Tammuz - How to Transform A Jewish Psychedelic Vision into Reality
שׁוּבִי נַפְשִׁי לִמְנוּחָיְכִי כִּי־יְהוָה גָּמַל עָלָיְכִי׃
“Return, my dear spirit, to being at rest, for the Holy One has been good to you” — Psalms 116:7
As of this month, Shefa is entering its fourth year, and at its inception, one of the first questions potential funders, supporters, or participants asked was, “When are you going to have your first retreat?” I recoiled—as of 2020, I had only had my first psychedelic journeys at Johns Hopkins three years prior, and I certainly had no experience guiding or facilitating this work for individuals, let alone a whole group of people. And anyway, I had founded Shefa to provide pastoral, educational, and community support for the experiences of others, certainly not to engage in underground medicine work! Nevertheless, I realized the ongoing need to explore legal avenues for Jewishly-rooted psychedelic experience as an obligation to both Jewish education and psychedelic harm reduction; not only did I consistently hear that Jews felt ill-equipped to infuse their experiences with Jewish wisdom and practice, but too often in the spaces where they were doing this work, they felt like some aspect of their Jewishness was being missed at best and actively required to be exiled at worst.
So, we researched and experimented. We first tried a BYO cannabis Shabbat retreat in 2022, facilitated by Daniel McQueen from the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness and a great team of Jewish educators who brought their unique gifts and perspectives. Our law firm did extensive research to see where we, as a 501c3 who wish to stay above-ground, could work with psilocybin, and Jamaica seemed to be the only real option. The project was exciting, and problematic—the cost per person was completely inaccessible to the people who could use this experience the most, and working with outside experienced facilitation teams meant that incorporating Jewish spiritual traditions required a lot of negotiation. After a few months of planning, we decided to pause this direction and regroup. Then the High Holidays and Sukkot of 2023 happened, and we came to shul and saw that Simchat Torah, and the world, would never be the same.
The events of October 7th and the ensuing weeks, when social and communal loyalties quickly realigned, sent shockwaves of confusion and betrayal through many typically moderate and liberal Jewish psychedelic explorers’ spirits, and the feeling of being othered in psychedelic spaces as Jews only intensified for some. Given the great deal of suffering and a reawakened awareness of latent trauma, I felt a great obligation to finally put all of the pieces I have developed into one container for Jewish psychedelic experience, yet one key ingredient was missing. What medicine will we use, and how can I learn how to hold space with it?
The Babylonian Talmud captures an early rabbinic teaching which notes that the Hebrew word for “placed” and “drug”—sam—are homophones, and so the verse which reads, “And this is the Torah which Moshe placed before Israel” also connotes that Moshe drugged Israel with Torah! What is the connection between Torah and a drug? The Talmud teaches that Torah can both give life and take life—it is in the hands of the ones wielding it to learn their craft well so they can preserve life. I began to consider that ketamine seems to be one of the medicines that can evoke great admiration for its life-saving status as well as consternation and fear for being overprescribed, abused, or simply “not really a psychedelic.” My previous experiences with ketamine (medically-prescribed and supervised) were profoundly beautiful and deeply Jewish, yet a number of my mentors in the space shared their reservations with Shefa utilizing it in our offerings. I stayed with this guidance for a number of years, yet after October 7th, the potential benefits of working with a legal substance within a safe and supportive Jewish setting became more urgent than any potential reservation. After training for a week with Lauren Taus and her excellent team, and dedicating myself to more professional development in the coming year, we decided to create Shuva, our first ketamine-assisted day-long retreat, a first for any Jewish non-profit organization.
The Jewish path doggedly asserts that no matter how far we have gotten away from ourselves, our own authenticity, our values and commitments, or our physical and spiritual health and well-being, the road to return is eagerly waiting for us. This powerful, ongoing practice of self-recovery, sometimes referred to as teshuvah, is available in every new step we take. Especially in this moment of increased tensions and pressure within Jewish individual and collective consciousness, we need more time and space to make this journey back home. The concept of “return” is also a fundamental aspect of Jewish ecstatic and mystical apprehension and practice—however far out we might go into the mystical, magical, psychedelic realms, we always have to return to normal consciousness, and as the Baal Shem Tov teaches, “We must devote time to the needs of the body, eating, drinking, and working a little for our livelihood...By ceasing from serving the Holy One during these times, the soul rests and the power of intellect renews itself so that it can serve Spirit again.” This is such a delicate process, even without the use of psychoactive substances; what has become fundamental in my thinking and my creating this offering is assembling a team of facilitators I honor and trust deeply.
The idea for this retreat began with a confluence of meeting and being in relationship with great people who are doing excellent work elsewhere. First, my board secretary Erica Siegal, who has spent over a decade in the field of psychedelic harm reduction, trauma-informed psychotherapy, and ketamine-assisted care, has been a mentor to me in understanding the ethical implications of holding space for others in group settings. Justin Lubin and I met at Psychedelic Science ‘23, and his deep knowledge of Torah, concern for non-hierarchical and affordable psychedelic care, and experience in developing personal and group ketamine protocols gave me a loving partner with an adaptable framework to apply to our Shuva circle (an added bonus was that his amazing partner, Allison, joined us as a facilitator and brought so much kindness and presence along with her). And finally, Dr. Mimi Schultz, without whom none of this could have been possible. A fellow Berkeley Jew, Mimi reached out to me after October 7th wanting to help serve our community and help provide medical and psychiatric support in a Jewishly-informed medicine space. Her seemingly bottomless well of compassion and humility informed every coffee meeting at Saul’s Deli, every dosing decision, every movement she made in the medicine space. Through this work, I got to witness excellent being done well, all while creating a facilitation culture of respect and trust, reaching consensus about programmatic and operational decisions, and serving the Holy One through our work.
As this was our first outing with providing a controlled substance to screened participants, we decided to promote this offering through friends and colleagues, specifically geared toward folks who have had some psychedelic background and were eager to participate in a Jewish experience. Over a couple months we found ten participants—a “ketaminyan,” from diverse Jewish backgrounds, life stages, and intentions—to be part of Shuva. Our facilitation and operations team made the commitment that each point of contact with our participants would be part of the medicine experience—informational emails, questions about payment, preparation calls—were all in service of building a container of trust and safety for vulnerability and authenticity had the best possible chance of emerging during our day-long retreat. In his work on the fundamentals of Jewish faith and theology, Rabbi Yoseph Albo writes that the shefa—divine flow—does not rest upon an individual unless they have prepared themselves “in the manner of Ark of the Covenant.” We prepare ourselves, the space, the guidance, and our participants to hold the potential for encountering fullness and brokenness, like the two sets of tablets which sit together, in a plain and unremarkable wooden box, gilded in gold.
“Buy the ticket, take the ride.” For years, Hunter Thompson’s famous quote has rattled through my body before leading High Holiday davening, going on roller coasters, and now evidently, holding space for medicine work. Our team arrived at the amazing, beautiful, and wonderfully hospitable Urban Adamah, where we would greet participants to screen blood pressure and review dosing decisions before smudging and entering into the yurt to start our ketamine ceremony. Our “altar” or makom kavanah was adorned with books of Jewish wisdom and guidance and beloved ritual objects from people’s families, and before dosing, I led a prayer for protection and healing based on the Priestly Blessing. With the music turned up and the Mindfolds brought down, we encouraged participants to acknowledge their intentions for the experience, yet to be as fully present and engaged as possible with whatever the medicine is showing them. Our team opted for a “low and slow” method to dosing, choosing to administer up to two separate intramuscular shots of ketamine, not taking anyone too far out beyond the shore, and making space for the participant to say if and when they were ready for more. This approach felt key to the experience—exercising personal authority in psychedelic and Jewish space. I’ve encountered so many stories about what I call “the silent no,” where the social structures of psychedelic gatherings do not always allow someone’s internal red light to emerge but rather yield to the larger mass of group dynamic, with deleterious effects. Everyone ultimately opted for the second shot, but it was their choice to go further when it felt right for them. It’s even likely that folks could have had more medicine overall, and I look forward to more conversation with our medical staff, facilitators, and participants about how and how much we dose and how it aligns with our goals of this offering.
As everyone began to come down after an hour or so, I landed our ketamine-powered Jewish spaceship with a prayer of gratitude to the Creator based on the first chapter of Bereshit, and our integration period began. As our ancestors did before us, we ate a festive meal after an apprehension of Cosmic majesty, and worked with Justin Lubin’s integration wheel and “shift language” method for reflecting back simple yet powerful statements about their experience to continue to work with, like a prayer or a mantra. We had big hopes for this phase of the day—folks can find their shift language and then do some singing in the yurt! And do some non-verbal response art therapy! And walk mindfully along the rows of the farm! And…our staff took stock of the scene and saw that most people were feeling complete—it was the end of a long day, the end of a weekend, and the energy of the group felt ready for a send-off. In the future, I’d like to think through this retreat with some backward-design techniques in mind—if the “return” is the focus of Shuva, to what do we want them to return? How do we consciously hold the energy and goodwill of the room before releasing it to the wind? A dance party? A psychedelic-inspired Open Studio Process? Especially with ketamine’s very short window of neural plasticity, the end of the day should have a good amount of embodied and structured activity to ground all of the very far out journeys most people went on in the ceremony.
And now, I meditate on the feedback from our participants, facilitators, and board of directors to think about the future of offering these retreats, iterating our very solid experiential model, and continuing to make more room for Torah and Spirit to inspire how we do it in a good way. After so much foundational work, this vision is now coming into reality before my eyes, a framework for Jewish psychedelic exploration which is dynamic, pluralistic, accessible, trauma-informed, ethically-driven, and scalable. I hope for this work to be in service of the health and well-being of the Jewish people and all people.
May our deeply felt visions, however amorphous, find the stable and wild grace to grow into the realities we wish to live in.
Hodesh tov,
Z
