frailty and doubt, and “spend Eternity praising the Lord”.

Peter, a fisherman, was first drawn into the community by ben Yosef’s fictional magnum opus, “The Parable Of The Prodigal Son”. He loves the righteous’ “world-scale ambition” and lack of bias towards localness, either in time or space. “Why care only about the Israelites when there are so many nations out there?” He sees no reason not to take the whole Roman Empire - indeed, the whole Mediterranean - as a playing field. After all, it is likely that the vast majority of people who will ever exist are Gentiles. Converting the Gentiles is a major goal, a value that he holds because, he says, “All humans are pretty similar in the eyes of God”.

Despite their commitment to the idea that all believers are bound together in an intangible Church, many of the righteous have affirmed the importance of community in the flesh as well. Galilee Area righteous congregate into communal living arrangements, often with whimsical names invoking saints or Scriptural locations. In building a shared culture, they draw on the example of Jewish traditions. Last spring, the several dozen of the righteous gathered together beneath stained-glass windows to observe “Easter”, singing hymns and eating a communal meal. It’s a powerful visual, albeit one that feels like a processed and repurposed Passover seder. Apart from songs, the event featured organ music, prayers, and a “sermon” by one of the community leaders. Peter considers it hugely successful at capturing the trust-building and bonding functions of Jewish rituals. In a way, the righteous’ approach to holidays is like the righteous themselves. They avoid formal rules and rituals in the preparation of their celebrations, preferring to rely on a shared sense of community and divine love.

Peter and his friends are responding to a lacuna in the present world not by shrugging but by trying to build something to fill it. The righteous are quite right that mainstream contemporary Judaism is in many ways legalistic, even uninspiring. But to act more effectively on these good desires for holiness, the righteous could use a more robust anthropology. Many of them mock the traditional institution of marriage, preferring to remain celibate in preparation for the coming Judgment. Some of them participate in “ordinations”, a Galilee-area rite where people promise to stay celibate for their whole life. Often this is combined with communal living and the sharing of property in common. In my view, the righteous are blind to grave dangers: they are making themselves human test subjects in a social experiment that is bound to prove destructive.

I told my righteous interlocutors that, frankly, I feared the righteousness community would come to represent the social equivalent of the Divine Judgment that ben Yosef is worried about. After all, if they convince the Romans to adopt an attitude of meek nonviolence, the Empire could lose its military might and collapse, leading to a Dark Age that kills millions. The righteous are a powerful, loving, compassionate entity, interested in forgiving everybody. How can we be sure they aren’t creating the God they claim to worship?

(source, sort of)