Shvat - How to Tend to Doubt
My psychedelic Jewish journey has surprisingly led me to become hypersensitive to the plants and animals that live in my neighborhood. I mind the habits of the birds, the fecundity of the squirrels, how the ginkgos have shed their brilliant robes, and which camellias are burning most brightly. There cycles seem so perfect and coordinated, but do any of these beings experience doubt about what is to come? Will I bloom again? Will the leaves return or will the food be as plentiful as it was just months ago? As the cold sets in, I observe my mind—have I done enough to prepare for the year ahead? Will my best laid plans yield their intended outcomes? Can I do what I set out to do, especially when there is so much unknown pervading the collective Jewish and human consciousness. Weren’t psychedelics supposed to make things more clear?
This discomfiting and protracted moment of uncertainty, for many of us, is further complicated by the certitude we observe in opposing forces—as John McDermott states, “Modern man is also a victim of clarity. Much of our difficulty proceeds from the demand for certitude and an inability to recognize and live with the irreducibility of shadows.” Contending with doubt, however, is a central concern both of rabbinic law and mystical contemplation. For the Hasidic lineage of Izhbitz-Radzin, doubt was sewed into the fabric of reality since the beginning of the world, reimagining the Garden of Eden’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather as ilana d’sfeika—“the Tree of Doubt,” typifying this world as a Cosmic Question Mark. We shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter goodness and evil commingling, as they are all branches of this world tree intertwining and growing in and amongst each other. “Nothing in this world is certain, the first Rebbe of Izhbitz, the Mei Shiloach teaches us, “and we have no idea why Hashem does anything." For this dynasty, doubt is the foundation for both agency and faith, the necessary conditions for serving the Holy One. Inner work and spiritual refinement flows from acting “as if” without full knowledge of Truth. We are gifted with doubt to cultivate discernment.
I share this Tree of Doubt as a prayer—that we can feel that our direct experiences with being human are not aberrant, but that they are purposeful and powerful, and that our ancestors have already made space for them, sanctified and elevated them. We can connect our doubts to the Roots from which they came. What would a Tu Bishvat seder which honored the Tree of Doubt look like? As the seder as conceived by anonymous author of the Pri Etz Hadar is for the purpose of tikkun—rectifying the Tree of Life through eating various fruits, what would be eaten to tend to honor doubt?
In our Jewish psychedelic explorations, even as we so often strive for clarity and healing and vision, let us find space to live with those “irreducible shadows,” with the potential to transform safek into sipuk—contentment—with the gift of our capacity to live in the face of '“maybe.”
