By Tracy Frisch, Contributing Writer

At Common Sense Farm, a 60-member Twelve Tribes “community of believers” in Cambridge, NY, no one goes off to "secular" jobs. Instead several homegrown businesses, a home school, and the domestic sphere provide plenty of work for all.

"We believe cottage industries are pleasing to God," asserts Randy, who's known to fellow members by his Hebrew name of Rashab.

Twelve Tribes members see many advantages to working within their faith community. Randy enumerated a few. "We can teach our children diligence and have them with us at appropriate times. Fathers are able to go home for lunch with their families. We have freedom that a 9 to 5 job in a corporation doesn't allow."

Randy is one of the two compounders (soap makers) at Common Sense hand and body care. The business, which primarily uses natural ingredients, employs ten members. Others work at the Common Ground Café on Main Street, one of the village's only restaurants. Farming several acres in organic vegetables is the newest enterprise.

Twelve Tribes members say that they're seeking to create the life that the Messiah desired for people to establish on earth. Founded in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the early 1970s, the group takes its name from the New Testament Book of Acts. "There will be restored twelve tribes that will bring about promises made to Abraham." Another passage describing an early community inspired by Jesus Christ as having "no rich or poor among them" and sharing "all things in common" offered the group a vision. I was told that the original founders were reacting to the  hypocrisy they observed among Christians, who were doing things that didn't reflect Biblical teachings.

Today, there's a network of 55 such communities around the world. New York has three others in Oak Hill, Ithaca, and Oneonta.

Defining themselves as a group of believers, members are adamant that their highly structured community is neither a hippie commune, an intentional community, nor a cult. People join voluntarily and can leave if they wish. While new members are frequently young, people of all ages are welcomed, and I learn of one new resident, a member's grandmother, who's in her 70s.

While the community observes traditions foreign to the society at large, it's not cloistered. Visitors are welcome and members regularly interact with the wider world through their work and in commerce. But they do not get involved in public life or politics. Rather than influencing the world at large, they have opted to start a separate society of their own.

On the afternoon of my visit, I meet Tim (Nadiv) transplanting peppers in the greenhouse. He readily shared his story. Members call this testifying. Four years ago, when he was 18 and "lost," he moved from Georgia to Common Sense Farm. He said he had been making poor choices and had stopped going to his college classes. A spiritual seeker, he had attended a couple different churches with his family growing up, and then delved into New Age teachings on his own. Yet he realized that he needed help finding his way.

"What drew me was the warmth and sincerity and kindness of the community members," he said. His mother, brother, and sister have each visited him at Common Sense Farm and support his decision to join.

Jonah, now called Othniel, 29, joined the Twelve Tribes as a single dad of a three-year-old. At the time he was juggling a full-time job and a full course load at the local community college in Utica. Coming from a "broken family," without a father, he bounced among different relatives growing up, and yearned for a stable family life of his own.

Initially he encountered the Twelve Tribes at a rally of the Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men's organization, at the Pepsi Arena in Albany. A couple years later, upon meeting the Twelve Tribes again, he went for a visit. Right after, he made the radical break with his former life.

When I asked Jonah what attracted him about the group, one of the things he said surprised me. Jonah was troubled by this country's class structure and the pressures it puts on people who are not economically well off. Thus the Twelve Tribes utopian abolition of class divisions to create a more egalitarian society held great appeal for him.

Cassie, Jonah's wife, stressed that to find fulfillment in this new life, it's essential to give up the old. So often, people's possessions possess them, she said. Community members pool all their income (and give the group their belongings beyond the basics). Once there, they don't accumulate individual wealth and do without most of the trappings of our contemporary materialistic world.

Jonah was called to Common Sense Farm from another Twelve Tribes community in New York in order to manage the café. He had worked in restaurants in the outside world and spent a couple semesters at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park.

Work assignments reflect members' knowledge and abilities, according to Jonah. "Those who tend to conduct themselves responsibly are noticed."

Last year, Jonah took on the job of growing vegetables as well as the cafe. He found a partner in the member who runs the farm equipment on the 110-acre property.

At this point, Jonah aspires to bring greater food self-sufficiency to the community, rather than generating much income from the crops. They sell surplus vegetables at their new farm stand, as well as the local food co-op, and other outlets like the regional wholesale market in Menands.

Unlike many a new farmer, Jonah doesn't have to face an overwhelming workload alone. Various residents, including children, pitch in, and once a week, the whole community comes for a work party at the gardens. It's enjoyable and allows massive projects, like weeding or transplanting hundreds of tomato plants, to be completed in no time.

On the first floor of the soap building, an attractively converted old horse barn, I meet Randy, the soap compounder. On his guitar, he's serenading a packing line worker while he finishes up for the day with rousing devotional songs.

The community derives its name from the soap business, which was started as a home-schooling project about 25 years ago by one of the original Twelve Tribes members ("a pillar"). After a good friend of the first soap-maker applied his business expertise to the enterprise, it took off. Members of the Twelve Tribes "clan" in Rutland, Vermont, relocated it to Cambridge in 1997, after it had outgrown the old workshop. 

Now, in place of a single pot and burner, the production area is equipped with "multi-thousand dollar" tanks. They look like giant soup kettles on stilts. Some have metal stairs. Soap making resembles cooking so what better set-up than an oversized kitchen?

The day I visited Randy had made castile soap. The process is closest to the ancient method and uses the principle of saponifying oils. Olive oil, and lesser amounts of coconut, palm, and castor oils, are mixed with a lye water solution while being heated. Since oil consists of fatty acids and lye is intensely alkaline, two things on opposite ends of the pH scale,  a chemical reaction occurs, yielding a new molecule. At this stage it's a "harsh" paste that must be diluted with water to make this traditional, gentle liquid soap. Essential oils are added for fragrance.

Randy explained why soap works. One pole of the molecule is water loving, while the oil end grabs dirt and grease. This dual attraction explains why washing with soap removes dirt.

His favorite process is making their Balm of Gilead product. The recipe calls for steeping various herbs, propolis from honeybees, and root extracts in extra virgin olive oil over mild heat for one to two weeks.

Common Sense used to exhibit at trade shows but they no longer need to do this type of promotion. Four or five years ago Common Sense began getting private label contracts, making products for other businesses, thanks to referrals from a friend at a fragrance company.

Asked what keeps him interested in the work, Randy answers with enthusiasm. "I believe it's what Yahshua (the Hebrew word for Jesus) wants us to do.  I know the founders. I know their hearts. I just see how it's important for our community."

Jonah's wife Cassie (Yasheva) has lived in Twelve Tribes communities since she was twelve, when her whole family joined, after meeting a few Twelve Tribes men in Florida, where they lived. Their stories especially interested her mother, "a strong Christian." Her father decided to take the family on a trip to visit nine different Twelve Tribe communities in the northeast. Then he sold his brush clearing and trash removal business and they all moved to a community in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Cassie said that, at a young age, because her family "went through a lot" with divorce, she already knew that secular society was not for her. Of her whole family – parents and three teenage sisters – only her stepbrother has left the Twelve Tribes.

The family unit is central to everything in the Twelve Tribes, and most members marry and have children. Big families are the norm, though the typical size has dropped from six or eight kids to four or five.

In the Common Sense community, residents have bedrooms in one of three houses on the farm or a fourth downtown in the village. They live with their families, or if they're single, in a same-sex dormitory.

Members follow a predictable, yet varied, daily and weekly schedule devised to provide for strong parental involvement with their children, twice-daily worship, and a full day of rest and leisure on the Sabbath. Couples with children have a night out with childcare provided once every two weeks.

Like Jews and Seventh Day Adventists, the Twelve Tribes celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday. To get ready, on Fridays the women take on a double workload. They clean the entire house "from top to bottom," according to Cassie, and cook meals for two days. Saturdays give families long stretches of uninterrupted time together. People go for walks, swim in the pond, enjoy volleyball games (Common Sense Farm has two outdoor volleyball courts), and even take the goats out to play.

Twelve Tribe members are not churchgoers. Instead they hold household-wide spiritual gatherings every day at 7 AM and 7 PM. They prepare for these gatherings with their families, by reading and studying the Bible or a Twelve Tribe newsletter or telling their children a story.

Not surprisingly, as a consequence of the commitment to a way of life portrayed in the Bible, the Twelve Tribes adhere to strict gender roles. Men tend to predominate in the cottage industries that provide cash flow for the community, while women are largely responsible for the daily chores that keep community fed, clothed, and clean. It's women who cook for everyone in their house. The women also can and preserve food, make clothing, and care for flower gardens.

Occupied with caring for their little children, the younger women mostly stay close to home. Older women, whose children are older, take on other jobs, teaching, bookkeeping, or working in the restaurant.

Cassie has a few other special jobs, like tending to the health of a small dairy goatherd and doing several shifts of barn chores. (The farm also raises Highlander cattle.) She also teaches a class of four toddlers four mornings a week.

Like the Amish, Twelve Tribes children end their schooling as soon as state law allows and begin apprenticeships. As a teenager, Cassie apprenticed with an experienced teacher for three years, and then with a bookkeeper.

Pointing to the sewing machine in the bedroom, which doubles as a sitting room and work area, Cassie told me she sews every Wednesday afternoons. Since women (and girls) have a prescribed type of dress, it falls on them to sew their own clothes. (If time permits, they also sew pants and shirts for husbands, sons, and single men, but they can find suitable attire for them at second-hand shops.)

Feminine clothing must be modest and loose flowing, covering the arms past the elbow and the legs below the knee. The neckline should not be much below the collarbone. They get fabric through a woman in the Oak Hill community who purchases it in bulk for the Northeast "tribe." They have a penchant for blends of linen, rayon, and/or cotton and muted colors.

The dress code reflects the Twelve Tribes' understanding of how the sexes should relate. Cassie explained that, given the "relatively high level of propriety between men and women," members don't date or become boyfriend and girlfriend. Marriage is sacred and a person is not supposed to gossip or complain about his or her spouse. Instead it's appropriate to confide in someone held in high esteem, who'd have the wisdom to advise.

Jonah calls these precepts their traditions. "We follow the standards of the Bible," he said. "We're looking toward the spirit of the law, not the letter. We want to understand the why.

"When we come in, we would surrender our own desires and submit them to the greater good of the whole community," with the goal being "the betterment of others." So rather than selfishly pursuing individual interests, they are encouraged to focus on how interests and talents can help fulfill others. As an example, Jonah mentions taking children hiking, rather than going off with buddies to indulge in adventure.

Jonah believes it’s "the human instinct to want to care for others, since we were created in God's image." Yet human beings also have " a fatal flaw" – selfishness, which, he says, can get the best of you if you let it. "People are in a struggle between their different impulses and it’s up to us to choose."

Trying to be true to the word of God requires people to deal with interpersonal conflicts. Jonah said, "If you have an issue with someone, you go to them and talk to them," he said. As the Bible dictates, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger."

Another reason cited by Jonah for valuing cottage industry is that within the community, their ideals hold sway on and off the job. But when people spend so many of their waking hours away in a secular environment, other norms influence their behavior.

"We want to be an example of what love is in the hopes that people will see the Messiah through us," said Jonah.

Common Sense Farm welcomes visits and people can also tour the soap workshop.

41 North Union Street, Cambridge, NY 12816, 528/677-0224, www.commonsensefarm.org