Love Israel

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Love Family, Passover 1976

"Love Israel" Is simultaneously the name of a man, a community and a spiritual path. The man Love Israel {born 1940 as Paul Erdman} is the founder and head of a spiritual community that emerged in Seattle, Washington in the late 1960s. The community is known popularly as The Love Family and the Love Israel Family. It's membership is comprised of people who claim a shared revelation about how they are related to one another and what they are called to accomplish together.

The family began as one small communal household on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill, and within the first 10 years expanded to a network of communal homes and businesses in the surrounding neighborhood and in more rural areas of Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. It has evolved from being a highly concentrated communal society with a shared economy to becoming a tribal network of autonomous households that interact through a shared culture that they continue to create together. Presently, those that claim membership in the Family are concentrated in two locations: around a communal center in a residential neighborhood of Bothell, Washington and a rural village on the shore of the Columbia River (Lake Roosevelt}, just below Canada.

1 Spritual foundations
2 History
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Spritual foundations

"Love Israel" is a spelling variation of one of the fundamental affirmations of the Family: that "Love is real". Equally important to the Family are three other commonly used affirmations: "We are one", "Love is the answer", and "Now is the time". These statements reflect three of the most widely experienced revelations of the 1960s and have become the foundation stones of the Love Family culture. Family members believe that they were called together to help each other cultivate love, oneness and the presence of God in everyday family life. They also believe that their gathering has Biblical roots and that their purpose is to help fulfill the promises of Jesus Christ. In this light, they view themselves as both the spiritual tribe of Israel and the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon, where "Armageddon" means the time and place of the gathering of God's family. Family members are re-named (and new-borns named} to reflect that each person's character is gifted with a predominant virtue such as Charity, Honesty or Contentment.

[edit] History

The earlier history of the Family (1968 to 1994) is recounted in two articles which can be accessed through the links listed below; and the story of the Family's transition from urban Queen Anne Hill to the rural Cascade foothills will soon be available in a new book being published by the University of Washington Press. For nearly twenty years, the Family tried to get approval from the Snohomish County government for a mixed-use rural village on their 300-acre ranch near Arlington--the kind of development that is now being called an eco-village. Unable to obtain that approval, Love Israel received permission in re-organizational bankruptcy court (Chapter 11) to sell the ranch to the Union for Reform Judaism.^[1] This sale enabled the community to re-locate its dream for a rural village to Northeastern Washington, and to re-establish an urban presence reminiscent of their early urban-renewal efforts on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill, where they purchased contiguous homes and removed fences to create a more park-like environment.