Torah/תורה: May 2003 Archives

Upon doing a search for “arthur green”+lsd, I discovered an incredible article, Drugs and Jewish Spirituality, from Tikkun Magazine. I’d love to excerpt highlights, but for now here are two powerful closing paragraphs:

Apart from legal impediments, why shouldn’t psychedelic drugs be used in Jewish life as they have been in other faith traditions — as a tool for wrenching open the mind and heart to “God’s presence”? Why not embrace the spiritual power of the psychedelic experience and try to elevate it, as we do with sexuality, above the recreational and into the sacramental zone? Why shouldn’t the roster of Jewish life–passages include the opportunity to have a psychedelic experience (perhaps after the age of forty, Judaism’s traditional age of enlightenment and mystical initiation, or perhaps at an earlier stage of development) — with rabbinic guidance and community approval? If Abraham’s Voice and Moses’ Burning Bush and the Revelation at Sinai are the archetypal encounters that inform our faith, why not strive to recreate such experiences throughout our “nation of priests”?

[...]

The fact is that psychedelic drugs have already been part of the “sacramental roster” for many baby–boomer Jews, who sensed while under the influence that “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!” (Gen. 28:16). Rather than emulating Jacob and erecting a pillar at the site of their discovery, they have been forced by two decades of repressive social policy to bury and hide it. Like the Marranos of old, they have bought respectability and influence with silence — a choice that has facilitated many innovations in American Jewish life. But that silence has also left our children to fend for themselves. It has left psychedelic voyagers without a Jewish port–of–call — and tens of thousands of human beings to wallow in prison without Jewish protest. It has left the heritage of the Sixties vulnerable to slander, while the “War on Drugs” rages out of control, with inquisitors and cowards calling the shots. Source: tikkun.org

The article I was looking for was written pseudonymously by the Dean of the Rabbinical School I hope to attend this fall. Also, sort–of on–topic, is the new book by Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, which I read parts of in a bookstore today. Written by Eric Schlosser, who also wrote the superduper (scary) Fast Food Nation. I can wait until “Reefer” comes out in paperback.