Hebrew Roots' roots

People care about origins and purity for several important reasons. The former is important because it is about where you come from and what gives you your identity. That's a really important part of our humanity, since, if your identity is broken in some way, you may not know exactly who you are. If you don't know who you are, if your identity is fragmented, then you will have difficulting figuring out exactly how to act. Purity is about maintaining an identity over time, since an identity, by definition, is something that is marked out by boundaries. When formally articulated, these boundaries are rules or laws. By sticking to the rules that define you, the essentials that define the essence of your being, you maintain an identity from its point of origin. In a normal traditional world, this is not a problem, because traditions are deliberately about preserving identities.

However, the modern world is clown world. Traditions and conventions of one kind or another are continually being broken, which means that identities are thus constantly being flattened. A very clear example is the distinction between men and women. Functionally, our society treats them as equal. No rules are supposed to exist to distinguish one from the other. Therefore, their identities become confused.

But this is an insane world to live in, because it has no definition, no structure, nothing certain: it is liquid modernity. Therefore, some people go looking for structure, which will involve nailing down their point of origin and the rules to preserve the identity. This is so that they know who they are and where they stand. One example of this is nationalism, which has become a worldwide phenomenon and is a reaction to the post-WWII globalist agenda that eroded national boundaries.

We must, at this point, deal with the fact that identities do develop over time. That is, an origin point is like a seed, a condensed point, which contains an identity in highly concentrated form. For example, Adam and Eve were the origin of the human race, and they contained all possible variation that the human race could exhibit, but in 'essential' form: It was not possible to see Abraham in Adam and Eve, but he was there, and his identity was nested within Adam's. So, as the human race grows, all those hidden aspects of identity begin to become 'manifested' and are revealed in concrete form. It's just like a seed grows into a tree. All the aspects of a tree are in the seed, but you can't see them. Thus, the implications of the new identity will not be obvious all at once.

In the Christian story, Christ is a new origin point for the human race, and supersedes Adam by recovering him from Hades: he is thus able to be placed prior to Adam and thus encompass all possible human identities (very clearly, this is the theme identified by Jung in many stories and myths of the son going to the underworld to rescue the father). Christ is a new origin point, and therefore a new identity, so the traditions needed to maintain his identity will be different from those of other identities.

Thus, my assessment of Hebrew Roots is that 1) they correctly realise we are in a confused world and 2) they go looking for an origin, identity and rules to maintain the identity. However, when it comes to manifestation, they do something a bit interesting. They deny manifestation. They approach Christ the same way that some people want to 'get back to the garden'. The Garden of Eden was a blueprint, a seed, an identity for Adam to use in populating the world. The rest of the world would become Edenic, but it would not look identical, in the same way that George Washington was human, but looked nothing like Adam. This is, ironically, a modern fault also: to want purity so much that you cut off all manifestation to maintain the seed unsullied. This is the symbolic equivalent of not resting on the Sabbath, not leaving things alone, even though that may mean there is some messiness in the world. Modernism is very OCD: always cutting off loose ends to maintain 'truth' in crystalline purity. However, the real world is messy, and to attempt to account for everything by eliminating the margin, the messiness of things is the instinct of totalitarian control.

Two other relevant points are the fall, since human identity and manifestation were marred, which means some things need to be eliminated, some kind of purity code needs to be enacted. However, the purity code we see in traditional societies is one that tends to leave the margin alone and to give even the margin some place in the world, not eliminate it altogether. The second point is that Christ is a new creation and we have a new blueprint, that of the garden-city of the New Jerusalem (a city represents all technology, which only became necessary after the fall, and the message is thus about redeeming the fallen aspects of the world). The manifestation of this garden-city will thus be different from that of the Jewish nation. The Hebrew identity was more about creating the right context for humans to understand Christ.

However, the rules of Christianity are focused on something somewhat different, specifically in bringing the New Jerusalem down from heaven, where Christ's will is done, to earth. The history of Christianity is thus a working out or manifestation of how Christ solves our problems. One example is sacrifice. Sacrifice is taking life from someone or something so that you don't die. This is why blood is the foundation for all civilizations. Romulus and Remus, and Caesar and Brutus are clear examples. The reason Caesar was revered as a god was that his death unified the Romans around a single point of identity: the Caesar. To be able to unify a nation like that is miraculous; it's a divine thing to do. Blood is thus the foundation of things in the fallen world: animals were killed to protect Adam and Eve from death for a little while.

This creates a problem, because it means we are all living on borrowed time or life. The only way to fix the problem was to provide a blood foundation that went deeper than every other sacrifice and a death that ended in life, which is what Christ accomplished. The 'cannibalistic' aspects of the Lord's Supper touch on this problem. This solves the problem of sacrifice and means it is symbolically moot to conduct blood sacrifices. This line of thought will apply to other aspects of the law as well: Christianity articulates the meaning of the Old Testament laws that was hidden.

Even the advertising and merch of Hebrew Roots exemplifies this focus on purity and primitive origins (the name, 'roots' is obvious), with 'glowing' trees, Menorah. So then, when it comes to 'unpacking' the identity of Christ, Hebrew Roots says no, there is nothing to unpack and do not let the seed grow. All things after the origin are viewed as corruption rather than growth and manifestation. Even the advertising and merch of Hebrew Roots exemplifies this focus on purity and primitive origins (the name, 'roots' is obvious), with a focus on such things as plants and lamps (Menorah).

In short: it's an (understandable) reaction to the modern fragmentation of identity and lack of concern for purity for 'central' things.