Benji

• The question of goodness permeates Murdoch’s entire body of work, but she plumbs this particular aspect of it — its bearing on truth and morality, lensed through Plato — in greater depth in an essay titled On “God” and “Good,” also included in Existentialists and Mystics.

• With an eye to the relationship between the good and “the real which is the proper object of love, and of knowledge which is freedom,” she considers what it takes for us to purify our attention in order to take in reality on its own terms, unalloyed with our attachments and ideas.

• What it takes, she suggests, is “something analogous to prayer, though it is something difficult to describe, and which the higher subtleties of the self can often falsify” — not some “quasi-religious meditative technique,” but “something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person.”

• Half a century after the existentialist and mystic Simone Weil liberated this raw mindfulness from the strict captivity of religion with her lovely observation that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” for it “presupposes faith and love.”

• In my favorite talk of the entire symposium, Sam Shonkoff described two modes of connecting with history. The first mode claims that drugs played a role in advancing Judaism—for example, that hassidic Judaism was boosted by poor Jews eating ergot-filled rye bread (ergot being chemically related to LSD). These claims are tenuous at best and have little to provide modern Jewish psychedelic users beyond some modicum of validation.

• Instead, Shonkoff argued, the more common move is to make a hermeneutical claim: my ancestors may not have tripped on shrooms, but I can understand them because I tripped on shrooms. The biggest public advocate of this idea was Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, whose LSD trip with Timothy Leary could reasonably be said to have inaugurated psychedelic Judaism. For Zalman, psychedelics offered moderns a way to get in touch with the past, even if that past didn’t involve psychedelics, and even if we’ll inevitably project ourselves onto the past that we’re retrieving. Like so many previous generations, psychedelic Judaism willfully and enthusiastically injects itself into our shared history. What could be more authentically Jewish than that?

• But, as some of the other speakers noted, there’s actually a third mode: the Jewish history of altered states of consciousness. This mode encompasses mystical texts in which the senses become mixed (discussed by Eliot Wolfson and Nathaniel Berman). It might also include Biblical and Talmudic sources that point to drumming-induced trance states, as well as female-run vineyard rituals (argued by Jill Hammer). Most usefully, it could even include the real-but-obscure history of Jewish shamans (ba’alei shem), whose use of esoteric rituals, intricate ceremonies, and herbal medicines was importantly raised up by Yosef Rosen (much of this tradition died off when medical schools began accepting Jewish students).

• This flourishing, moreover, has a clear path to maturation. It’s so straightforward, in fact, that I can spell it out in broad strokes right here, in no particular order:

• Create a suite of definitive studies on the history of Jewish psychedelic use, consciousness alteration, and practical guides (some of these are already in the works!)

• Fund research teams on Judaism and psychedelics

• Establish mechanisms for cultural exchange between American and Israeli psychedelic users

• Encourage experimentation with psychedelic-boosted Jewish rituals, both communal and individual

• Design and expand trainings for facilitators and trip sitters

• Collect oral histories of Jewish psychedelic use from the 1950s until today

• Further develop informal online networks, as well as regional networks

• Draft a statement of principles for psychedelic Judaism

• Publish guidelines for safe use

• Develop Jewish thought about addiction

• Create pedagogical tools for communities with little exposure to psychedelics, so that they can appreciate them intellectually and/or try them if interested (coercion is never okay)

• Devise strategies for engagement with major rabbinic institutions

• Establish a national organization to link all the people in the psychedelic Judaism space and perhaps do public advocacy