Latest / Not in Heaven / Isabel and Nicki and Albert Hoffman

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Isabel and Nicki and Albert Hoffman · Not in Heaven

• 0:04
  This is bolsheurchai. The isabel and nicki and albert hoffman edition. I'm Ali Fongle in Montreal, and I'm here with Phoebe Baltzvovie in Toronto. We are your Frozen chosen today on the show. We are eagerly anticipating purim, and the only way we could top last year's weed stravaganza was to go even higher. And so we set out to find out about Judaism and psychedelics. Is there a connection? I mean, like a real deep connection? We'll talk to Zach Hammonds and find out. But before we do, let's take a swing around the Jewish world. TV, how have you been?
• 0:43
  I've been well. How about you, Avi?
• 0:44
  Good. It's been busy, but always but doing my thing. Porn is coming up. We have a big poor meal planned. We have costumes for kids to deal with. We have lots of stuff happening in the house. So yeah. Poems on my mind.
• 0:59
  That's interesting, because you know what's on my mind holiday wise? Hanukkah. And I'll tell you why. Because I'm going to do a little pre nachus nahas where I endorse out of season latkes. My older daughter asked for latkas and I thought, you know what the weather feels, Hanukkah like. Potatoes and onions are procurable in stores. So we had latkes for dinner last night and my daughter brought a leftover latte to snack. I'm sure her classmates will be intrigued.
• 1:25
  Do you remember at the University of Chicago the last Wednesday before Thanksgiving?
• 1:29
  I do know where you're going with this. I covered it once as a journal. Latches and Hammond hush.
• 1:33
  Yes.
• 1:34
  The Latkes versus Hamiltonian debate.
• 1:37
  The great late obviously debate.
• 1:38
  Okay, yes. Definitely latkes for me. What about you?
• 1:42
  Totally. Definitely latkas also. But they used to actually have a live debate. They turned it into a book, but they used to have a live debate every year at I think it was like one of the big halls on campus event, and they would get four professors, like actual professors from distinguished professors from within their respective fields to argue one or the other. And so I remember being there and hearing, like, Austin Goulsby, who was a professor at the time, arguing pro latka. And I'm sitting there in the audience and hearing other professors and economists and education professors and sociologists all taking their side. And this was like a fabulous annual occasion at the University of Chicago.
• 2:21
  Yes, absolutely. Even though it's kind of a foregone conclusion, of course.
• 2:27
  Yeah, because Hamiltonchan are inferior. They're just not good cookies. So that's like a plan.
• 2:32
  I'm not super into cookies generally and certainly not that type of cookie generally. So I think it was always going.
• 2:39
  To be about the Lockett team savers all the way. We joke that when we go to a restaurant, my wife will order always order dessert, and I will order a second appetizer because it looked interesting. I would rather have that, but I want to keep eating. Yeah. What's on your mind? What Jewish stuff has crossed your transom these days?
• 2:59
  Well, I saw a JTA article about that. The headline is meet the real life sister act behind the two new 90s Jewish American girl dolls. So I had to see about these Jewish American girl dolls. Basically, there are new the American Girl dolls. I'm going to give a whole background of what this is to the best of my ability. We're going to pretend I knew this all along and wasn't just Googling it to write about it. But basically, these are these high end toys, these dolls, but they're based on actual not actual historical figures, but sort of historically accurate types. So there are these different girls from different moments in American history. There are different races, religions, things like that. They have these backstories. There are like literal books for each doll about I think somebody who actually knows about this maybe can correct me. But then there are also these physical dolls, and girls get these dolls as gifts and bring them to at least did many years ago to American Girl stores where they would have American Girl Doll tea parties and so forth. I should give a little disclaimer here that I have neither ever wanted nor gotten such a doll. I cannot imagine personally being involved in this as a consumer, but it is interesting to me that this exists and I have no opposition to it. That's my doll. Yes. Do you know about the American rule?
• 4:34
  Do I know about them? I was going to wait till the whole thing and the discussion and then to really get into it, but I have to jump in here. To quote a former host of Bojo Hai, you are in for a world. You have a young girl, right, who.
• 4:54
  Is I do, but yeah, I remember buying my book I have two young girls.
• 5:01
  Yes. So I remember buying my wife this book when we only had one, I think it was by Peggy Orenstein called Cinderella Ate My Baby. And we were like right in the throes of this. Like, yes, of course we're not going to get into gendered toys or anything like that. We are going to let the child do whatever they want and get into it. And then you realize that your life is going to be sucked into this princess world whether you like it or not. Tea parties are a thing. Dress up as Disney princesses are a thing. And American Girl dolls most certainly are a thing. I have girls through it, but it's.
• 5:32
  Not a budget thing because, like, my God, it's a budget because I don't have strong feelings about the gender aspect. I think my feeling, as I'm sure said before, and will doubtless say again, is that most children are gender conforming, some are not. It's important to be accepting of those who are not. It's also futile to pretend that the world isn't as it is. And I have no expectation to have the gender neutral toys or whatever. I think, however, that in 115, US dollar Doll and a Toronto mortgage may not be compelled.
• 6:12
  Together, we are the proud owners of four American Girl dolls. Our girls. We have visited the American Girl Doll store in Chicago as recently as this past December. It's still a cafe. It is two floors, it is a museum. That's the way that we used to call it when we used to go visit it when we were actually living in Chicago. I think we had one that was given to us by somebody else and now we have four. That the kids are like a little past now because our youngest is nine and a half. So they're already at the tail end of wanting this. But we went in December to Chicago and we went to the American Girl Doll store because of course they had to. And there is a cafe, there is a hospital where you can fix your broken dolls. There is a hair salon to take care of that really unruly fake hair that they have. You can get a manicure alongside your doll. They have special chairs at the cafe where you put your doll up. So this is a world that is a world unto itself.
• 7:08
  Wow. This is world gender woman. But this might be a little too early for me. This might be a little bit earlier than I could handle.
• 7:17
  This is like you have the text and you have the midrash, and the midrash is a living world that these girls inhabit. That is unbelievable. Speaking of which, tell us about these two new American Girl dolls.
• 7:29
  Yes, so the reason that the JTA was covering this is indeed that these particular American Girl dolls are Jewish. They have one Jewish parent and one Christian parent. These dolls and their story begins in 199. And so I'm quoting here from JTA. American Girl just released its first twin dolls, Isabel and Nikki Hoffman, who are also the first characters from an interfaith family. Their stories take place in the late ninety s and are written by Julia de Villiers or Divine, I don't know, and Jennifer Roy, and are inspired by the sister's own childhood experiences. Okay, so this story has the obvious Jewish angle would be the whole interfaith aspect. And I had already seen this story because a lot of the mom Facebook groups I'm in and other places online, people have been very upset about, but sort of tongue in cheek upset about 1999 as a historical moment being treated as that long ago. Like, oh my goodness, does that mean we're old? And yes, it means we're old. But I had a totally different Jewish angle on it that I wrote about for the CJN's website, which is that I think that 90s nostalgia is extraordinarily Jewish, is about the most Jewish thing.
• 8:53
  Ever, meaning late 90s or 90s was a particularly great Jewish time? Or was it that the nostalgia for that era is a Jewish thing? Also both.
• 9:03
  I think that they go hand in hand. I was trying to articulate this when writing this piece, and I just kept thinking, there are so many examples of this. So there's the general sort of pre 911, pre war on terror, pre conspiracy, theorizing about Neoconservatives with a sort of wink, this sort of antisemitism that came through, that there's just the whole kind of, for lack of a better term, sort of wokeness discussions that have gotten Jews on various different points in the ideological spectrum upset. There are all sorts of things that have happened that have been less pleasant for Jews since that time. And I thought, yeah, I think there's something about the Clinton era, the Seinfeld era, the era of the nanny. Fran Drescher's the nanny. That was just certainly for American Jews, a very cozy time that I think people of my demographic look back on often fondly above and beyond the way all people look back on the time when they were young as like, oh, that must have been a better time. I was young then.
• 10:19
  Judaism has come up in American girl dolls beforehand. There is a classic of the historical figures named Rebecca Rubin. She lives in the Lower East Side in the 1920s, I believe, or the early 30s. All the accessories that she has there's a shabbat kit and a some of our and with like candlesticks and Akala and stuff like that. So so definitely Judaism does play a large role. I mean, remember that these dolls are there to create narratives to play with and to work with, and having a Jewish character makes a lot of sense. What I'm curious about is that in 1999, interfaith relationships was still very, very fraught. This was not something nearly as accepted as it was now, almost 25 years later. And I'm curious how they're going to play with it. Or they're just like this is yet another marketing tool to say there's a lot of interfaith marriages or marriages of different faiths with Jews and others or Jews and nuns or whatever it might be, and that this is just yet another seller.
• 11:17
  Nuns, you mean? Not the Catholic sort. You mean no religion?
• 11:22
  Yes, jews of no Jews and people of no religion.
• 11:25
  Because audio only. I'm thinking, like, many people relate married.
• 11:32
  To Jews and nuns, but only on pure. But even then anyways, so that's like one aspect of it. But I was reflecting on this, like, what is this nostalgia and this positivity? I think that there was definitely a boom time in the late 90s for Judaism. The Jews were everywhere, and it felt good to be able to talk about it and say it was like a thing. I think people had a little bit of nachos, for example, about Monica Lewinsky, right? Oh, you see a Jew. This was not just anybody. And it, thought about it because one of the twins actually has a very lewinskyesque beret.
• 12:08
  Well, that's why, yes. So I wrote about Monica Lewinsky in my piece also because I think there was something about that prior to that. I think there had been this idea of the Jewish woman as kind of like the frumpy one who Woody Allen, philip Roth has an alter ego who's fleeing from or it's the nagging mother. And then there's Monica Lewinsky. And while it's obviously a more problematic story and everybody knows that these days, at the time it was like you could be the hot one who the president likes. And then there's the Israel angle, which I think we will begin to perhaps touch on here, which is that I think you think of Oslo, you think of a time when I would say, and I was a child. I don't know what I'm pretending, but my impression of that time is that the sort of normal view among at least American Jews was that, yes, there will be a two state solution. It will be wonderful. It might be difficult to get there. Whoever gets everybody there should get the Nobel Prize and well done and all of that. But like that seemed plausible. Everything was going to be fine. There was going to be peace in the Middle East and this was just going to be resolved within not just within everybody's lifetime, but like probably in the next ten years or something like that was my impression of that era. Now, are we still in that moment?
• 13:21
  We are very much not in that moment. And that's as good a transition as possible to really dwell for a moment on the events of the past week or two in Israel. I find that they're genuinely caused for serious concern and to think about where we're at in this world and for time to reflect on what's been going on. I think that some of the worst fears of some of the protesters and dissenters of the current Israeli government are starting to come true. And that's not a good thing. That is far from a good thing. I'm going to bring this up in the context of a Twitter thread, a Tweet thread I should say, from Sija. Right? So cja posts this thing.
• 14:06
  So who is Sija for the Uninitiated?
• 14:08
  The center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. They are the self appointed and proclaimed and they are the major organization that is devoted to advocacy for Jews and Israel in Canada.
• 14:22
  So is it equivalent to APAC in the States?
• 14:26
  Ish we can unpack that another time.
• 14:29
  Okay.
• 14:31
  So they have this Tweet thread and says what is happening in Israel? And they wanted to sort of like the events are very israelis are high alert as another escalation has led to more violence. Let's unpack what happened in the last week, what happened in Israel and Israel is on high alert. Several days ago, the IDF held a counterterror operation in nablus several Islamic Jihad and lines. Then militants were killed. During the counterterror operation, there were large clashes resulting in the deaths of twelve Palestinians. Eight of the twelve killed in the counterterror operation are confirmed members of terrorist organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and lions dead Canadian listed terrorist entity Hamas responded by firing missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilians. In the past 48 hours alone, three innocent Jewish civilians were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Following the murders of Hill and IGA Yani, fringe Israeli extremists took the law into their own hands and violently rioted in the Palestinian village of Hurrah. This violence is unacceptable and has been condemned at the highest levels of Israeli society. Then they, it's weird because they have a tweet, but then they also have a picture that says the same thing but slightly different. French Israeli extremists decided to take the law into their own hands and violently rioted the Palestinian village of Huara, destroying 35 homes and torturing 95 cars. A Palestinian man was killed in the clashes. Israeli leaders have condemned the violence and IDF soldiers assisted in rescuing Palestinian residents. We pray for peace and calm in the region and for Israelis and Palestinians to be able to live free from terrorism. And it ends with a picture of a Jewish kid and a kid with a CAFIA on his head and the caption that says all Israelis and Palestinians deserve to be free from terrorism. Oh, I forgot to mention that these kids are sitting shoulder to shoulder with their arms around each other and they're facing away from the camera. Okay.
• 16:17
  Oh boy.
• 16:18
  Terrible.
• 16:19
  Yeah, I mean that I'm just saying. Oh boy, that thread. Wow. Okay. I haven't actually seen it, but from.
• 16:24
  Your description, and I'm not on Twitter, so this is relatively new to me, how these things come out and what's going on and retweets and all that stuff. But I'm sorry, I am not going to let this moment pass by without calling out the discussions that I've been hearing online and in real life, and especially by major Jewish organizations such as Sija. And honestly, I'm a little bit disgusted because there are Jews that are doing horrible things. There are Jews that are committing atrocities and, you know, honest reporting. If this, if this situation had been flipped and the same exact words were used as Israelis and Palestinians and the city and the they were the object and the subject of every sentence was flipped, they would absolutely be all over this and have huge problems with this. They would be putting out a press release, a story, analyzing this thing completely. Right. When we, when Sija goes and says eight of the twelve people have been are confirmed members of terrorist organizations, that means that Sija is not willing to recognize that is the IDF killed four innocent civilians.
• 17:37
  Well, they didn't use innocent. What I noticed in the thread was when you say about the Palestinian, the one Palestinian man was killed, they don't say one innocent.
• 17:45
  So first of all, they don't mention that there are four civilians in that initial clash that jumps out as well. Then they don't mention that the Israelis are terrorists, right? If these were Palestinians, they would be up in arms if CBC didn't use the word terrorists. These are people committing acts of terror on innocent people and they are Israeli terrorists, right? And they write that one person was killed. If CBC had written that, again, they would say, say murdered, this person was murdered. Because if the Israelis that were in this situation were murdered, why was this Palestinian not murdered?
• 18:29
  There's so much here and it's a share your view that this is all extremely upsetting and that plainly saying what actually happened would be a good start media wise. And I think there's just this, I guess probably just generally North American diaspora thing of being sort of not even understanding that Israelis themselves are often unhappy with what's happening in Israel and that you can support Israel without. Supporting every single horrible thing that happens in Israel, every single thing the Israeli government does, and indeed, every single thing that just happened now.
• 19:10
  And I'm sure they're going to come back at me and say, well abi, but we condemn the violence and this and that. And I'm like language, first of all. Language is difficult and I recognize that. So the first thing I'm going to say is sija be better, right? We are better than this. And when there are atrocities happening and that are being perpetrated by Israelis and or Jews, we need to accept that. And if we have language that you want people to use when it comes to Palestinians, you have to use that language on your own, right? But the fact is I accept and I recognize that language is difficult, right? And I want instead of saying be better and change everything, start toning down, start recognizing that the other side is in a lot of pain every time something like this happens. And that sometimes third party media organizations are not interested in cow towing to your specific way of approaching something and saying there's clear sides to this and we are always right and they are always wrong. And to use words like murder, to use words like terrorists and insisting on those things when it comes to Palestinians and specifically refusing to use them in these situations is very, very telling. And I think that it should be a moment of introspection for Sija, for places like honest reporting, for places like Benabrith, for when calling out hatred, recognizing that people hate on both sides, and to go and say well, we're different, we are civil. The IDF helped the Palestinians that were in trouble, the IDF condemned the terror happening on their side. That makes us qualitatively different, that doesn't, right? We have people within our community that are terrorists, that are violent, that are not just fringe extremists as you like to call them. They are a growing. They are the people that are in power in the government right now. They are the majority and the real kicker. The real kicker. And we have to absolutely mention this because I've seen literally nobody mentioned this at all. And I assure you that this would be a major media campaign if this happened in the other direction. So this photo that I described to you, something seemed off to me about it, right? This Jewish kid and a Palestinian kid or a kid with a CAFIA arm in arm right from the back, something seemed off. Thankfully we have Google and we have Google lens that lets you search for a photograph using your camera to find it. I did the search and the first hit that comes up is an article from 2014 in the Times of Israel. Don't worry, there's a good Canadian connection also. And the title, the headline of this piece is the story behind a staged coexistence picture. Israeli and Palestinian boys embracing a famous image were actually two Jewish friends from Jerusalem. This is a photo that was taken in 1993 that was designed to illustrate aspirations for peace in Israel during the Oslo peace process. They were two boys and it was taken by an American photojournalist that was shot from a Claims magazine which has been reproduced countless times, often without Rosen's consent. And as he says, it was a symbolic illustration. It was never supposed to be a documentary photo. It is wow.
• 22:11
  Like incredible find. Incredible find. They should make American boy dolls out of Israeli boy technically dolls out of this out of this experience.
• 22:24
  Yeah, well, we'll see. All right, enough of that. Let's move on to our main topic. We'll get to our interview with Zach Cabinets in just a minute or two, but I was wondering before we even get to that, Phoebe, what's your relationship to psychedelic drugs?
• 22:40
  Well, I'm on ten of them right now. No, really? I'm like the Woody Allen persona in I guess, Annie Hall where there's like every drugs around the knee just and in everything where he's like I don't know, I mean that, that is like actually me. I'm the person who has the I'm allowed to say this ashkenazi alcohol tolerance. Where the thimble of alcohol, especially since I would say turning 30, I cannot even have alcohol basically without being completely useless the next day if I have like half a glass of wine, I'm hungover. So I do not have a tremendous amount of experience personally, firsthand with psychedelic drugs. I know about using an old British sitcom as a sleeping pill. I don't really know much else about this. So obvious. This is up to you now. What is your ample experience? You're tripping right now, of course.
• 23:39
  Lucidly with nothing more than a snapple and a fountain pen ink. I am that good. No, actually, I will admit that I don't have any experience with a psychedelic drug. I've been fascinated by it ever since. Reading about the new uses of psychedelics for psychological trauma, for PTSD, for all sorts of ego destroying, ego changing approaches to the mind and consciousness. Ever since reading Michael Pollan's book that came out a few years ago called how to Change Your Mind, where he starts out as a skeptic and says, I'm a journalist and I'm just going to go and do this. And he learns a lot and realizes that these drugs, this class of drugs that are known as psychedelics or anthrogens or however we're going to call them, have great possibilities for people and will compress five years of therapy into one session. And not just to remove the idea of therapy beyond that, but to sort of say like, hey, here's, let's get to the good stuff of therapy, right? These psychedelics. The way he described it almost was sort of like you know how you watch season two or three of a show, to use a TV reference or metaphor, again, and then right at the beginning of the season, they're like on the last season of X. And in two minutes they sort of get you up to speed with everything you need to know if you hadn't yet ever watched it or forgot all about it and move you on. He's like, well, that's the point. Or that's one of the things that psychedelics can do is sort of speed up and get you through all of the stuff that gets you over your fears and all of your facing the stuff that you have a hard time facing to get to the good stuff of therapy, to get to the point where you're able to face whatever it is that you need to be able to confront and move on again. I only know about this from reading about this. I then looked into it briefly after finding out about this and this whole world. I actually signed up about five years ago. So it's safe to say that the waiting list no longer exists and I am not on it anymore. But I signed up about five years ago for a study at Johns Hopkins where they were asking religious leaders and spiritual leaders of various denominations to take a supervised psychedelic study, like to take psychedelics under supervision. And they wanted to see what the spiritual experience was like under that and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that because I'm sure Zach knows about it more than I do, but I never heard from them. I heard from them where they said, yes, we're putting on the waiting list, but it's very long and so don't expect to hear from us. And I didn't hear from them.
• 26:26
  Well, this is fascinated by it, what you're describing. It sounds like sort of two different but related things a medical use of psychedelics as the same as using any other sort of medicine in a mental health context, but also exactly.
• 26:42
  And that the spiritual works on the same axis in the sense that it takes years sometimes to have a spiritual breakthrough where you say, I'm putting in the work, I'm putting in the work. I believe in this, I'm doing this, but I don't quite get what I'm doing it for. Until you push through and you do, it is kind of fascinating to me. So I'd like to explore that a bit more. Before we do get to our next topic, I do want to remind everybody at Our Great Canadian Seder. As we've mentioned in the past couple of weeks, we are planning another addition of last year's big hit. We would love to hear your ideas for it. To get in on that, please just email us at bonjour at the CJN CA. Tell us your ideas, tell us if you'd like to volunteer bonjour at the CJN CA for The Great Canadian Seder part duh. Let's get to our interview with Zaccam and it's right after you hear from our response.
• 27:30
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• 28:10
  I first ran into Zach cabinets virtually. We have still never met face to face except through these screens on the magic and the weird interesting world that was Clubhouse Peak, like 2021, when it was like a really cool thing and we found each other in all the same rooms talking about Jewish stuff. And he was out there at the forefront then talking about psychedelics and how Judaism and psychedelics can interact and intersect with each other. Since then, Zach Kaminetz has founded Chefa, which is an organization, probably the first organization maybe even since the 17th century, probably to intersect Judaism and spirituality and psychedelic use. And so we thought, what better person to bring on to talk about any sort of mind expanding idea, expanding spiritually spirituality, expanding ideas ahead of purim then Zach Kaminez. Zach. Welcome to Bonjour.
• 29:10
  Hai. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
• 29:12
  Zack, what exactly does shepherd do?
• 29:16
  So like you said, I think that we're probably one of the organization that is starting to look very carefully at what it could mean for psychedelics to be incorporated as tools, as partners or. Allies in Jewish spiritual growth and development and also for the purpose of healing, individual and communal healing that specifically Jews have to do thousands of years of intergenerational trauma, genocide, displacement, the woundings that happen from our own culture and religion and hopefully to continue to elevate our people and hopefully elevate the rest of the world also. So what we do specifically is we have groups dedicated to integration. That's the meaning making process where people have psychedelic encounters on their own. They're looking for a Jewish space to do this in with Jews and to be able to speak as Jews also. And they get to talk about the experiences they've had either 20 years ago or 20 minutes ago. And to do that in a very safe, vulnerable, peer led way. We're also exploring reopening the great sources of Jewish wisdom about how have we explored our consciousness, how have we expanded consciousness from the very beginnings of our civilization. Where is the intersection between opening oneself up to the mystery, the beyond what lies past rationality? We have a lot of that in our tradition, but it's not really on the curriculum of Jewish education in North America right now, at least in liberal circles. And we want to actually raise up those very interesting maps of consciousness, maps of reality, maps of the human spirit. And we also want to find opportunities to celebrate in community for people who have had these experiences one way or the other. If it's in Peru, in ayahuasca or a Ketamine clinic in Toronto, or at a Fish concert with a bag of mushrooms around a bunch of friends, these can be very opening, very meaningful experiences and they become some of the most meaningful experiences of these individuals. And it's important for people to feel like there are others that are on the path with them. So to be able to come into community and to be celebrating what we have learned, what we have gained, not just individually, but as a Chevrolet, as a community, is really important too.
• 32:02
  It sounds like you're trying to straddle and the balance between this serious idea of the ego being deflated by one acid trip and the ability to rise spiritually through that with the fact that, as you said, there are. People that are just going to take some mushrooms and go to a fish concert and have fun, and that you're not placing a value judgment and saying that that's not okay. Don't do that. Poor M is coming up and there are people that are going to go say, no, psychedelics are serious and they're real and you have to treat them as through. And I'm like, no, there could be some absolute enjoyment that you can get out of just having a psychedelic experience as well. That seems to be where you're going.
• 32:46
  Yeah, absolutely. Again, people are doing these things in lots of different settings and I like to say sometimes casually and sometimes consciously. This is not to make everything as serious as I think. When people start encountering psychedelics mostly in general culture right now it's about medicine for PTSD, for a diagnosis and therapist. But that's not how these things have been used in North America for the past 60, 70 years. And also that's not how these materials have been used in traditional cultures either. Where yes, there's ritual, yes, there's coming to terms and making a stronger community through them. We don't judge. We're not determining how these things should be used, but if someone has some opening within them that either they have no connection to their Jewishness and this has opened the possibility that their Judaism can be personally meaningful and as a ballast for their lives. In some ways, we want to help them make those connections. Or people who have very sick Jewish identity and Jewish practice, but just don't know how. Do I actually plug that into my personal psychedelic experience? We want to help them there too, but again, whether it's fun or functional, we want people to know that they're not in this alone.
• 34:18
  I was wondering you talk about the last 60, 70 years and I was just thinking about and also about Fish concerts and I was wondering about if there's any kind of tradition among Jewish musicians. And I'm including musicians. Who happen to be Jewish and I'm thinking about like the late sixty s and so forth like you know if there's a kind of history of Jews and psychedelics there maybe well I think we have to name any specific names. But some come to mind.
• 34:45
  Yeah, some come to mind and they can speak about that better than I. But I would say in the this is my working hypothesis that post Holocaust kids growing up, teenagers in their 20s in the who are encountering psychedelics like general culture, mostly LSD and mushrooms, some masculine also they're having major spiritual personal openings. They are seeing the creation of culture not as something that is a given, but that there's a possibility the entire counterculture movement, and I think that probably what happened, is that at the same time as psychedelics are coming into the culture, there are Eastern traditions that are not weighed down by the pressure and the pain of Jewish past. There are more accessible models, at least in Americanized versions of Buddhism and Hinduism, that actually talk about consciousness, that talk about soul, that talk about presence and purpose that's more accessible than Hashem al Qaeda, hashem wow, jeez. And then I think that all of the Joseph Goldsmiths and all of the Sharon Salzburgs and all of the Ramdas, all these powerful Jewish geniuses, they gravitated toward these eastern traditions and found homes in these traditions and are now leaders of them because of their psychedelic experiences. The other way is that people like Reb Zalman Shakir Shalomi of Blessed Memory, people like Rabbi Art Green, people like Rabbi Sheffield Gold, they also have their meaningful psychedelic experiences, but they want to go home with it. They want to know I want to either. For Reb Zalman, who is a dedicated laborator all of his life, there's something spiritually potent in this psychedelic experience that maybe I can actually share with more people. For Rabbi Art Green, he only started getting into Hasidoot and Kabbalah and then wanted to translate his direct experiences with the mystical and trying to connect it to the traditions that were taken off the table for liberal Judaism. So we have a lineage, and it might even go farther back. I'm not a person that starts finding drugs or hallucinogens in the Bible. But, you know, just as of 2020, a team in Barilan was able to isolate Cannabinoids right, the active compound in cannabis in an altar, an incense altar that was found in Tel Arad outside of Bercheva. So something was happening with cannabis in ancient Israel. Now, it didn't come to us as a continuous lineage or practice, but it is there also. But we have a profound tradition of expanding our consciousness in really rarefied, beautiful ways as well, between then and now.
• 38:08
  Dr. Hoffman, was he Jewish, the one who first was not? No.
• 38:13
  Albert Hoffman was not Jewish? No. But interestingly, just in terms of history, so he was the first person to synthesize LSD. I think his first successful and purposeful ingestion of LSD on what is called Bicycle Day was also the same day that the Warsaw Ghetto was being liquified, or liquidated, rather. So there's a very different history between what happened in the gentile world with psychedelics and what happened with Jewish culture.
• 38:53
  Excellent, because just the previous segment, we were talking about the American Girl dolls, and their name is Hoffman also. And I was like, oh, what a good intersection with that. Jim, if the Hoffman twins from the American Girls from 1999 were related to Dr. Albert Hoffman. But, oh, not to be so practically, what does the intersection look like? I mean, it's clearly going to be very varied, but what are some examples, right, of some of these experiences that people have been able to synthesize to use the term Judaism with a psychedelic experience?
• 39:26
  Yeah, well, what we have been doing, because these materials are still illegal in this country, although things are changing very quickly. You've seen places like Oregon, Colorado, various cities which are decriminalizing things, but on the federal level in the United States are still illegal. They are still schedule one substances. But I think a lot of the research that is happening in places like Johns Hopkins, NYU, UC Davis in Northern.
• 40:02
  California I signed up for the Spiritual Leader Study at Johns Hopkins many years ago, but they never did. I never got it off the waiting list.
• 40:13
  Well, we could talk about that maybe another time, but I think when we're seeing all of this profound research not only about what is available to people in the psychological space, but what is available spiritually, what is available trans personally as they call it, beyond oneself. And what we're finding when people come to us is that they've either had an experience and they want to ground anchor, make meaning of those experiences within their Jewish framework or they're preparing for an experience and want to know what is the ritual that I could be bringing here? How could I prepare myself for this in a Jewish way that is I think, really valuable. And also what's important is that most of the spaces that people are finding themselves in that are psychedelic. Whether it is Ketamine Clinic again, or whether it's working with an underground therapist, is that those spaces are not always conducive to one's Jewishness, either in the iconography or the music choice, or even just the assumptions about what is happening, what is occurring to that person at that time, or what's even the best advice to give a person in the integration So we are giving people, I think, tools and criteria to say how do you allow your Jewishness to show up in this space? How do you let your tradition guide you? How do you even call on your ancestors, your ancestors to support you in this process? So we are taking the language that seems to be permeating psychedelic space and we're also bringing in these aspects of Jewish practice, jewish religion, Jewish spirituality that I myself was not raised with. Do you have a personal and abiding relationship with Avraham Avenue and Sara Emanu? Me personally, that is something that yeah.
• 42:22
  You personally I'm a rabbi. Do I have a personal relationship with them? As in like do I think about them one on one? Not necessarily, but I do think about other characters. I probably relate more to the Rabbis of the Talmodo than my Monadeans because I am more of a rationalist. But it's a great question. I was going to ask even, let's say hypothetically, right, to get really grounded and let's say I know we're going to see it's hypothetical, but it's not. But it is. But I'm like suppose I get mishloachman note this week and somebody happens to include in my mishelachman note this week a tab of acid. Right? It's something that will help my poor him go forward. What would I do to make that a more Jewish experience?
• 43:04
  Well, the first thing that you should.
• 43:05
  Do is maybe not do a tab of asset the first time as your first psychedelic experience.
• 43:10
  Again, I'm not going to give any direction in that way. I would think that in order to be upholding the mitsva of the Nish Martin et Nachotechem, right, to actually be guarding your body, taking care of yourself, you would try to find a testing kit to make sure that what you're getting is and what you're putting into your body is what someone has told you. Right. So that this is what we call harm reduction. That's number one. The second thing that you might do after you have verified that it is what they have told you it is is to think about your intentions. That we have in the Jewish language of prayer, we have kavanaugh our intention, setting the direction that we're hoping to go in, to be able to say, like, what is my purpose here? Not just stick out your tongue and buy the ticket, then take the ride. But what would I actually hope to get out of this experience? And then the other piece is the Keva. What is the space in which I would want to do this, that is safe, that is supported? Do I want someone with me? Do I want someone to be minding the store while I go fishing inside my own consciousness and be really intentional about do I want to be listening to music? Do I want to be moving my body? Do I want prayer or ritual to be part of this?
• 44:41
  Can I just jump in and ask a really practical question that relates to this? Because I am a complete ignorance in these matters. How long does an acid trip or whatever the kids call it or whatever, how long would it last? Because I just am thinking like most of the people I know, myself included, have small children. You know what I mean? Like this seems like it would be kind of I'm picturing some sort of retreat. Again, like late 1960s. A lot of people who maybe do not have a ton of practical obligations.
• 45:12
  Sure, of course. Well, just like Abby had started to indicate in his earlier comment, all of this information about everything is available and people really should do research. There's good information out there on the internet about the subjective effects of all of these chemicals and plants and fungi. But when we're talking about LSD, for example, this is a very long acting compound. Someone with a regular dose, if there is such a thing, that could last up to ten to 12 hours. This is heavy work. So someone who doesn't have all of that time to give either because of their own responsibilities might choose something else. So someone who is working with Ketamine in the clinic, this might be something that they do for one to 2 hours. Someone who is using any other compound could be from 1 hour, it could be 20 minutes to four to 6 hours. So again, you need to know what you're getting into. And that's part of the upholding of that mitzvah of guarding yourself. Yeah.
• 46:26
  I find it fascinating that it sounds like what you're doing probably could be what anybody is doing. But grounding it in Jewish texts and Jewish ideas, even the preparation for it and the way in which you come forward to it is doing that. Are there any people that have done like creative rituals that are specific to a psychedelic that have a strong Jewish content that are innovative that you're like. If you want to know what people are doing with Judas and psychedelics, look to that.
• 46:57
  Yes, plenty of people are doing this individually. They're doing it in small groups. I'm not at liberty to share anybody's name here, but people are working with this, and we might be the first organization that's dedicated to working these things out. But there's a lot of great work by great individuals out there, and we're wanting to raise them up in the ways that are appropriate.
• 47:27
  Notice my old friend from university, Amy Silver is on your faculty.
• 47:32
  Yeah, he's truly fantastic educator. Holy man, brilliant educator. He's also a therapist. And so people are quite innovative with their rituals. I think whatever is the desire of a person's heart, if they want to have Shabbat energy, people are setting a full Shabbat table for themselves on a Wednesday just to be able to bring that kind of awareness. Or they're bringing people over for Friday night, but having the entire evening be infused with cannabis. And people are trying to be intentional about how much and when. What is the space for ritual? What is the space for silence? Do we also schedule a hike that Sunday after so that we can begin to integrate and talk about what it was like for us in Toronto?
• 48:29
  Often a Friday evening could be infused with cannabis. Just if you walk down the street.
• 48:34
  Of course.
• 48:35
  Canada joke. Canada joke. That's all. I'm sorry.
• 48:38
  I mean, you would talk about Canada. I'm aware of people in cottage culture in Canada that they spend a week at the cottage with their friends and are for the purpose of expanding consciousness when the sun goes down around the fire by the water. So people are doing this in lots of ways that in please God are nourishing their souls. And at the same time, we know that people can have negative experiences, and that's not just because of the subjective effects, but they found themselves in a situation where they didn't know the person that they were actually working with as well as they should have. They're going to retreats that they were they didn't do enough research about it and find themselves in harmful situations. And so, again, this is not just because the drugs are cool, but people need to also be drugs are cool, be aware that their drugs can be cool. But I would say maybe the drugs themselves are relatively safe, but the company that they find themselves with could be less than safe. And so people need to be more careful about that than the substances.
• 50:07
  Is that something that might change in terms of the is it because drugs are illegal and you don't know what's in them? Does that play a large role here, do you think?
• 50:18
  I would say drug testing, regardless of the drug, is a very good practice. I think part of the issue is that because these things are still illegal it's that prohibition actually allows bad actors who are not regulated to act with impunity and because people often are so are often desperate, right? Especially now. In the past month, I have received more emails and calls about people's children who have treatment resistant depression. That they have tried everything. That they have tried SSRIS, antidepressant medicine. They have tried talk therapy and they see all. Of these press releases about psychedelics can psychedelics may psychedelics could heal for this particular ailment and because they are so loving and scared for their loved one that they'll do anything. And I think that that allows people who are either doing this but are not doing it in the best way, people who are shamans for no particular reason other than they have access to the medicine, people can be taken advantage of. And that also means the integration process not just come somewhere, stay for 6 hours and go home, but how is a person being held after the fact? How are they able to process what has happened during the session? Is there an ongoing therapeutic relationship even if it isn't with a therapist per se? And so I say eventually we are going to be able to move into the space that is outside of medicalization but is something that's closer to maybe pastoral care where we are actually offering spiritual direction hashpah that is utilizing these medicines, these plants but it is for other purposes than just the treatment of mental health disorders. So we are making our path toward that future.
• 52:55
  Have you had any pushback from Jewish communal leadership, whether rabbinic or other communal leaders who have said that this is not a path that the Jewish community should be going down and you should not be doing this?
• 53:12
  There's very little. The pushback that I have gotten is either historical meaning people who were around in the have mostly anecdotal stories about how people who use these substances back then it was deleterious to their well being or their mental health. Again, people not being careful with the set and the setting, the keva and the kavanaugh when these things were happening that yes, these can be destabilizing experiences for people if they're not held in a good container. So that's one pushback about what people have seen in the past and whatever work you're doing, if you're not advocating, you're just there to catch people is still giving a hacker to these things that's on one end, on another end. What I would actually like some more time and thought to work through is people from more religious orientation who say this is a shortcut to spiritual work. This is not part of our Messora. This is not part of our tradition. Our sadiqim, our wise people. Our sages did not use this to achieve the heights of spiritual refinement. And this is just the easy way or even whatever you achieve is like nothing because you didn't do it according to the traditions that we have for this. And I would like to understand the nature of what it means for there to be a shortcut also because all of the people that I have talked to don't see this as the apprehension of some final thing, but see this as the beginning of a path of acquiring knowledge and wisdom. And also I would say that the easy path is probably hard enough. This is maybe a shortcut, but a shortcut to a longer road. We even learn in Chabad Hasidis that there is a short, long path and a long, short path. And so for a lot of people who are working in this way, it could be a shortcut in the moment, but they are introduced to a much longer process of spiritual development. So I need time to think about more about that.
• 55:48
  Sure. Well, to go on the line of Hasidic teachings, there's a famous hosidic teaching about how Yom Kippur is Yom Kippurim. That it's a day that is almost like PORIM, that is almost at the level, and that the ability the heights that one can reach on Purim are actually higher than the heights that one can reach on Yom Kippur. And people think about the physical dissolution. Right. The ability for you to go and be a better person by letting go of everything in your body. What better time to think about this in the days leading up to poor him than the ability to let go of the ego and the possibilities and the benefits of psychedelics, especially through joy and not just through a long scary process. And so I encourage everybody to go check it out, at least, even if you're skeptical, even if you're just more interested in hearing about it. Your website is chefaflow.org. Is that it? To find out more, they are not going to point you to anybody that is going to do anything illegal. They are just going to point you to resources for integrating other ideas into a Jewish context. Zach cabinetZ. Thanks so much for coming on. Boger high.
• 57:00
  Thank you. This was fascinating.
• 57:02
  Thank you again.
• 57:20
  And now it's time to show for our nakas this week. Phoebe, what's your nakas?
• 57:25
  Well, mine actually has a bit of a CJN connection because our colleague Ellen Bezner just interviewed Dr. Daniel J. Drucker, an award winning Canadian researcher behind the diabetes drug Ozempic and other such drugs.
• 57:44
  Is this the drug that's like taking the nation by storm and making people lose their weight?
• 57:50
  Yes. So my Nahus is well, I also have Nahos for miraculous drugs of all kinds, which is perhaps on topic also for today generally. But that's not what I mean in this context, of course. But what I'm going to praise right now is Matthew Schneier's New York magazine cover story about the off label uses of such drugs and what they mean for the body positivity movement. So basically the same drugs that can be used to really sort of, in this revolutionary way, treat, I believe it's type two diabetes can also allow a fashionable thin woman or a person of any gender identity become even slimmer. And apparently there's a bunch of that happening in fashionable circles in New York City and elsewhere. And anyway, the article, though, Matthew Schneier's article in New York Magazine is just really, really interesting in terms of what it says about there had been this kind of cultural moment where it was supposed to be a thing of the past, wanting to be skinny. People weren't supposed to want that anymore. People were supposed to have sort of moved past that as a goal. And evidently that now that it's possible to take an apparently quite expensive, at least in this off label usage medication to be skinny, you got a bunch of people doing that. So, yeah, I really recommend that article.
• 59:24
  I will check it out. I discovered an album I have mentioned in the past, multiple times how I love Jewish music. I love music in general. I find that there is less and less great Jewish music that is coming out lately. Maybe I'm just not discovering it. So if you have albums that you think I should be listening to, you should be sending them to me. But I did discover a new album by this group called Raza, and their album is called Capellia. They are associated with hadar in New York and their rising Song institute, I believe. But it's a recording of 22 women singing Hasidic nagunam Hasidic songs, like mostly wordless songs, you know, that it's supposed to be deeply moving because they use harmonium and they use, like, open drums and like, cellos as the minimal instrumentation behind it. But you often hear these Hasidic songs being sung by Male Kasidim at male Hasidic events. And they're just all singing together, especially at Shabbat without any instrumentation. And this is the first instance that we have of women generally. A lot of them are probably excited, not necessarily all of them, but they recorded some videos. They did a photographic documentation. It's a whole project. But the album is available on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get wherever you are listening to Bonjour Hai. Obviously you should go and check out this album, Raza Capellia. It's beautiful, it's haunting, it's fun. There is a sense of humor and joy that I don't always hear when you're hearing men singing these negotiations, these songs. But I had a lot of fun and I've been listening to our repeat for the past week since it's been out. Maybe we will go out with an excerpt. Phoebe, fabulous as always. This has been a fun show.
• 1:01:36
  Thanks, Abby. This has been fun.
• 1:01:38
  Thank you for listening to Bonjourkai for the week ending March 4. Shabbat parashat titsavet. The show is produced and edited by Zach Kaufman, the executive producer for CJN podcasts is Michael Freeman. Our music is by so called we're, a project of the Jewish Living Lab and are distributed by the CJN Podcast Network. You can listen to all our past episodes on our page at the CJN. CA Bonjour, and you can subscribe to the podcast and automatically receive all episodes on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. We'd love it if you told a friend about Bonjour High. It is one of the best ways we get new listeners. As always, email us with comments at bonjour at the CJN. CA. I'm Avi Feingold.
• 1:02:15
  And I'm Phoebe Maltzbovi.