The Roman naturalist, who admired the Essenes without understanding them, noted that they lived without women and without money and, he said, with only the palm trees for company. He did not say they lived without killing. Others did. A later Christian writer records of the Nazarenes that they would not sacrifice or eat flesh, holding it unlawful. The tradition that has come down through the centuries, and that the fellowship has received, holds that the holy ones of the desert and the mountain would not shed blood, that their table was of bread and herbs and the fruit of the tree, and that their tenderness extended to the least creature.
The fellowship must be honest. The scrolls themselves do not forbid the eating of meat; the Damascus Document regulates the slaughter of fish and locusts and the Temple Scroll describes sacrifice in detail. The desert settlement has yielded animal bones, buried with care, that some read as the remains of sacred meals. The historical Essenes were almost certainly not vegetarian in the modern sense. The teaching of the sanctity of life, as the fellowship holds it, comes from the wider stream of the tradition and from the gospel of the Way, which says that not a sparrow falls without the Father.
The Breath in All Things
In Genesis God breathes into the clay and the man becomes a living soul, and the same words, living soul, are used of the fish and the birds and the beasts. The breath of life is one breath, given to all that breathes. The psalmist says that when God takes away their breath they die and return to the dust, and when he sends forth his spirit they are created, and he means the creatures of the sea and the beasts of the field as much as the children of Adam.
The fellowship's sixth teaching begins here. Every living thing carries the breath of the Giver of life, and to harm it needlessly is to harm oneself and to offend the Giver. The word needlessly is weighed. The Law permits what is necessary. The teaching asks what is necessary, and asks it honestly, and finds that the honest answer in our time is: far less than we take.
The Simple Table
Whatever the historical Essenes ate, they ate it simply: one dish, blessed by a priest, in silence, enough and no more. The historian says they ate as into a sanctuary. The fellowship holds the simple table as the practice of this teaching. Our students are not asked to adopt any diet. They are asked to bless what they eat, to know where it came from, to take enough and no more, and to let the table be a holy place rather than a filling station.
Most students, having done this for a season, find their table changing on its own. They eat less flesh, not because they were told to but because blessing a thing makes one think about it. They waste less. They cook more. They eat with others. The fellowship has never had to argue anyone into reverence. Reverence, once begun, argues for itself.
The Least Creature
The tradition tells of holy ones who would not crush an insect, who moved the worm from the path, who would not cut a green tree. Some of this is legend. All of it points at something true: that the one who has learned to see the breath of God in a sparrow cannot easily unsee it, and that the whole creation becomes, for such a person, a temple full of worshipers. The Essene way, the fellowship holds, is the training of that sight.
It is also a training in humility. A man who will not harm a beetle finds it harder to despise a neighbor. The tenderness learned on the small is spent on the great.
A Direction, Not a Line
The fellowship teaches this as a direction to walk in, not a line to be judged by. We have known students paralyzed by the impossibility of living without harm, and we have known students proud of a purity that cost them nothing but made them hard. Neither is the way. The way is to turn toward reverence and keep walking, to do a little less harm this year than last, to bless the bread and the hand that made it and the earth that gave the grain, and to leave the judging to the One who counts the sparrows.
The Fasting and Simplicity page describes the fellowship's practice of the simple table in more detail.