These are interesting times, to say the least, for Jews, for whom the rallying cry Am Yisrael Chai has gained renewed relevance.
These are even more interesting times for Jews whose motto seems to be Am Yisrael High, and who are creating what is being called a new Judaism inspired by psychedelic drugs.
The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, who synthesized lysergic diethylamide in 1938 and accidentally discovered its hallucinogenic properties in 1943, called LSD “medicine for the soul.” He also referred to LSD as “my problem child,” and governments around the world saw drugs like acid as dangerous poisons that threatened the mental health of individuals and undermined the social order in general. Prohibiting psychoactive substances, natural and synthetic, only sent them underground, which eventually seems to have led to a shifting of foundations of our thinking about psychedelic drugs.
Popular interest in drugs, especially hallucinogens, seems to have finally achieved cultural escape velocity. Legalization and decriminalization in the United States and elsewhere have opened the door to legal and legitimate study of a wide range of psychoactive substances, and a good deal of less official study as well.
For a truly mind-blowing experience, all one has to do is visit the web site of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which offers plenty of evidence for the old Cold War motto ‘better living through chemistry.’ Or visit any school classroom in the industrialized world and note that half of the ten percent of the children who have ADHD or related disorders are being medicated.
‘Mother’s Little Helper’
The use of hallucinogens in psychological treatment has become especially popular, because of its apparent success in treating depression, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, and trauma. Ayelet Waldman’s 2018 book A Really Good Day seems to have led to micro-dosing becoming a go-to therapy for women juggling career and parenthood – apparently their husbands are too drunk or stoned to do the cleaning and cooking and shopping.
It all sounds a bit like the quick fix that valium supposedly offered to understandably frustrated Second-Wave feminists, memorably articulated in the Rolling Stones 1966 song about the popularity of ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ among housewives.
But the stakes are now higher, so to speak. Michael Pollan’s best-selling 2018 book How to Change Your Mind in particular sparked a remarkable normalization of psychedelic drugs as relevant not just to our mental health but to our search for wisdom and meaning.
Philosophers and writers as users: Henry James, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault
Philosophers have long taken this subject seriously. Think of Henry James inhaling laughing gas, Walter Benjamin smoking hashish, Jean-Paul Sartre trying mescaline, or Michel Foucault dropping acid. Now it’s time for the rabbis, according to Madison Margolin’s Exile and Ecstasy: Growing up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground.
When it comes to religion, hallucinogens have long been relegated to ethnic ghettos, as in Carlos Castaneda’s books about a Mexican shaman, which became counterculture classics. But there were apparently chemical assists in the ‘Western’ religious traditions as well.
Oracle of Delphi
Were the prophetesses at the Oracle of Delphi under the influence of ethylene gas being admitted from fissures in the rocks beneath the site? Was the communion wine of early Christians spiked with hallucinogenic substances? Thinking about the relationship of drugs to Judaism is newer and riskier terrain.
There were many ways of rethinking Judaism in the Ashkenazic world dating back to the eighteenth century, all of them deploring the supposed sterility of traditional Judaism, which had emptied out the rituals of meaning, offering wisdom oriented only toward the proper and the conventional.
These efforts, from Chasidism to the Reform movement to Zionism, were certainly successful in their own way well into the twentieth century, but they seemed to have little to offer Jewish Baby Boomers confronting the Shoah, especially when assimilation seemed to make so many questions irrelevant.
Shlemuth ha-avodah, ‘the perfect service of God’, according to Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
It was Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a Chabadnik who was assigned by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to go on the road with Shlomo Carlebach to spread the word, who seems to have offered a different kind of alternative.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi left Chabad in 1962, after Timothy Leary guided him in his first experience with LSD. It led Schachter-Shalomi to his pursuit of shlemuth ha-avodah, “the perfect service of God,” in the form of the Jewish Renewal movement, where he met Arthur Green, a rabbinical student who was also searching for an alternative to orthodoxy.
Together these two Neo-Chasids experimented with egalitarian worship practices and new ways of community building, including interfaith dialogue. There were other experiments as well. Green’s 1968 essay Notes from the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbala – written under the pseudonym Itzik Lodger – argued that conventional Judaism had become a form of idolatry, and that LSD unmasked conventional wisdom.
The traditions of orthodoxy on the one hand, and the materialist appeals of the secular on the other, were often not deceptions or distractions.
LSD stands for ‘Let’s Start Davening’
From Green, who went on to pioneer the Havura movement, and Schachter-Shlomi, who eventually embraced Sufism and advised the Dalai Lama on how to make sure Tibetan Buddhism would survive galut, it was a short step to Yosef Needleman’s 2012 book Cannabis Chassidis, which dedicated itself to exploring ‘the Torah of drugs,’ minyanim in which LSD stands for ‘Let’s Start Davening, and new traditions in which ‘pot’ stands for ‘Put On Tefillin’.
The world’s most prominent ‘theoneurologian’ Rick Strassman, looked at the Hebrew prophets in the context of the science of the psychedelic experience in his 2014 book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible and found that they were tripping on ‘the spirit molecule.’
Psychedelic seders have been held by two Boston rabbis in Oregon, and starting in 2016 the Orthodox Union even began certifying certain marijuana products as kosher.
All of this is obvious and non-controversial to Madison Margolin, who looks at connection between Jews and psychedelic drugs from the perspective of her own travels in the land of ‘heimedelica.’
Avodah zarah for traditional Jews
It is of course deeply preposterous to traditional Jews, who reject psychoactive drugs – not simply hallucinogens like mushrooms, ayahuasca, or LSD, but marijuana, MDMA, ketamine, Adderall, cocaine, heroin, speed, roxies, and 2C-i, and a wide variety of drugs most people have never heard of.
For them, psychedelic drugs are a form of avodah zarah, or unfamiliar and dangerous spiritual practices, at least to the uninitiated. They have a point. Just think of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or Noah’s discovery of wine – neither ended well.
The danger is especially acute if, as Margolin suggests, the tradition is not at all what we thought it was. Jewish stoners love to remind us that the Besht himself was an herbalist and devotee of pipe-smoking, though their insistence that traces of marijuana have been found in his pipes seems dubious. This approach goes back even further and deeper. Was Moses exposed to DMT given off by the Burning Bush? Were the rye matzahs that the Israelites took with them when they fled Egypt contaminated with hallucinogenic ergot fungus?
Was the revelation at Sinai a mass hallucination caused by the psychoactive properties of mannah?
Was the showbread of the Temple ritual similarly tainted, and did the holy ointment used to anoint priests contain kaneh-bosun? Get it? ‘Canna-bis’! Did the tabernacle incense induced visions, and did the tabernacle wine contain psychoactive alkaloids? Was the Exodus Exodosed?
Hin-Jews
Margolin, perhaps the most prominent reporter on the Jewish drug beat – yes, that’s a thing now – has a distinguished yiches. Her parents were ‘Hin-Jews’, devotees of Ram Dass, who as a Harvard professor named Richard Alpert, along with Timothy Leary (Margolin’s father was Leary’s lawyer) pioneered the academic study of LSD and in 1964 published a version of the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead under the title The Psychedelic Experience.
Ram Dass, who was raised Jewish but popularized Hippie Hinduism in his infamous 1971 book Be Here Now, explained: “I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.”
Exile and Ecstasy is a bildungsroman with a difference, since it includes tripping on three continents, four if you count Los Angeles and Berkeley separately, with an especially eye-opening visit to the Na Nach movement in Tzfat.
Margolin’s premise is that we are looking at a new form of Judaism emerging, a fully-blown Jewish Renaissance that explores not just the similarities but the causalities between the psychedelic experience and Judaism. But the argument is often unconvincing.
Always, and all religions?
Can we really be made to believe that ”marijuana has always been part of Jewish life”? That Jewish mysticism and indeed all of Judaism, and for that matter all religion and even human civilization and consciousness itself was enabled by chemical assistance? That our experience of reality itself is a hallucination?
Much of this will seem unsupported by evidence. It can seem illogical, ignorant, irrelevant, juvenile, naive, or just plain wrong. But it may be more accurate to say it is unsupportable by sober evidence. Margolin, whose account of taking DMT is underwhelming, does at times approach this whole issue in a cautionary way. If she never quite penetrates the worlds of orthodox Judaism, nor does she ever really experience psychedelia as a committed insider.
The world of illusion
Psychedelic means no more – or no less – than mind-manifesting. But part of the problem is the impossible task of expressing, describing, or translating the experience.
Nor do we have a clear sense of whether the wisdom being sought after is simply what the Zohar calls the world of illusion, or whether the ego death that some experience while using hallucinogenic drugs is precisely the nullification of the self recommended in Kabbalah.
Ultimately, Margolin’s book may simply encourage the reader to embrace the classic denunciation of drug use less as sacramental than as mere bourgeois individualism, as privileged escapism – that’s the way Martin Buber read Aldous Huxley.
Superficial and cliched references to tikkun olam
Pleasure is surely an important form of knowledge and experience, but beyond Margolin’s embarassingy superficial and cliched references to tikkun olam, one misses a sense of the social, the political. Where, for example, is the attention, so central to Judaism, to justice, aside from the problems of drug laws, which acid’s more clueless or perhaps simply tone-deaf Jewish advocates have compared to Pharoah’s army?
Advocates of ‘Jewdelica’ make much of the fact that there are no question marks in Torah, but of course there’s no punctuation there at all, which invites us to wonder whether psychedelics are for Jews less a shortcut than a detour on the Royal Road to enlightenment.
So this book makes for lively reading, but by the end Margolin has sidestepped the question of whether drugs and Judaism are different versions of the same thing, whether one inspired the other, or the other inspired the one.
Instead, she suggests that they are interacting in ways that mean a Jewish Renaissance is upon us. Perhaps, but the Renaissances tend to be followed by Reformations.
‘Lighting up’ may be more about lightening up than about enlightenment.
If LSD is a spiritual tool, we ought to ask ourselves what it is we’re building. When Margolin suggests that LSD might even hold the answer to the seemingly eternal political conflicts in the Middle East, we might think: First things first, especially lately.
The Mishnah’s Elazar ben Azariah teaches us that where there is no bread there is no Torah, meaning that sustaining life must precede the search for wisdom, not to mention fun. It’s less often noted that he then says that where there is no Torah there is no bread. Both, Margolin understandably suggests, are worth a L’Chaim.
Exile and Ecstasy: Growing up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground
Madison Margolin
Hay House, 2023
cover illutration: Primo Gill, 2026
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