Introduction
Psychedelics have led neuroscientists and policymakers to employ the language of theology and spirituality, yet scholars of religion have been strangely absent from the conversation.Footnote 1 This has resulted in a lack of attunement to important phenomenological and cultural complexities, which bears both theoretical and ethical problems. I propose that the field of psychedelic studies would benefit immensely from incorporating more case studies from particular religious communities and traditions, with special attention to the hermeneutical dynamics at play. Indeed, there is no psychedelic experience or religious experience as such; there are rather ongoing acts of interpretation, ceaselessly situated within cultural, biographical, and ecological contexts that continually refashion the very frames and conditions of experience. This hermeneutical circle animates a question at the heart of this article: how do particular traditions shape psychedelic experiences, and how do those experiences in turn reshape traditions? Concrete examples of this interpretive interplay help us think more deeply and critically about both psychedelics and religion alike.
Here, I will consider the case of neo-Hasidism. Hasidism itself is a Jewish mystical movement that emerged in eighteenth-century Poland, and neo-Hasidism refers to the phenomenon of non-Hasidic Jews drawing upon Hasidism for purposes of spiritual or cultural renewal. The first wave of neo-Hasidism was a largely literary movement born in early-twentieth-century Europe; the second wave swelled from the American counterculture of the 1960s and was more overtly mystical, spawning various communal and ritual innovations.Footnote 2 I will trace formative intersections between psychedelics and neo-Hasidism from the mid-1950s until the war on drugs of the early 1970s,Footnote 3 and the centerpiece of this discussion will be a study of the original, unpublished trip report of a highly influential rabbi’s first LSD experience.Footnote 4 As a whole, this examination sheds light not only on historical interplays between neo-Hasidism and psychedelics but also more broadly on the hermeneutics of psychedelics and particular religious traditions. The latter consideration is especially crucial for those who want to understand the cultural significance of psychedelics, particularly as these substances enter the mainstream and intersect increasingly with religious traditions throughout the world.
A Growth-Edge in Psychedelic Studies
For roughly half a century, there has been a near consensus among academic scholars of religion that there is no perennial “religious” or “mystical” experience as such that is transcultural or transhistorical. Even if there were indeed some common experiential core, it would be virtually impossible to identify it, let alone discuss it, without projecting one’s own personal background and biases.Footnote 5 Meanwhile, the burgeoning field of psychedelic studies tends to draw upon classic essentializations, such as William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Walter Terence Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy (1960).Footnote 6 For example, in the landmark scientific article of 2006, which proclaimed that “psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences” and largely inaugurated today’s so-called psychedelic renaissance, the Johns Hopkins University team note that their “Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire” “is based on the classic descriptive work … by Stace (1960), and it provides scale scores for each of seven domains of mystical experiences: internal unity … ; external unity… ; transcendence of time and space; ineffability and paradoxicality … ; sense of sacredness (awe); noetic quality … ; and deeply felt positive mood (joy, peace, and love).”Footnote 7 It is hardly necessary to argue today in the field of religious studies why these “seven domains of mystical experience” offer a culturally specific caricature.Footnote 8 Indeed, the modern, Protestant, individualistic underpinnings of the Hopkins study were manifest where each participant was encouraged to wear “an eye mask to block external visual distraction” and “to focus their attention on their inner experiences throughout the session.”Footnote 9 Moreover, the Eurocentric tones of this mysticism were on display where all subjects were instructed to don “headphones through which a classical music program was played. The same music program was played for all participants in all sessions,” regardless of any religious or cultural diversity among subjects.Footnote 10 In short, the “set and setting” of the study corresponded culturally to the very definition of mystical experience that the questionnaire would ultimately measure.
The Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire produces definitional and phenomenological quandaries alike, given the vast diversity of experiences reported and represented across different cultures and communities throughout time and space. Moreover, there are ethical-political hazards, given how essentializations of religion or religious experience have manufactured measuring sticks for evaluating other traditions throughout the world. This has been particularly concerning, of course, when combined with sociopolitical conditions of domination, such as when metrics have been constructed and applied primarily through white, Christian, male gazes upon religious minorities in Christian lands or upon Indigenous traditions in regions that European, Christian men have colonized.Footnote 11
In psychedelic studies, specifically, one must bear in mind the historical background of European Christian settlers literally demonizing Indigenous traditions involving psychoactive plants and fungi, condemning those rituals through explicitly Christian theological frames. Almost invariably, early modern European missionaries, naturalists, and historians alike denigrated—and at times brutally suppressed—those practices as the idolatrous works of “the devil.”Footnote 12 In fact, even the more recent “mysticism” frames employed in psychedelic studies bear insidious traces of that history. Aldous Huxley, the renowned perennialist who impacted twentieth-century psychedelic cultures and studies in indelible ways,Footnote 13 quipped that only “crude formulations of some of the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy are to be found in the thought-systems of the uncivilized and so-called primitive peoples of the world.”Footnote 14 Meanwhile, Stace himself claimed that genuine mystical experiences appear in the “advanced peoples in all ages” and reinforced the modern Protestant doctrine that “Judaism is perhaps the least mystical of all the great world religions.”Footnote 15 In fact, when noting some resistance within Christianity to mystical experience, Stace goes so far as to suggest that this is only because “Christianity inherited it from Judaism.”Footnote 16 Just a few years later, Walter Pahnke affirmed Stace’s claims and hierarchies in his dissertation on psychedelics and mysticism at Harvard based on his famous “Good Friday Experiment.”Footnote 17 And the second namesake of the “Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire,” William Richards, has portrayed mysticism and religion in similarly perennialist terms.Footnote 18 In short, the Protestant-Eurocentric tones of perennialism have shaped the very foundations of psychedelic studies.
To be clear, my critique of mystical discourse in psychedelic studies is not necessarily rooted in a conviction that the field must be more aligned with secularist sensibilities, but rather that it must be more attuned to cultural variation. In this respect, my approach differs from those who bristle specifically at the “supernatural” elements inherent in the term mysticism.Footnote 19 Richards critiques the field of religious studies for being “quite far removed from the world of private devotion and faith, sometimes with heavy reliance on intellectual processes and minimal regard for the intuitive matters of the heart and the experiential domains of the religious life,” and he proposes that psychedelic research has the potential to infuse religious studies scholarship with more attention to “the experiential dimension of religion.”Footnote 20 To an extent, I agree with Richards that the field of religious studies can lean too heavily into objectifying the data of religions, without sufficient attention to phenomenological dynamics. And yet, the very centering of “private devotion and faith” and “experiential domains” itself may reflect modern western preoccupations with personal experience.Footnote 21 Moreover, too much reliance on one’s own “intuitive matters of the heart” can descend into mere projection, thereby obscuring the alterity of the materials at hand. Whereas Richards insists that “the historical, social, and political” contexts of religious language is at odds with the “experiential” and “visionary” dimensions,Footnote 22 the truth of the matter is far more dialectical. There is crucial middle ground between constructivist reductions of religious experiences to sociopolitical, historical factors, on the one hand, and perennialist reductions of concrete phenomena to dehistoricized categories, on the other.Footnote 23
Applying more hermeneutical methods to particular case studies illuminates such a middle way. Studying the confluence of psychedelics and particular religious traditions helps us understand both elements with far more nuance. If, as scholars of religion contend, culturally situated modes of interpretation are so foundational for mystical experiences, then how do practitioners refract their traditions through the prisms of psychedelic journeys? Conversely, how are psychedelics themselves—that is, formulations of their effects and significance—refracted through the prisms of traditions? Attention to specificity inevitably disrupts the perennialist assumptions about “psychedelics and religious experiences” that continue to thrive today. David Dupuis is of course correct to insist that “cultural background and social interactions organize not only the relationship to the hallucinogenic experience, but also to its very phenomenological content.”Footnote 24 Christine Hauskeller and Claudia Gertraud Schwarz go even further to suggest that “independent critical studies by scholars in humanities and social sciences who take care to examine practices in depth” thereby “break up dominant narratives about what psychedelics are.”Footnote 25 In this regard, it is most illustrative to examine particular case studies at the intersection of psychedelics and particular cultures.
Psychedelics and Neo-Hasidism
Contrary to scattered claims and hypotheses, there is no clear evidence that early Hasidim themselves ingested psychoactive substances beyond alcohol and tobacco.Footnote 26 However, psychedelics did indeed play a significant role in the historical development of neo-Hasidism, most acutely starting in the 1960s. I want to focus here on the hermeneutical dimensions of this relationship. Indeed, insofar as neo-Hasidism always involves drawing upon Hasidic sources with an eye toward new personal-cultural contexts, it is a fundamentally hermeneutical movement to begin with, so the hermeneutics of neo-Hasidic psychedelia illuminates foundational depths of the topic at hand. My central questions here are: how have Hasidic traditions shaped individuals’ psychedelic experiences and, in turn, how have psychedelics shaped interpretations of Hasidism, and how do these dialectical dynamics illuminate the confluence of psychedelics and spirituality more broadly?
As it turns out, the first major neo-Hasidic figure who commented publicly upon psychedelics was not speaking from experience. This was the German-Jewish scholar Martin Buber (1878–1965), who did more than any other single person in history to introduce Hasidism to non-Hasidim. Countering the anti-Jewish tendencies within fin-de-siècle discourse about mysticism, Buber’s earliest writings on Hasidism portrayed the movement as robustly mystical.Footnote 27 However, after Buber underwent his own personal shift “from mysticism to dialogue” in the wake of World War One, his depiction of Hasidism morphed accordingly for the next five decades.Footnote 28 As one might expect of the dialogical philosopher of “I and Thou,” Buber portrayed Hasidism as a deeply relational, community-oriented outpouring of religiosity. His single most enduring perspective on Hasidism was that it was “Kabbalah become ethos”—that is, a transformation of esoteric theosophical mysteries into the bodily, interpersonal immediacy of everyday life. In 1956—when he was 78 years old—he wrote about Aldous Huxley’s recent book The Doors of Perception, wherein Huxley described his experience with mescaline. For Buber, Huxley’s report epitomized monological mysticism, as opposed to genuine, dialogical religiosity. Buber laments that for Huxley, “There is now no distinction between inner and outer, between subject and object. It is no wonder that Huxley avoids the eyes of the people in the room with him, people who are usually dear to him—indeed, they are from the ‘world of selves.’”Footnote 29 Intriguingly, Buber notes that the inward-gazing nature of Huxley’s experience may actually say more about modernity than about mescaline, more about Huxley himself than the meat of those cacti. “Perhaps the Indians, when they required the peyote cactus, gazed at one another no less than usual; however, the man of modern culture averts his eyes from the people of his surroundings, since they belong to the world that generally imposes obligations upon him.”Footnote 30 For Buber, the deafening blares and solipsistic flares of modern society smothered the spirit of true community.Footnote 31 Modernized Europeans such as Huxley fancy that religious meaning lies in one’s subjective interiority, in the transcendent depths of consciousness beyond interpersonal noise. According to Buber, however, genuine religiosity is self-transcendent precisely because it is intersubjective, beyond oneself toward other beings in the world. This dissident take on what it means to cleanse “the doors of perception”Footnote 32 was also at the heart of Buber’s vision of Hasidism, and his comments on psychedelics render this especially clear.Footnote 33
Let us shift now from this European first wave of neo-Hasidism toward the very dawn of the North American second wave. There are stark differences here, and the prism of psychedelics illuminates the contrasts in striking ways. On a summer night in 1963, a Chabad Hasid named Meshullam Zalman Schachter (later Schachter-Shalomi) tripped on LSD for the first time with Timothy Leary at a Massachusetts ashram.Footnote 34 This was evidently part of Leary’s psychedelic research at the time through which he “arranged transcendent experiences for over one thousand persons from all walks of life, including 69 full-time religious professionals” from various traditions.Footnote 35 Although Schachter-Shalomi had not yet parted ways with Chabad by that summer, he would soon do so and become the most significant leader of neo-Hasidism in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 36
He first learned about psychedelics “in a serious way” through reading Huxley.Footnote 37 This is perhaps the only thing that he had in common with Buber when it came to psychoactive substances. Indeed, in contrast to Buber, Schachter-Shalomi felt that Huxley’s Doors of Perception was actually “close, in a way, to what emerged from the Hasidic tradition.”Footnote 38 Thus, already before Schachter-Shalomi had direct experiences with psychedelics his interpretations of those substances illuminated his interpretations of Hasidism, and vice versa. And this juncture throws into sharp relief the abyss between his mystical and Buber’s post-mystical perspectives on the movement. Moreover, according to his own report, already on the drive to Leary’s ashram from his post as the “Religious Environmentalist” at Camp Ramah of New England, Schachter-Shalomi threw Buber under the bus, so to speak. When he and the camp counselor driving him suddenly started singing the same tune at the same time, Schachter-Shalomi mused to himself: “Buber is so completely wrong when he makes people discrete entities, so separate that there is always an ‘I’ over and against the ‘Thou,’ because we were We rather than ‘I-Thouing’ it.”Footnote 39 Moreover, a year after Schachter-Shalomi’s LSD experience with Leary, he penned a letter to the esteemed Hebrew University professor Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, encouraging him to try the drug, but warned him to tread lightly around some faculty of Mount Scopus: “I think Buber for instance who does not like gnosticism would object to it,” Schachter-Shalomi wrote, underscoring Buber’s aversion to body-spirit dualism.Footnote 40 Clearly, Schachter-Shalomi’s own sense of spirituality was far afield from Buber’s, and this differentiation meant a lot to him—particularly with regard to interpreting Hasidism, but this was also evidently bound up with Schachter-Shalomi’s views on psychedelics. Schachter-Shalomi was more interested than Buber in ecstatic transcendence and dissolution of boundaries. Indeed, for Schachter-Shalomi, this was the experience at the heart of Hasidism.Footnote 41
Let us not get ahead of ourselves, though. It is best to start at the beginning. The most vivid glimpse into Schachter-Shalomi’s first LSD experience comes from an oral trip report that he shared shortly thereafter. His audience was a group of trusted rabbinic colleagues, with whom he could speak exceptionally freely for at least two reasons: First, given the high level of religious literacy in the group, he was able to weave in Yiddish and Hebrew words, along with allusions to tales, teachings, and terms from the matrix of Jewish tradition. Second, the gathering was unusually intimate and uncensored by design. Schachter-Shalomi recalls,
This group of rabbis met in Wisconsin, where we did something that wasn’t usual. We met, not as rabbis, not as members of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform Judaism, but simply as people. This was a group of people who were interested in theology, all over the spectrum. We shared experiences and read to each other the papers that we somehow didn’t dare to give elsewhere, for peer review, discussion, and understanding. After I had that experience with Tim [Leary], I gave the group my report.Footnote 42
A highly edited version of this trip report appears in Ralph Metzner’s 1968 book The Ecstatic Adventure, but it is a paltry distillation of the original.Footnote 43 Thankfully, a stenographer typed up Schachter-Shalomi’s lush language in real time.Footnote 44 This unpublished typescript is an astonishing artifact, shedding rich light on the religious-cultural textures of Schachter-Shalomi’s LSD experience. I want to share several parts here as a way to explore the hermeneutical dynamics between psychedelics and tradition—in this case, Hasidism, soon to be neo-Hasidism.Footnote 45
First, let us attend to matters of preparation and “setting.” Based on his description, Schachter-Shalomi made a clear effort to infuse his trip with sensory elements of Hasidic practice: “I took some records along with me. I took along many Mozart and some Bobover and Lubavitcher nigunim [melodies] on records.Footnote 46 I took along my shtreiml [Hasidic fur hat] and my Shabasdikeh tallis [prayer shawl for Shabbat], and my Shabesdikeh glasses, you know, that I should be in the proper setting for it, too.”Footnote 47
As the LSD started to take effect, Schachter-Shalomi recalls: “I put on a record of Bobover nigunim… and as the nigunim were playing, I suddenly got the same feeling I got after four cups of shnaps that the Rebbe gave me.…Footnote 48 I danced through several sides of the Bobover record and then a few more sides of the Lubavitcher record, and I was not winded a bit.… In between dancing, I kept saying: ‘It’s better than shnaps. It’s better than shnaps.’”Footnote 49 Also, Schachter-Shalomi notes: “I did not have my watch on at that time; I had put it away. At the Lubavitchers there is a custom. When you come to a farbrengen [festive Hasidic gathering], and you sit down and you are going to spend the night drinking and thinking and talking and singing, you turn in your watch. The mashpia [spiritual guide] would collect the watches from us every time we came; very much like collecting guns in a saloon.”Footnote 50
Thus, Schachter-Shalomi immerses his body in Hasidic soundscapes, gear, and garments. These religious media are meant to shape and deepen his trip. When he dropped the needle onto those records of Hasidic melodies, he swerved from the cultural key of psychedelic sounds in Leary’s sphere, well aware of what would rouse his particular spirits.Footnote 51 Indeed, as Ido Hartogsohn frames it, “the character and content of a psychedelic experience… is not solely, or even predominantly, determined by the drug itself. It is instead primarily dictated by personality, expectation, and intention (set), and the physical environment in which the experience takes place, including the people in the immediate vicinity and the broader sociocultural context (setting).”Footnote 52
However, Schachter-Shalomi also notes some dissonant conditions at hand. For example, while Leary’s friend Mattaji prepares the LSD for the two men, Schachter-Shalomi asks Leary for some instruction, “Is there anything special that you would want me to remember?” Leary responds, “Yes; The rules of the road are that you have always got to trust your travelling companion.” Now it dawns on Schachter-Shalomi: “Neither Leary nor Mattaji speak Yiddish, and not to have someone around and being in a Hindu place with all the symbols that were there, it didn’t afford me the opportunity of being able to express myself, where my kishkes [viscera] were, at various points. In other words, it became far too cerebral because still the need was to translate and not to be a direct dialogue.”Footnote 53
This need to translate and filter the particular language of his soul was further complicated by the fact that Leary himself did not recognize the cultural particularities of his own perennialist mysticism. While Leary saw Schachter-Shalomi as an old hat, not yet liberated from religious parochialism,Footnote 54 Leary’s lair brimmed with icons of various traditions, including Jesus, the Buddha, and Krishna. This irony tickled Schachter-Shalomi, even while it posed some complications for him.Footnote 55 But with characteristic curiosity and playfulness, Schachter-Shalomi continued to explore the psychedelic terrain with his own Hasidic “reality maps,” which were themselves mutating in the process.Footnote 56
As he begins to peak on LSD, the psychic landscape grows rather terrifying. How Schachter-Shalomi navigates this thicket is highly illuminating for our purposes.
So, I look into the fire, and my thoughts begin to wander to gehenim [hell]. First I had said to myself: “Will I get hurt?” And it was very interesting to see.… And so my thoughts wandered off to being hurt, hurting being gehenim, and in gehenim, oh-oh …. over here are a whole bunch of demonic malakhey khaboleh [angels of destruction] making all sorts of ugly faces and were teasing me and trying to get me broigez [upset], you know.Footnote 57 It is not clear yet. I am still looking at the fire. They are all there. And Leary was turning around; the noise sounded almost now, as if they were ready to pounce.… Now, I stand here. What am I going to do? And I close my eyes for a moment: “Oy Rebbe, what am I going to do?” And he says, and I get the sense: “Azoi vie Reb Zushe hot geton [Do just as Reb Zusha did].”Footnote 58 So, now, there is a mayseh [story], a beautiful mayseh. He says that when G-d will tell him that he has to go to gehenim, so he will take a gurtel [belt] and tie himself up with the gurtel and say the l’Shem Yihud [“For the sake of unifying”],Footnote 59 and jump into gehenim. There, you can’t have any mitzvahs, right?Footnote 60 But then if G-d wills, he will go to gehenim, then he has one more mitzvah. So he will jump. So, I sort of said: “OK…c’mon…that is fine….”Footnote 61 And so this is what I did. And I was ready to turn around and say: “OK, c’mon. You can push me into the fire.” And all of a sudden, you know….Footnote 62 again they were still not in the field of vision, but around. This time they were good white [luminous] malakhim. And the malakhim were having such a great deal of fun as if I sort of found them out, that they are not really malokhey khaboleh and demons. So, a great sense of rejoicing.Footnote 63
The infinity mirror of psychedelics and tradition radiates here in this moment. On one hand, the very manifestation of psychedelic overwhelm is mediated by images from the landscape of Hasidic imagination—gehenim, malakhey khaboleh, and so on. On the other hand, Schachter-Shalomi’s way of navigating this whirlwind springs from his own religious resources—the story of Reb Zusha, which emboldens him to surrender and leap lovingly into the fire. These images and stories shape Schachter-Shalomi’s journey, and yet they themselves also transform through the trip.Footnote 64
Six or seven hours after ingestion,Footnote 65 the glow of dawn intimates that it is time for morning prayers. And here we see a most striking moment in the dialogue between LSD and Hasidism.
I took the tallis [prayer shawl] and said to Tim: “Tim, I am going to daven [pray]. Let’s be together.” So I open that tallis and the k’rikhes [bindings] of the t’fillin [phylacteries] and took his hand and tied it to my hand and put the shel rosh [head piece] around him too, and he was under the tallis un er hot zikh geshok’l’t mit mir tzuzamen [and he swayed with me in unison], and the only trouble was, I could not daven. Why couldn’t I daven? Because every word was oylem umloyo [the world and all that fills it]. For instance, I had to skip. It was terrible. I had to skip because I could not move. And I was saying [the liturgy]: “Shelo asani goy [that You did not make me a non-Jew]”… and my hand was tied to him [Leary], so I say, “Goy, shmoy. Er is nisht a goy, ikh bin nit kein goy [He’s not a goy, I’m not a goy]. Goy is just a game. Nobody is goy anyhow.” [Then I came to the words] “shelo asani ishah [that You did not make me a woman].” He’s an ishah, I’m an ishah. We’re both an ishah. Ishah is also a game.… We shokel tzikh [sway]. And we stand around the trees and they seem to shokel along with us and daven along with us.… We came to “Vayevarekh Dovid [And David blessed]”, “l’kho Hashem hagdullah [O God, the grandeur is Yours].” I just overflowed with tears and I couldn’t go on. “Ve’Ata m’khayey et kulam [And You give life to them all].” I was ready to give up and die. What’s the use of saying anything more? And here was Tim, and I was consoling him.… I’m reassuring him, I’m sorry, you are out of this thing, but you are with me.Footnote 66
Here, LSD is transforming tradition before our eyes. Normative binaries of Jew/non-Jew and male/female blur for Schachter-Shalomi as he engages with ancient liturgical expressions of particularism and patriarchy. The prayerbook in his hands teems with newness.Footnote 67 Furthermore, set and setting matter. Schachter-Shalomi’s epiphany that every aspect of life is fundamentally a “game” reflected the language of the very friend to whom he was bound under the tallit. From his very first lecture on psychedelics in August 1961, Leary consistently characterized personal identities and cultural practices as “games,”Footnote 68 and here, for Schachter-Shalomi, this lens fuses with liturgy to bathe both gender and Jewishness in wholly new lights.Footnote 69
Psychedelics mediate tradition, and traditions mediate psychedelics. This is always the case, of course, even when one’s “tradition” is less conscious or explicit, such as the vaguely Protestant-Buddhist modes of secular humanism that tend to animate mainstream psychedelic discourse today. But when the shapes of one’s tradition are more intentionally invited into a psychedelic journey, then new possibilities emerge—and sometimes the fruits of the experience will be more readily accessible for integration processes thereafter.
Indeed, the hermeneutical process continues at least as much in the afterglow of the psychedelic experience. In his oral trip report with rabbinic colleagues, Schachter-Shalomi extended his reflections with ideas for future enhancements. “Was it an aliyath han’shamah [ascent of the soul]? I would have sworn on the trip to New York, afterwards, that it was. Now I wouldn’t swear to it.”Footnote 70 Among various differences that he discusses, Schachter-Shalomi notes the following:
It wasn’t Jewish enough for me. A universe in which everything was happening wasn’t Jewish enough.… I had no real Shabbos with LSD… LSD didn’t have enough keddushah [holiness]. It was… great it was lovely, it was wonderful.Footnote 71 [But] I kept on remarking to Leary in the middle: that it isn’t solemn enough here. I expected that there should be a kind of grandeur, though not a long faced sort of thing. It’s the kind of thing that happens around the Rebbe. And since I experienced some of this awe by consecration outside LSD, and it didn’t happen inside LSD, I was beginning to wonder, you know—this is part of the re-assessment.…
We need to train Jewish spiritual directors in the LSD experience—put our texts to use. What I would want to do, if I have the opportunity again, is to control it in the shtibel [prayer space, particularly in the Hasidic style] setting, with more of a Jewish paraphernalia—music, pictures, space arrangement—but I would also want to have someone who is going to be the ground control, to keep on calling attention to some Jewish program, because… [LSD] took hold of me and I had nothing to do with it.… Maybe we ought to make a sacrament out of it, to be administered as it were, in Shul [synagogue], under given situations with certain things.Footnote 72
In short, Schachter-Shalomi left that experience in Cohasset not only with a sense of the spiritual potential of LSD, but with a heightened awareness that its spiritual significance depends upon intentional constructions of conditions. Leary and his apostles may have set the paradigm for psychedelic counterculture in the 1960s, but this was in fact only one culturally specific setting. Schachter-Shalomi wonders at the possibility of Jewish sets and settings.Footnote 73 Contrary to perennialist universalities and clean categorizations that inform so much of psychedelic studies today, Schachter-Shalomi’s stammerings here reflect what Tehseen Noorani describes as the tendency of trip reports to reveal “mis/translations across thresholds—the doubts, contradictions, ambivalences and aporias involved in the writing out [or speaking forth] of experiences.”Footnote 74 Both consonances and dissonances between LSD and Hasidism fructified his spiritual growth. He adopted a practice from that time to “have a psychedelic experience at least twice a year, once before Yom Kippur and once before Passover,” and while Leary’s circle studied the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Tao Te Ching in light of psychedelic experiences, Schachter-Shalomi was “quite eager” to do the same with Jewish sources.Footnote 75
While there were various influences and experiences that led to Schachter-Shalomi’s shift from Hasidism to neo-Hasidism, it was ultimately his public comments about psychedelics that triggered his break from Chabad.Footnote 76 Even internally, though, his experiences with LSD (and soon thereafter other psychedelicsFootnote 77 ) altered his perspectives on Hasidism and proved profoundly influential for neo-Hasidim in his wake. LSD transformed Schachter-Shalomi’s perspectives on Hasidism, even while the latter shaped his interpretations of the former.
To appreciate these reverberations on a grassroots level, we might consider a piece published in 1967 in the Canadian Jewish Quarterly, entitled “‘Do Your Thing, Baby!’ A Story of Hippies and Hasidism.”Footnote 78 The author was a nineteen-year-old woman named Phyllis Steinhaus (later Ahouva Steinhaus). She describes Schachter-Shalomi as “a dear friend… through whom [her partner] Norman first learned about Hasidism.”Footnote 79 According to Steinhaus’s report, she dabbled in LSD—“I’ve had [acid] only six times within the last three months”Footnote 80 (!)—yet she locates this, among other psychedelics, as foundational fuel for the spiritual explorations in her San Francisco scene. “Many Hippies are learning to go towards God and spirituality and religion, and they use psychedelics to help them get there,” she writes. She emphasizes from her own experience that “deep spiritual experiences like those at ShabbosFootnote 81 have been made more enriching through acid.” In fact, she notes, “The third time [I took LSD] was when I discovered Judaism at Shabbos at Alex and Mary’s [a couple within her neo-Hasidic orbit in San Francisco]. The changes I went through as a result were tremendously important.… I stayed there for six weeks.”Footnote 82 Steinhaus notes that Alex spent “most of his time studying Chumash [the Pentateuch] and Hasidism,” and she describes how such religious seekers “are part of a larger group of Hippies who are now going beyond psychedelics and are using meditation, davening and other practices for personal and spiritual growth.”Footnote 83 Indeed, as Arthur Green and Ariel Mayse note, it was precisely Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s House of Love and Prayer, the epicenter of the San Francisco Jewish counterculture that Steinhaus describes, that “allowed Reb Shlomo to emphasize the Shabbat atmosphere as a means of inspiring ecstatic experiences rivaling those induced by psychoactive drugs in the hippie counterculture. One of his popular songs from these years, ‘Lord, Get Me High,’ was also sung to the opening words of ‘A Psalm for the Sabbath Day.’”Footnote 84
Steinhaus was certainly not the only neo-Hasid to identify Hasidism as an alternative to psychedelics. Abraham Joshua Heschel himself made a similar claim from New York in 1971: “I interpret the young people’s escape to drugs as coming from their driving desire to experience moments of exaltation. In my youth, growing up in a [Hasidic] Jewish milieu, there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation.”Footnote 85 To be sure, Heschel maintains that the turn to drugs is a rather displaced expression of the spiritual impulse. Indeed, he insists, outsiders are often quick to misunderstand even those psychoactive substances that are used within Hasidic practice. “He who has never been present at the scene, at the moment that Hasidim drink vodka, cannot know what it means to be holding the essence of his world,” Heschel writes. “To Hasidim, to drink yayinsaraf [vodka, lit. burnt wine] is to be on fire, to remember that God is a consuming fire. It is not just gaiety, it is great discipline living in a number of extraordinary relations, commitments, entertaining a number of basic convictions. It is above all the cultivation of the inner life, a complex of sensibilities.”Footnote 86 One can only understand the exalted nature of Hasidic intoxication in the broader integration of Hasidic communal life. For those who are estranged from any vibrant spiritual culture, psychoactive substances can only offer a taste, at best. And yet, of course, a taste is more than nothing. When Schachter-Shalomi asked Heschel once about LSD, “Heschel laughed and said, ‘I had it with my mother’s milk in Warsaw.’”Footnote 87 For Heschel, psychedelics may be a far cry from the authentic “mother’s milk” of Hasidic life, but he entertained the comparison.Footnote 88
In fact, this neo-Hasidic notion that psychedelic experiences—somehow, to some extent—approximate the fruits of Hasidism, reached far broader audiences. For example, an addiction researcher claimed in the Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, published in 1972: “From San Francisco and Vancouver to London and Amsterdam, innovative institutions serving youthful drug users have begun to introduce nonchemical ways of ‘turning on’ or ‘getting high’––nonchemical routes to altered states of consciousness.… In the Jewish tradition, a return to the Chassidic mode of ‘singing and dancing God’s ecstasy’ is enjoying a revival.”Footnote 89 Of course, we should not simply take for granted this ubiquitous idea that Hasidic customs produce psychedelic-like experiences! This is a distinctly second-wave neo-Hasidic viewpoint—“neo-Hasidic” because these figures are not encouraging drug users to actually become followers of rebbes in the ultra-Orthodox world; and “second-wave” because this identification of the essence of Hasidism with a particular spiritual-psychological experience (rather than, say, a type of communal bond or “ethos,” as Buber saw it) is distinctly rooted in the North American setting of the sixties.
Arthur Green, the preeminent academic scholar of Hasidic theology in North America for the past fifty years and a foundational figure of neo-Hasidism in his own right,Footnote 90 came of age Jewishly in this era, and he more or less shared the sense that psychedelic experience resembles the fruits of Hasidic practice. It was through his friendship with Schachter-Shalomi that Green, then a young rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), first experimented with psychedelics.Footnote 91 He was clearly inspired by Schachter-Shalomi’s sensibilities, which were—let us say—far afield from the vibe at JTS in the mid-1960s.Footnote 92 A few years later, in 1968, when twenty-seven-year-old Green published an essay entitled “Notes from the Jewish Underground: Psychedelics and Kabbalah” under the pseudonym Itzik Lodzer,Footnote 93 he was a PhD student at Brandeis University. This academic context is important. Whereas Schachter-Shalomi treated theology as “the handmaiden of the pastoral,” Green was ultimately more invested in intellectual-theological discourse.Footnote 94 For Green, psychedelics offered a “pneumatic key” for opening up Kabbalistic texts.Footnote 95 And they proved fertile for his reading. To be sure, Schachter-Shalomi had recounted in his oral trip report how after his experience with Leary, “Then I started to skim read some Hasidic material in order to see where are there things that stand out… and I found that there were.”Footnote 96 But for Green, the interpenetration of text and trip was at the very core of his psychedelic integration. Indeed, regarding his first experiment with psychedelics, Green relates, “LSD confirmed everything I had been reading about in the mystical texts.” He recognizes that “the states these Hasidic texts were talking about… were forms of expanded consciousness. I immediately translated what happened on acid to what I had studied.”Footnote 97 More than thirty years after his 1968 essay, Green admitts, “while I now look upon my early essays on psychedelics and Kabbalah as juvenilia, I by no means repudiate the essential insights expressed there,” and even describes the “post-psychedelic lens” through which he reads Jewish mystical sources.Footnote 98
Presumably in resistance to the intellectual orientations at JTS and Brandeis alike, Green contends in 1968 that psychedelics offer an enhanced hermeneutical lens. On one hand, he points to the heady perspective from “Religionsgeschichte”—using the term for “History of Religions” taught by his professors from Germany—which examines kabbalistic theology as mere junctures in a genealogy of ideas. On the other hand, Green describes the philosophical approach, which merely reads language of mystical sources as formulations of theoretical puzzles. “But,” Green suggests, “since we are after all dealing with mystics, an explanation which takes the inner experience of the mystic into account might prove to be more fruitful. Our claim here, of course, is that on this level one can learn of the classic mystical experience from the psychedelic.”Footnote 99 To be sure, Green qualifies, there is “a tremendous difference in tone between” the insights of kabbalists and psychonauts. Since the former labored with contemplative techniques for years and the latter just blast up on chemical rocket ships, Kabbalistic theology tends to display dramatic gravity, whereas psychedelic trip reports often sound whimsical and even comical. Nonetheless, Green asserts that the fruits are fundamentally similar. The tone of theological voice “in no way contradicts the impression that the states of consciousness reached are in some manner the same.”Footnote 100 Both Kabbalist and psychonaut attain “mystic insight,” “mystic consciousness,” or even “psychedelic/mystic consciousness.”Footnote 101 Both employ exceptionally “daring and creative… religious imagery,” delighting in inconsistency, because their unitive experiences let them “see through [their] own image games.”Footnote 102 In other words, they have tasted the nonduality of Ein Sof, divine Infinity, so they can appreciate individual revelations as at once drenched in divinity and ephemeral emanations. “Indeed,” Green writes, “this is one of the great ‘pastimes’ of people under the influence of psychedelics: the construction of elaborate and often beautiful systems of imagery which momentarily seem to contain all the meaning of life or the secrets of all the universe, only to push beyond them moments later, leaving their remains as desolate as the ruins of a child’s castle in the sand.”Footnote 103
In this essay, Green declares that modern Jews have lost sight of God’s infinite nothingness beyond all imagery.
Judaism as presented today knows nothing of God as Eyn Sof; it has lost the creative mystic drive which led beyond its own images into a confrontation with the Nothing. The Judaism which contemporary Jews have inherited is one of a father figure who looms so large that one dare not try to look beyond Him. We have indeed become trapped by our image. The Kabbalists knew well that God-as-father made sense only in the context of God-as-mother, God-as-lover, God-as-bride, etc. They played the image game with great delicacy; their descendants have forgotten how to play.Footnote 104
Divinity has calcified into a brittle and paltry idol. Today, Green declares, it is high time to smash that edifice into technicolor pieces, melt it back down into glowing puddy, maybe even vaporize it into new aromas and breezes on our breaths. For Green, this demands a rediscovery of ancestral states of spiritual consciousness, out of which Jewish mystical literature radiated. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that he published this piece under the pseudonym Itzik Lodzer—a Yiddishized version of his Hebrew name followed by a reference to the Polish city of Lodz, his ancestor’s home in the heartland of Hasidism. But the question is, how can one revisit that old-country landscape of mystical awareness? “Today we no longer know how to read the road maps” of their spiritual ascents, Green conceded.Footnote 105 Thus, the contemporary theological-spiritual breakthrough demands that Jews relearn how to read mystical sources—more precisely, how to personally recognize the correlations therein between language and experience. After generations of atrophy in Jewish souls, psychedelics can provide a sort of jump-start for inert engines. And those who combine such intense psychic journeying with intensive Jewish learning may yet be able to rev up that old theological imagination. “I firmly believe that if Judaism is to speak to certain kinds of religiously sensitive Jews today, new modes of the translation of classic Jewish mystical texts must be found. The esoteric symbolism of the past must be given a new life; creativity and insight are needed for this.”Footnote 106 And such “creativity and insight” can indeed spring from psychedelic practices, Green intimates, especially when combined with other traditional techniques. This is the work that Green and some of his friends set out to do. It was essentially a hermeneutical odyssey to uncover the experiential wellsprings of Jewish texts, especially Hasidic ones. Trip, then read. Trip again, then read further. And at a certain point, when those cylinders start humming again, you might not even need to trip anymore.
For our purposes, Green’s reflections reveal a great deal about one neo-Hasidic leader’s psychedelic-infused understanding of Hasidism, and how he crafted a “post-psychedelic lens” for refracting Hasidic texts, which has influenced innumerable others over the past half-century. Of course, while Green never claimed that early Hasidim ingested psychoactive compounds to attain the states of mind from which their writings flowed, his indication that psychedelics approximate those mental states demands further reflection. Although this is a phenomenological-historical claim, rather than a material-historical one, it is still a historical claim, however implicit it may be. Indeed, if you sense that a psilocybin mushroom trip helps you understand early Hasidic articulations of devekut, or “flushness” with divinity, then you are likely assuming that early Hasidic experiences of devekut resembled the experience of mushrooms. You are interpreting the past through prisms of your present. This mode of memory also activates wholly new hermeneutical pathways. If readers suppose that psychedelic experiences grant first-hand insights into the psychological roots of traditional sources, they invite those sources to serve as both mirrors and maps for their own psychedelic journeys. Per usual, hermeneutics and phenomenology go hand in hand here—interpretations always draw upon experiences, and experiences are always fundamentally interpretive.
Conclusion
Since the mid-1950s, neo-Hasidim have portrayed psychedelics in ways that illuminate their own perspectives on Hasidism. Starting in the 1960s, psychedelic practices directly influenced the trajectory of neo-Hasidism, even while that relationship was quickened in the first place by new, more overtly mystical concepts of Hasidism—a complex hermeneutical circle, indeed. Buber saw Huxley’s psychedelic subjectivism as antithetical to the intersubjective vibrancy that Buber identified with true religiosity, as embodied in “Indian” peyote circles and Hasidic communities alike. Meanwhile, Schachter-Shalomi heard echoes of Hasidic ecstasy in Huxley’s reports and eventually reimagined Hasidism through the lens of LSD (among other influences in his life), exploring both harmonies and discordances between the worlds. Steinhaus, Carlebach, and Heschel cast Hasidica and psychedelia as phenomenologically correlated, preferring the former over the latter, sometimes based on their own chemical experiments and always drawing upon imagination. Green embraced psychedelics as a tool for studying the experiential headwaters of Hasidic texts. Taken together, this cacophony captures the impossibility of identifying any essence of either Hasidic spirituality or psychedelic substances. In these various sources, the meaning of both are continually emerging through their interaction.
This case study of neo-Hasidism from the 1950s through early-1970s sheds light on the confluence between psychedelics and religion more broadly. While religious studies has much to gain from contemplating psychedelics, psychedelic studies would also benefit immensely from further case studies by scholars of different traditions. The findings would be different, of course, given the unthinkable cultural diversity across traditions. However, a constellation of such investigations would continue to clarify a crucial point: there is no quintessential psychedelic or mystical experience as such. Rather, all is shot through with a dialectical dynamism that disrupts definitions and decenters identities, including our own as critical scholars. This is not only a theoretical or academic intervention; there are also ethical concerns at stake. As discussed, the purportedly universal, perennial constructions underlying much work in psychedelic studies are measuring sticks that have been weaponized against so-called “uncivilized” and “primitive” peoples, be they Jews in Christian lands or Indigenous groups in Christian colonies. Historical violations against the latter group should be particularly haunting for the field of psychedelic studies, given the multimillennial plant-medicine traditions within many Indigenous lineages. Thus, the disruption and decentering that scholars of religion can offer in the psychedelic studies are not simply in service of deconstruction but, ultimately, decolonization. And, to be sure, this critical work need not be disenchanting. Investigations of particular case studies illuminate the kaleidoscopic interplay between sources and substances, unearthing new interpretive and ethical possibilities within both. One beholds here a pulsating infinity mirror, bending all light.
