Love Israel is Dead: Memories of the Love Family

Just came across this: Love Israel is dead!  (Well, since last year).



When you joined the Love Family you were first given a biblical name, and then, when you proved your spiritually bonafides, a virtue name. Everybody took the last name Israel. The big boss was Love Israel ("...the greatest of these is love" 1 Cor 13:13). As I recall they didn't use money. Unsurprisingly the group eventually went down in a blaze of scandal in the early 1980s.

In the early 1970s a considerable group of Love Family members came and stayed at the Rainbow House Commune in Yakima, Washington.  Unlike us, they were very regimented (up at dawn, yoga and chanting out in front of the house at 6 AM--I can't say on the "front lawn" because there was only dirt out there--then breakfast and off to work all day in the orchards, no sloughing off!). The women embraced the womanly role completely, took over our filthy kitchen, cleaned it all up spic span, and in no time flat our usual fare, consisting mostly of stuff like plain pasta with ketchup, pancakes made with nothing but flour and water, and an occasional shared gallon jug of beer, gave way to some pretty passable cuisine.

I remember in particular getting on well with two guys going by the name of Strength and Imagination Israel, but Truth Israel took an immediate dislike to me. At the time this disturbed me greatly, throwing me into a fit of self doubt as to what there might be in or about me that a man who supposedly personified Truth would take such exception to.

My old buddy John Healy joined up and was given the name Gabriel Israel. After that when he was around and any of us had to use the toilet we would say "Hang on a minute, I gotta go to the Gabe." I remember arguing with Gabe about the Love Family's policy of "Agreeing to agree." I would try to counter with my opinion but he would in all seriousness dismiss it by saying, "Opinions are like a**holes, everybody's got one." So far as I ever heard old Gabe never graduated from an Angel to a Virtue!

I remember admiring the members of the Love Family when I saw they were staying onto clean up after the Rainbow Family Gathering in Granby of 1972.

Oh, and I'd forgotten until just now. Years later I actually wrote a dictionary entry on the group for Baker Book House's ill-fated Dictionary of North American Cults and Religious Movements, a project that finally crashed an burned about a year or so ago. Baker still owns the article, but I expect it will never see the light of day. Anyway, it labor wasn't a complete loss since with the money I made writing that and other entries for that project we bought M her guitar.

Another good thing that came out of writing the entry was that otherwise I would have never come in contact with the University of Montana's Robert Balch and his brilliant essay: “Charisma and Corruption in the Love Family: Toward a Theory of Corruption in Charismatic Cults,” in Sex, Lies, and Sanctity: Religion and Deviance in Contemporary North America (Religion and the Social Order 5; eds Mary Jo Neitz & Marion S Goldman; Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995), 155-179.