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Bottlenecks and Free Enterprise

January 22, 2012

The Twelve Tribes communities in different countries displayed various degrees of tolerance to independence, and free will to individual self-autonomy.
Bottleneck style government is typical in many communities, where all decisions must go through just one person. Everything from borrowing a car to going shopping to asking if it’s a good idea to have your children’s tooth ache looked at by a dentist or even just go for a walk with your family in some cases!
Yeshurun governed the Cambridge, NY community in all logistical matters. He became that bottleneck since all communications and decisions needed to go through him for it to be in coordination with the Holy Spirit. This was frustrating to say the least.
In contrast, in the Tribe of Asher, Sydney, Australia, nobody wanted to assume responsibility for anything! If you went
to someone with a question they would simply pass the responsibility along to someone else. This indicated the use of fear tactics as a highly influencing factor. Nobody wanted to make a decision and take responsibility for it. Everything would default back to Ha Qanai, an elder who hated responsibility more than everyone. Often he would just say NO.
So, on one hand you have Yeshurun who loved the position of responsibility and did it well, and nothing happened without his approval (and woe to him who did something out of coordination of his all-knowing eye) and then you have the Tribe of Asher who were all too scared to actually make any decisions at all for fear of retribution from the almighty Israel, or Nun who were the appointed leaders of the Australian operation.
They discouraged free initiative, not openly, but through the lengthy process of chain-of-command style decision making.
It just took too much effort wading through red-tape to get something approved. And more often than not, after you received a preliminary permission to go ahead with a directive you may just get a crushing appeal from a rank and file concerned citizen who considers it their duty to call to attention the fact that God spoke a word of reservation to them about your initiatives. Or even more typical; having something approved by one elder, only to receive a cease and desist call a week later from the higher ranking elders when they finally catch wind of it.
So, at the end of the day it was easier to just have no initiative at all, and simply do what you’re told rather than try and do something original which god evidently doesn’t approve of.
This wasn’t the case in all communities. Some tended to lean the other direction and had more wiggle room for the enterprising young disciple who wanted to just put their energy and talents to doing something beneficial and industrious for their community. However, ultimately these type of communities would be exposed for their relaxed approach and their leaders would eventually be brought to justice in the form of a governmental elders meeting where they were ridiculed, defamed, belittled and humiliated to the point where they too would come to fear doing anything out of coordination with Yoneq and his Moses-style communication with God.
Ultimately, if you saw the greater picture this phenomenon wasn’t exclusive only to the lower ranking disciples. I have seen this many times where even Nun himself, one of Yoneq’s inner circle and one of his right hand men received a reprimanding for taking initiative in an area which wasn’t pleasing to Yoneq and his wife Ha-Emeq. The poor man was quickly reduced to a spineless blubbering mess believing that God didn’t approve of him.
The knee-jerk reaction required immediate action at any cost to please God and Yoneq: dissolving the enterprise, destroying any evidence that could be regarded as trying to salvage or retain anything of worth from the project. Therefore money would literally be thrown away, burned and disposed of in the form of tools, materials, plants, baskets, food, paid services etc.
We can conclude that this abusive use of ridicule and humiliation instills fear and is used to enforce the directive of Yoneq and his wife Ha-Emeq. This fear is passed down through the ranks to the lowliest of disciples through the chain of command to ensure everyone has a proper fear of God and ultimately no initiative of their own.

The title of this thread may be misleading to some people.

"The Family", otherwise known as "The Children of God" are a completely distinct group from the "Twelve Tribes" communities.

I actually met a couple of members of the COG [Children of God] while on a military deployment in the 80's and traded a donation for a gospel tape.
Beyond that I don't know much about them other than what is on Wikipedia.
I was a member of the Twelve Tribes for five years.

Just wanted to clarify that these are two separate entities and not related.