Growing up in the Hebrew Roots movement — and why I eventually had to leave
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Lively debate
I was neither brainwashed nor raised in a cult. There is nothing more American than leaving the beaten path to make your own way, especially when it comes to religion.
The women in my family are too mouthy and bratty, myself included, for the family to ever have fallen into true patriarchal suppression. We were all encouraged to study our Bibles for ourselves and to test one another. When the family home-churched together, it was always lively.
Even I, at the ages of 10 through 14, would get pulled into the heated dialogue with religious opinions of my own, carefully researched and passionately presented. I was obsessed with writing theological essays during those years.
We were not cosplaying as Jews any more than Amish are LARPing as peasants. We were more interested in what the Bible had to say than the traditions of modern-day Jews. In fact, anything that was “traditional” must be too much like Catholicism. We didn’t want to follow customs, but the law of Yahweh.
Although my great-grandfather and grandfather invented our faith, there was room for fluidity. It has changed much over the years. My great-grandfather kept the Saturday Sabbath and refused welfare for his family although they were poor and had 13 children. They did not eat pork, but ate according to Leviticus 11. We call this eating kosher, but it’s more accurately referred to as eating “clean.”
My grandfather started using the “Sacred Names” to refer to God when my father was young and warned against “calling upon the name of Jesus” because Jesus, he argued, was another form of Zeus. We argued over whether to spell the Messiah’s name Yahshua or Yeshua. We never referred to God as “God” or “the Lord” because those, too, were pagan names. It was always “Father” or “Yahweh.”
Which Sabbath?
When I was 9 years old, my grandfather realized that Saturday was not the true Sabbath. He had discovered an idea called the Lunar Sabbath.
The Sabbath is determined by the phases of the moon. At the end of the month when the moon goes dark, the Sabbath is two or three days long until the new moon appears and resets the Sabbath. And so Sabbath might be on a Tuesday one month and then Wednesday or Thursday the next month. If it were cloudy, it might be difficult to see the moon, and sometimes we would be keeping Sabbath wrong for a week or so until we were able to clearly see what the sky said. It was also difficult for making plans and having social relationships.
When I was 14, I sat down and did a long study on the Sabbath using encyclopedias, various Bibles, and concordances. After three months I presented my research to my family. I explained the pros and cons for the Lunar Sabbath, Saturday Sabbath, and Sunday Sabbath. I had become convinced that Sunday was still not the true Sabbath and that we should stop doing the Lunar Sabbath and revert to Saturday. My parents and siblings could not argue with my evidence. We voted. After five years of living by the moon, we unanimously agreed to revert back to Saturday Sabbath.
This situation taught me several things: We were not a cult, but most of my family was intellectually incapable of interpreting scripture for themselves. It was cool that my family changed after my research. But also why hadn’t they studied this properly at the start? I was 14 years old, and yet I had convinced my parents to make a major theological change. This both inflated my ego and left me feeling insecure and unstable because I was truly alone and could not go to my parents for answers about God.
This is part one of a two-part essay. Part 2 will appear next week. It was adapted and edited for length from an essay that first appeared on the Substack Polite Company.
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