Four Who Entered: A Jewish Reflection on Bicycle Day

“Did you know that the very day on which LSD was invented was also the day of the Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw? I feel that there is some profound connection here, the words for which elude me.”

—Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

There are some synchronicities so dense with mystery that they refuse to be interpreted. They must be approached like fire—reverently, trembling, barefoot.

April 19, 1943: In a sterile Swiss lab, Albert Hofmann ingests LSD and opens the gates of consciousness. In the hell of occupied Poland, starved and orphaned Jewish fighters rise in the Warsaw Ghetto, refusing to go like sheep to the slaughter. One man receives a vision that splits reality open. Another throws a Molotov cocktail at a tank with the last strength of a ravaged soul.

Reb Zalman saw in this shared date not a coincidence, but a cosmic koan—a signal from the fabric of being itself. If we follow his intuition, we do not arrive at answers. We arrive at a threshold. The day of vision and the day of resistance—what lies between them?

Perhaps: a cry. A rupture. A shattering of vessels.

In Shivitti: A Vision, Holocaust survivor and writer Ka-Tzetnik 135633 undergoes a series of LSD treatments in the 1970s under the care of Dr. Jan Bastiaans. His goal: to confront the nightmare of Auschwitz, which he could neither remember nor forget. During these sessions, he enters a state he calls the "Auschwitz eternal present," reliving scenes of torment while simultaneously encountering realms of vast, terrifying light.

He sees not only horror but something beyond it—visions that touch the Infinite. Yet he returns again and again to one unbearable image: the face of the girl he loved, devoured in flame.

It is in this unspeakable simultaneity that theology must begin. The God of Shivitti is not a protector. God is both present and absent, concealed and unbearable. The name of the book itself—Shivitti, “I have set YHVH before me always” (Psalm 16:8)—becomes a searing paradox. What does it mean to “set God before you” when what you see is the crematorium?

In another milk can buried beneath the Warsaw Ghetto, a different witness cries out: Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe. A master of interiority, he spent his life reaching for direct experience of God—not only in study, but in practice, in feeling, in altered states of consciousness cultivated through prayer, song, and silence. In Bnei Machshava Tova, he wrote of forming small groups to train the soul to feel the Divine. Not to believe—to feel.

And when the fires came, he did not stop. In his final Ghetto sermons, collected as Esh Kodesh, he asks again and again: How can one pray when the heavens are silent? How does one set God before them when God seems to have fled? His answers never resolve into comfort. But they burn with longing. They burn with love.

If Ka-Tzetnik’s LSD visions cracked open the unhealed wound of Auschwitz, the Piaseczner’s sermons opened a passage into the fire—not to escape, but to find the Divine within it.

The Kabbalists taught that God’s light was so vast it had to be withdrawn for the world to exist. That the vessels meant to contain Divine light shattered, and that our cosmos is built from the shards of that catastrophe. April 19, 1943 is one such shard: two eruptions, one of ecstatic insight, one of unspeakable pain, joined in an unbearable harmony.

What LSD unlocked in Hofmann, and what Ka-Tzetnik and the Piaseczner saw in their respective vision-journeys, is not a world beyond suffering but a world saturated with it—a world in which every ecstatic opening might also pierce us with the truth of exile. Exile from ourselves. From each other. From the Divine.

Reb Zalman may have sensed that the molecule and the uprising, the visions and the voices buried in the Ghetto, were all aspects of revelation in a post-revelatory world. That LSD came to us as a kind of p’tach eliyahu—a mystical key—not to bliss, but to da’at, to penetrating knowledge. And that the fighters of the Ghetto, in their final act, offered a revelation of their own: not just martyrdom, but emunah—a defiant faith in the soul's refusal to be erased.

What does it mean to gaze at the Infinite through a psychospiritual aperture opened by LSD while Auschwitz smolders in the background?

Ka-Tzetnik shows us: it means you scream. It means you tremble. It means you call on the Name even when the Name is aflame.

The Piaseczner shows us: you pray anyway.

It means you live in the tension that Reb Zalman pointed toward but never tried to resolve: the LSD molecule, the Warsaw Ghetto, the buried manuscripts, and the wounded mind as four doors to the same fire.

And maybe—maybe—on that day, as the veil thinned in Basel and burned in Warsaw, the Holy One wept from both sides of the flame.

And now—here we are.

The world burns still.

Gaza. Ukraine. Congo. The forests. The seas. The microplastics in breast milk. The thin membrane of Earth’s atmosphere. The ache in our streets, in our feeds, in our families, in our own fractured minds. Assholes with chainsaws and rocket ships. Polarization so total it feels cosmic. Grief braided with numbness. Rage without root. Grief without grave.

And in the midst of this slow-motion collapse, psychedelics rise.

From underground ceremonies to FDA trials. From festival tents to lab coat drag and corporate portfolios. Molecules once whispered about are now published in Nature. Trauma once considered unhealable is now mapped, modeled, monetized. Insurance codes are being written for the soul.

Psychedelics are entering the mainstream—but they arrive limping. Shackled by biomedical reductionism. Drained of myth. Flattened by protocols. Emptied of the sacred. Called “medicines” but stripped of the Mystery. And yet—even so—they often work. People are finding healing, glimpsing light, remembering how to pray in the forest of their own body.

But let us not forget the fire.

Reb Zalman’s koan echoes still: what does it mean that a molecule of revelation was born on the day of an uprising, in a world so utterly abandoned?

What does it mean that altered states are being re-sanctioned as the planet unravels?

Perhaps it means the same thing it did then: that the rupture is the revelation.

That we are still living in the Auschwitz eternal present—and still longing for the Shivitti moment when God’s face is set before us, even if that face is too bright to bear.

That the Piaseczner’s call to cultivate spiritual experience is more urgent now than ever, because without it, all our protocols are ash. That the ecstatic and the ethical are not separate paths. That to touch the Infinite while ignoring the suffering of others is not a psychedelic awakening—it is a spiritual bypass.

So we stand again at the edge of the veil.

Psychedelics can open it. But they will not walk us through. For that, we need integral intentionality. We need to tap into our lineage. We need accountability. We need the voices in the milk cans, that are surviving climate crises, generations of folks missing generational wealth, women who stitch the tears from their miscarriages into their tallesim. Like the badass old growth Redwoods and ponderosa pines (and not that "over-harvested monoculture bullshit"), we need Torahs that have survived fire.

The mainstream will try to scrub the sacred from the molecule.

Our work is to remember that the power of these few molecules teach us that every molecule is always sacred, smudged with the Creator's fingerprints. That they are all forever born, in a moment of unfathomable heat and pressure and rupture and entanglement, thrust out into the Forever and still going. And that somehow, we find ourselves in an echo of that same moment of Divine irritation, forever in whatever spooky action at a distance this psychedelic passion play is now--the suffering! the death! and the resurrection of the FDA approval process! That these molecules have re-entered into the consciousness of this culture not as a bliss escape, but as a key—one found in a time of ultimate despair.

And perhaps—perhaps—psychedelics are not here to help us transcend the burning world, but to help us feel it fully. To widen the heart. To hear the cries. To set YHVH before us in the midst of rubble, and ask: What now?

If Hofmann opened the gate, if the Piaseczner held it, if Ka-Tzetnik walked through it on his knees, if Zalman saw the game—then it is our turn.

Not just to heal.

But to witness.

And maybe, as my living teacher Rabbi Mimi Feigelson adds, to play the game as fully as we can.

And to act from that place, where the veil is thin and the soul remembers what it came here to do.