Adar - Better than Schnapps, but Not Shabbos…?
It’s astonishing to think that in less than a week, Harvard will host a symposium dedicated to exploring the practices and legal pathways of monotheistic traditions engaging with contemporary psychedelic use. Just seven years ago, when I completed my participation in the Johns Hopkins Religious Professionals Study (RPS), I was desperate to find sources, voices—anything from my own tradition—that could help me integrate my first major experiences with psilocybin. At the time, the internet offered only a smattering of speculative theories on psychedelic influences in the Bible and abstract comparative phenomenologies. But nothing, at least for me, reached into the kishkes—nothing told the story from the inside out.
That changed when I encountered Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s firsthand account of taking LSD with Tim Leary on his day off from Camp Ramah, one night in 1963.
Reb Zalman’s recollection of that evening in Cohasset, MA, was originally published in 1968 by Dr. Ralph Metzner as part of The Ecstatic Adventure: Reports of Chemical Explorations of the Inner World. This version is widely known, yet Reb Zalman himself noted its limitations:
“This version is an edited verbatim of the report. Since my colleagues were rabbis I could use much Hebrew and Yiddish. Many biblical and talmudic allusions (of great significance to me) had to be omitted for the sake of the general reader. This report looks pale to me now. It is a poor compromise. Yet there is a personal freshness I did not wish to edit out.”
As valuable as this trip report is—an almost contemporaneous account of his first LSD experience—the necessary omissions dilute its richness, particularly for an engaged Jewish reader. The unfiltered flow of Zalman’s psychedelic Torah, bursting with references and insights, remains largely unseen.
In 2019, I received a copy of the full, unedited version from Reb Zalman’s archives at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives thanks to my dear friend Professor Sam Shonkoff, whose research on psychedelics and Neo-Hasidism is groundbreaking. The forty-page document is dense with Yiddishisms, quotes from sefarim, and references to people and places from the sixties—essentially a closed text for the contemporary reader. Since then, I’ve been working to elucidate this foundational Jewish-psychedelic document, footnoting Reb Zalman’s streams and tributaries of thought with the help of Josh Fleet, Ami Silver, and Chana Raskin.
As we enter a new chapter of Jewish psychedelic exploration—with the Harvard symposium, Shefa’s expansion into more community-based programming, and many more friends and allies joining forces—it feels vital to share this text, even as a work in progress.
One of the most exhilarating moments in Reb Zalman’s trip report is when he recalls dancing and shouting, “It’s better than schnapps! It’s better than schnapps!”—expressing that the ecstatic sensations of LSD surpassed the joy of saying le’chayim at Hasidic gatherings. It’s a rallying cry, a signal of a new, innovative mode of spiritual engagement. Early in my own journey, this moment electrified me. But over time, I’ve become more drawn to a subtler reflection, recorded days—perhaps weeks—after the LSD wore off:
“I kept on remarking to Leary in the middle: that it isn’t solemn enough here. I expected that there should be a kind of grandeur, though not a long-faced sort of thing. It’s the kind of thing that happens around the Rebbe. And since I experienced some of this awe by consecration outside LSD, and it didn’t happen inside LSD, I was beginning to wonder, you know, this is part of the re-assessment.”
Reb Zalman recognizes something missing in the psychedelic experience—“solemnity” and “awe by consecration.” Not that it can’t be found—heaven forbid!—but the full picture of his experience mirrors so many of our own. The truths revealed in moments of ecstatic insight can feel like exclamation points, only to fade over time into question marks.
As the Jewish psychedelic movement coalesces, my hope is that this trip report can serve as a foundational document—an anchor in our ongoing exploration. Though I never had the chance to meet Reb Zalman in the flesh, I often sense that he already did everything, and yet, he’s still cheering us on to go even further. We can follow his lekech crumbs toward a more intentionally Jewish set and setting, as he himself imagined:
“What I would want to do, if I have the opportunity again, is to control it in the shtibel setting, with more Jewish paraphernalia—music, pictures, space arrangement. But I would also want to have someone who is going to be the ground control, to keep on calling attention to some Jewish program, because I was complaining before, saying that it took hold of me and I had nothing to do with it.”
May this Adar and its Purim inspire us to attend not only to the ad d’lo yada schnapps moments, but also to the quiet, contemplative moments of solemnity—those that are possible, necessary, and deeply healing in a world that so often rushes past them.
