The People of the Yellow Deli

Listen to the story:

When I was 23, I quit my job at Salisbury House, and, unable to pay rent, I moved back home. My parents gave me a room in their basement. I never cleaned; every surface was covered in dirty dishes and fast-food garbage; clothes concealed the floor. I rarely turned on the light, preferring to navigate the obstacle course between my computer chair and my bed by the glow of my computer monitor. I’d get up in the evening and go to bed in the morning when my dad woke up, maximizing the time I’d have to smoke weed in secret. I’d hit my pipe and blow the smoke through a cardboard toilet paper tube stuffed with dryer sheets. This went on for years.

I was lonely and desperate for a relationship. I hadn’t dated since my high school girlfriend dumped me when I was 20. I didn’t think I was dateable, so I never tried, settling for pining after coworkers and other women in my life from afar. I became nervous around girls. It felt like my virginity had grown back.

I was some kind of mom’s-basement-dwelling, incel-adjacent gamer creature with absolutely nothing to show for my years of adulthood. One day, I got up at 9 p.m., and, feeling extra depressed, I decided if I was still living like this when I was 30, I’d kill myself.

I found myself thinking about this period in my life often when I spoke to people in the Twelve Tribes. Everyone had a story about feeling rejected from modern society. For some it was isolation, for others fake friends or self-destructive party lifestyles. I know the feeling. It seems a common thing to feel today.

The Twelve Tribes are a high-control religious organization. Media and advocacy organizations do not hesitate to use the word “cult” (but I do, because I know them and it feels insulting). When people join the Twelve Tribes, they’re expected to give up more than their worldly possessions, like vehicles, property, and bank accounts. They give up their jobs — they’ll work wherever leaders assign them, maybe at a Yellow Deli or another company the group owns. They stop living independently and move in to a communal residence. They take a new Hebrew name and leave their old identity behind.

Why would anyone join? It’s not a question I struggled with. It was plain to me, from the first time I peeked behind the scenes in Rutland, Vermont while hiking across the United States on the Appalachian Trail.

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Eventually, I moved out of Mom’s basement, but I still didn’t like myself. By the time I hit 27, still working kitchen jobs I hated, I knew I needed drastic change.

The Appalachian Trail was my answer. I started in April 2019, when I was 28.

Spanning from Georgia to Maine, the 3,500-kilometre-long footpath is more than a long hiking trail — it’s a place of community. On average, it takes about five months to walk from end to end (four if you’re quick), and every year thousands start at Springer Mountain over the course of March and April, walking north with the spring. Only about a third will make it all the way to the northern terminus on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine; most leave the trail early due to injury, lack of money, or simple boredom.

I saved up money, sold my computer, and set out to hike across Appalachia. Before I left, I thought I’d never live in Winnipeg again. Table flip my life — that was the idea behind the hike.

It worked, too. I grew up a great deal and met people that changed my life. I had adventures that expanded my worldview.

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I started hearing a familiar name from other hikers — the Yellow Deli. I’d thought it was just a Winnipeg thing. Word on trail was they let you stay for free, a blessing for lots of northbound hikers like me who were running out of money in the expensive northern states.

I was keen. Lots of other hikers were staying there. I was curious.

After my host showed me where I would be sleeping and explained that I was not to enter the women’s dorms, she brought me to the sharing circle.

Community members and hikers were co-mingled, sitting cross legged in a big circle, passing around a token to designate who was speaking. The topic was love.

I found the contributions people were making pretty boring. To my ear it was a lot of platitudes about how love conquers all and such. No one was getting real, and to me, that’s the whole point of a sharing circle. So, when I got the token, I decided to get spicy.

“I don’t think love conquers all. I don’t think love can protect you. I think it can even hurt you or mislead you. If your husband beats you, but he says he loves you and you love him, is that okay? Can love conquer that?”

The room got stiffer. People exchanged nervous glances. On trail, hikers gossiped endlessly about the Twelve Tribes. Stories about child abuse, the rich founder in France living fat off the cult’s businesses, hikers sucked into it after staying at the hostel. But now that we were here, there seemed to be a spell of politeness and graciousness towards our hosts.

No one really engaged with what I said, and the circle ended after a few more people spoke. Everyone went to bed.

That night sticks out to me because I couldn’t sleep. I had “hiker hunger,” a common phenomenon for long distance hikers. I couldn’t shake the thought of getting out of bed to walk to a nearby open Domino’s Pizza.

Feeling insatiable, I got up, got dressed, walked to the front door, and saw it was locked. I wasn’t locked in — I could have simply unlocked the door and left — but I didn’t have a key to lock the door behind me. What if the place was robbed while I was wandering about in the middle of the night looking for pizza? Leaving the door unlocked didn’t seem right, so I went back to bed, my concern for the group overruling my selfish desires.

We left the hostel at 9 a.m. the next morning with a handful of other Appalachian Trail hikers to earn our keep at a nearby farm run by the community. It felt like a routine operation. We got on a bus and drove two hours to a tiny town called Bellows Falls. I don’t recall learning the name of the town or even having a good idea of where we were going at the time — I pieced this together later.

After we arrived at the farm, we got a tour of the farmhouse before eating lunch together at a long table — family style. I recall long skirts in neutral colours and braided headbands. We got straw hats for the sun.

Next was a tour of the farm. It went on for hours. I wanted to just pick stuff already; I felt exhausted standing there, listening to an old guy with a white beard. He just kept on and on. I was trying not to be rude, but I had to squat as he was talking just because standing was unbearable. He showed us several fields and a greenhouse before he finally let us loose on some carrots.

Later, I had some one-on-one time with a man who lived there as we filled a packing order from a cooled warehouse area. I remember asking him a bunch of questions about his family and the work. He spoke positively about his life, explaining that he met his wife in the community after joining. But I got the impression that living there was hard work. I tried to work hard too and be helpful with the packing.

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After the trail, I took more trips and continued to push out of my comfort zone. I worked as a tree planter and spent a winter at a ski resort in British Columbia. Eventually, I decided to stay in Winnipeg. I met the woman I’m going to marry here. I started studying full time, angling for a career in marketing. I got a dog. I got better.

I was still curious about the Twelve Tribes. I wanted to write about them. One day, working on the piece at the local Yellow Deli, the man behind the counter saw me reading one of the “Freepapers” they distribute, and he handed me a business card inviting me to the weekly Friday Sabbath celebration on my way out.

So, the next Friday, I drove to the address on the card. I was curious.

It was a massive creepy old house. I took a picture with my cellphone out my car window and checked to make sure my fiancée could see my location. I was nervous.

I built up my courage and walked to the door.

I knocked and a man answered right away. There was an awkward moment as we exchanged greetings; this is where most people would try to figure out why a stranger was knocking on their door. Instead, he invited me in. I started to take my shoes off in the foyer, but he said I should keep them on, so I spent the whole evening with one shoe untied.

There were kids running around and people eating in several rooms. I’d find out later I was late and missed the ceremonial start to the evening. Someone handed me a plate with Alaska fish caught by the community up there. I started chatting with some folks, letting them direct the conversation. They asked me all the small-talk questions: where I’m from, what do I do for work, how I’d heard about the Tribes.
I was hyper-aware of where I was looking. I kept staring down at my meal, nervous, before someone would shoot another question at me and get my attention again. I noticed my hands were shaking. I felt sneaky — it seemed like they were feeling me out, avoiding the question I wasn’t asked at the door: “Why are you here?”

After the small talk came the deep talk. The willingness to start philosophizing about community or love or the Bible at a moment’s notice is something I enjoy every time I’m around. I’m always game. Get me together with some friends, roll a joint, and watch us become the most insufferable little gang of stoner intellectuals this side of Reddit. So, when the older gentleman I was talking to started to talk about selfishness in modern society, I listened closely for a loose end to pull — a nit to pick. Right as it was getting good, we were joined by a young man who came over and introduced himself to me with his Hebrew name.

I answered all the small talk questions again and, feeling more confident, started to turn the questions on him. I asked him if he’d researched the Twelve Tribes before meeting them. He had; he told me what the media writes about the group is “90 per cent lies. 10 per cent based.”

Another person at the table wasn’t familiar with the term, so he explained: it means speaking unfiltered truth in the face of societal pressure.

We talked about his religious journey — he used to be Catholic — and how he couldn’t meet women that he felt were serious about God.

“They say they’re religious, but then they go to the beach and drink and wear bikinis,” he said. I thought that sounded misogynistic, but I didn’t say anything. I just nodded in agreement.

He asked outright if I was religious; I hesitated and said I wasn’t. The shoe didn’t drop, he didn’t get weird —any weirder, anyway — and we kept chatting. He was trying to explain some article that exposed the tactics the media uses to discredit religious communities. He stumbled a little, and got the attention of another community member walking by to help him explain.

This man clocked me immediately. When I introduced myself, he said that he I knew who I was, that we had spoken on the phone.

I had called the Yellow Deli about a month prior. I spoke to a woman and a man and told them both I was working on a story and hoping for an interview, and the man said he’d call me back. He never did.

I was relieved to be exposed. I think my verbatim response was, “Oh, so you know what I’m up to!” He took it in stride, and we chatted about how you can’t trust the media. On the spot, I made up something about how I’m trying to reconcile my in-person experiences with the stuff found online when googling the Twelve Tribes, how I’m here because I didn’t want to take what I’ve read online as gospel, how I wanted to see things for myself.

That became my line all night, my charm offensive in full swing. I was invited to come the next day or during the week when they weren’t putting on a show.

I didn’t want to just show up. The man who knew who I was seemed to have some gravitas, so I approached him again, and explained I’d been invited to this and that but didn’t want to intrude. The man from the Yellow Deli who gave me the card was standing nearby, and he playfully suggested I should intrude, he could see I had an intrusive sprit.

But the man with the gravitas had a different take. He looked me in the eye and said he thought it’d be best if I came around on Fridays for now or hung out at the Deli —in other words, the public stuff. I smiled and agreed.

In total, I spent seven evenings with the Tribes. Three Fridays in Winnipeg at the house on East Gate, two days at the Hiker Hostel in Rutland, Vermont where I visited the farm in Bellows Falls in 2019 with other Appalachian Trail hikers, and two evenings at the Yellow Deli for a new initiative they call “Nicodemus by Night.”

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I didn’t expect these evenings at the Yellow Deli to be as helpful in understanding the Twelve Tribes as visiting their home. But it was; the conceit gave me room to ask direct questions.

Nicodemus is a biblical figure who goes to question Jesus after he’s made a splash chasing the moneychangers from the temple in Jerusalem. He represents a mainstream Jewish thinker who’s sympathetic to Jesus, who sees his good. He leaves an ally.

Unlike Nicodemus, I did not leave these conversations a changed man. I found them self-important. When the man leading the discussion explained how to be “holy” has nothing to to with popish finery but is merely to be set apart, for that’s all the word means in Hebrew, I quipped, “Oh, like the Twelve Tribes is set apart?”

“Well, if you want to say it like that,” he replied, his tone changed from patient to annoyed.

I wouldn’t say things like that at the dinners. It just felt rude. But if they’re going to position themselves as holy and invite skeptical questioners, I was game.

Setting themselves apart is important to the group. It justifies their position as the chosen people, the 144,000 who “had the name of Jesus and the Father on their foreheads” as described in Revelation 14:1. They don’t consider themselves Christians, and don’t call him Jesus. They prefer his Hebrew name, Yahshua. They’re talking about the same biblical figure, and they talk about him a lot, often calling him “our Master,” but get some distance from mainstream Christianity by keeping it Hebrew.

I wasn’t the only one to show up to these meetings, but I would ask the most questions. After a visit to the house, these in-public small gatherings were not scary at all. I started to see familiar faces.

There was a middle-aged couple from a local evangelical church who attended their first Nicodemus by Night with me. I saw them again a few weeks later at the house, and went over to chat with the husband.
He asked me about my beliefs, and we talked about atheism, evolution, God and the flat earth theory. I checked out when he insisted the sun never appears behind clouds, so it must be much closer to the earth then they want you to think. I just didn’t know how to argue with that.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Twelve Tribes as a “American white supremacist cult.” The Denver Post published a three part investigation into the Tribes where ex-members describe child abuse and other horrors. In Winnipeg, Michael Welsh went undercover for six weeks, photographing the rods they use to hit their kids, a practice openly defended on the Twelve Tribes website. In Bavaria, the police got involved, removing dozens of children in 2013.

I spoke about the Bavarian raids with a woman from the community at my last Nicodemus by Night discussion. She described an abuse of power by the state, babies being torn from their mothers’ breasts. She told me most of the children came back to the community once they turned 18. She said some escaped from state custody, traveling through the country on foot, evading capture by the police before making it back home to their families.

I nodded along, but I didn’t believe her. Ex-members are everywhere. They’ve written books, spoken to reporters, set up websites, blogs, and YouTube channels.

I was dominating the conversation again, asking about their personal lives and Twelve Tribes lore. The hour-long meeting was half over, and no one else had asked a question. So, I let a lull in the conversation linger and my flat earther friend jumped right in.

He asked a great question. He asked about the Rapture.

We discussed the end times in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way. They expect it in 2071, with the COVID-19 pandemic interpreted as the first plague. He calmly explained how the children of the Twelve Tribes, who would be Yahshua’s bride, would command angels on earth. How they would have the power to destroy cities at a word.

In that moment, the Twelve Tribes came across like your typical Christian offshoot. History is filled with radical Christians incorrectly declaring imminent end times, from the early church to the Anabaptists in 1534 to the Mormons in Utah.

I don’t think the world is ending, but it seems the cracks in our society get wider every day. When I would argue against the Twelve Tribes philosophy, I’d end up defending awkward positions like “our society works,” “the world has a bright future,” and “people are good.” I wasn’t very convincing; the Twelve Tribes meet the cultural moment better than my naive optimism.

I don’t have the answers, but I know some people who are set apart from this mess, who do have answers.

But, it will cost you everything.