Tevet: Let’s get physical
This past month, I had the honor of attending Limmud Festival in the United Kingdom, a weeklong gathering of cross-communal Jewish learning which brings together the world’s most dynamic Jewish educators, performers and teachers for lectures, workshops, text-study, film, meditation, discussions, exhibits and performances. As an invited speaker and presenter, I was able to share what we have begun to develop at Shefa with the hopes that the English Jewish psychedelic community can begin to organize and create their own spaces for this exploration. Over this week, I was met by excited rabbis, skeptical scholars, and young people who are already doing this work intuitively. As Shefa begins to expand outward, I’d like to share some reflections of my time on the road, attempting to embody what often feels too abstract.
Textual Healing
One of the most exciting aspect of Limmud is the full range of Jewish learning across modalities, disciplines, and applications. It presents Jewish people as learners and teachers in full appreciation of the diversity of our interests, strengths, and ways of connecting to our heritage and each other on somewhat equal footing. While most of my sessions at Limmud were geared towards modeling Jewish psychedelic practice, what felt like a hiddush for me and those attending my sessions was centering Jewish texts in the midst of teaching and speaking about psychedelic Judaism. Since I began this inquiry for myself and founded Shefa, I’ve found the near-obsession with identifying psychoactive substance use in our textual or archaeological record to be a bit of an unnecessary and insufficient side quest (until harder material evidence of ancient practices credibly emerges), largely because I have not found any contemporary Jewish expression to be founded upon some set of clear textual antecedents. Even “Jewish meditation” as it has come to be understood is largely translating modern, pre-modern, and ancient Jewish texts through a notion of meditation that is largely dependent on Eastern traditional postures and structures—a highly exciting endeavor and anything but straightforward. Yet, to establish and maintain some legitimacy for one’s self and to justify your pursuits to outside audiences, engaging with and speaking in the language of Jewish texts is still the best way to show your work. Limmud was the first time I was able to present a set of magical and mystical texts, based on the categories of spiritual experiences found within Dr. David Yaden’s excellent book on the topic, as the basis for taking seriously Jewish psychedelic experiences—all non-ordinary states of consciousness really—as a worthwhile pursuit of curiosity and personal investigation for individuals and like-minded communities. Like other modern Jewish pursuits invested in being in dialogue with our textual traditions—Halakhic egalitarianism, Orthodox feminism, environmentalism, queer Torah—the vanguard of Psychedelic Judaism should get comfortably conversant in the ways in which our ancestors shifted pursued shifting consciousness and attempted to share their journeys with the world.
God Gave Us the Medicine In Our Bodies
Coming into relationship and being in conversation with a number of British Jews about how something like Shefa could take root in the UK, the first topic of discussion was our success with ketamine in a retreat setting and our plans for researching programs in areas like Oregon and Colorado where adult use of natural medicines has been (imperfectly, IMHO) authorized by state legislatures. Much like the US’s Controlled Substance Act of 1971, the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 also criminalizes almost all psychoactive substances, although with a maximum sentence of seven years for violation. Medical cannabis is legal and anyone who wants it can get it, and while underground ketamine and addiction is on the rise, its prescription as an off-label treatment for depression cannot legally be administered outside of a physician’s office or hospital. So for these UK Jews, who also want to keep their activities legal and above ground, what are they to do? They can start where we started—integration, learning, creating relationships with researchers, therapists, and spiritual health providers. Learning from my experience, however, I recommended to this group—and to all of us—to engage with psychedelic breathwork in a group context as often as possible. It is legal, powerful, and healing. It is serious place to begin inquiry around ritual, ethics, and harm reduction, creating self-organizing communities of practice. As this month of Tevet teaches us, what can be experienced in the human body is enjoyed by the body of the entire Cosmos—consciousness experiencing itself from a first-person perspective. At the end of our Limmud breathwork ceremony, a participant came up to me to ask for a hug, and with tears in their eyes, said “I never knew anything like this was possible.”
We should make very good use of this capacity we all share.
A Nation of Integration
To what may integration be compared? Putting another a piece into a puzzle? Navigating our ship through a storm? Slowly letting a photograph develop or nurturing a plant to grow? As we sat in a circle on my last night of Limmud, participants’ stories of psychedelic transformation, quandary, healing, and confusion emerged. One member of the circle, a thirty-year veteran of Limmud, commented on how seemingly impossible it felt to have such a gathering for Limmudniks who have had these experiences—for him, this was his integration, to bring more parts of himself together, to put down more masks, and to be authentic with himself and others about how ayahuasca use has enhanced his well-being, his connection to Judaism, and the indebtedness he feels to the whole of existence. With these new relationships forged in ritual space of safety and vulnerability, I felt like a seed was planted, that I was simply passing on what was given to me.
Next Steps?
Ooooh the ‘what now’ part of the organizational development plan is such a slippery edge for me! Through text study, breath and dance, and integration, along with numerous private conversations (some of the quite tense), I know that the UK Jews are in a good place to good work in this space. Folks like Rabbi Danny Newman and Micah Gold are intent on supporting Jewish psychedelic exploration that benefits the individual and the collective, figuring out what a “Shefa” will look like in a community far from us in the States, with its own challenges and opportunities. As Tevet is the month, as our Sages teach, “a body can delight in another body,” the idea of other organizations, other entities inspired by our work here, moving toward a psychedelic Judaism together, is inspiring and wonderous. The next step, it seems right now, is to let it unfold.
With blessings for the new moon,
Z
