I came to this work through loss. My wife and I spent a couple of years going through pregnancy loss and IVF. The grief left me open to things I might have dismissed before, including an invitation to join the Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin with religious leaders. My first session came three weeks after my daughter was born. My second came when she was three months old.
So this work has been tied up with parenting from the start. Part of why I do it is that I want to be a better father.
My kids are older now, and they ask more questions. On our walks to shul we stop at the plants in our neighbors’ yards: the huachuma cactus and its night blooming flower; sticky fresh tobacco leaves; brightly colored morning glory; angel’s trumpets hanging over a sidewalk we wear as hats; and now and then a surprise amanita under someone’s fir tree. They know the names of the plants that live around them. Last summer, during the shiva for his grandfather, our son helped me plant cacti in our front yard. We talk about how people have used plants like these for healing, and how some can bring dreamlike visions. I tell them there are people who know how to make these plants into medicine, and without that knowledge the same plant can be poison. We look, and we don’t touch or taste. When friends and colleagues are around the kids, I ask them to leave the word “psychedelic” out of it.
I want to protect my kids, and I also want to build something they could inherit: a Jewish life where prayer, meditation, Talmud Torah, Shabbos, community, and healing fit together. This holiday has helped me think about how to do both.
The name Ḥanukkah shares a root with ḥinukh, education. The Piaseczner Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, opens Ḥovat HaTalmidim, his book on education, with that word. Following Rashi, he links ḥinukh to the dedication of the altar and the Temple, and points out that the word applies when a finished building is first put to use. For him, ḥinukh means drawing out what’s already in a child. Left alone, it stays hidden.
To draw it out, he says, the teacher has to get down to the child’s level to find the spark and help it grow, and every child needs a different approach: חֲנֹךְ לַנַּעַר עַל פִּי דַרְכּוֹ. He compares the parent to a gardener and calls difficult children unripe angels, bitter early and sweet once they ripen. For a father who spends his walks pointing at cacti, it’s the right image for this kind of plant parenthood.
Bnei Yissaschar, by Rabbi Tzvi Elimelekh of Dinov, says the holiday is called Ḥanukkah after the ḥinukh we give young children so they’ll know the practice when they’re older. We teach the form, and the meaning comes in microdoses. The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) records how the lights should grow. Beit Hillel says to start with one and add one each night, מוֹסִיף וְהוֹלֵךְ. Nobody lights all eight on the first night.
Our walks are the first candle. More of the story will come as the kids get older. The medicines themselves are for adults, in safe, legal settings.
Plenty of other parents are in this position. Mothers and fathers are finding these medicines in the middle of raising kids, often through grief or depression, and coming out of it wanting to be more present at home. Some have built community around it. Plant Parenthood brings together parents exploring psychedelics and family life, and Moms on Mushrooms gathers mothers to talk openly about psilocybin and parenting. Most are working it out alone, and quietly, because the stigma is real and so are the legal stakes for families. They need a way of life to hold the experience, a set of practices and a community that can teach children what matters at each stage of their growing up. Emmanuel Levinas called Judaism a religion for adults. Our work as parents is to raise children who can grow into it.
Other cultures raise children inside ceremonial life, and I’ve been learning from them. In many Native American Church families, young children come to the all-night prayer meeting, get a blessing, and fall asleep behind their parents and grandparents while the road man and the community pray over them. Full participation comes years later, as a rite of passage the young person chooses. Among the Wixárika of Mexico, the youngest children make their first trip to Wirikuta, their sacred desert, through the singer’s chant at the Drum Festival. When they reach the right age, they walk it as their parents did, seeking the peyote and the life it brings back to the community. These traditions belong to their peoples. What I take from them is the sequence: the children belong to the ceremony first, and the medicine comes later. For our families, “later” means adulthood.
The psalm we say on Ḥanukkah is headed מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר חֲנֻכַּת הַבַּיִת לְדָוִד, a song for the dedication of the House, by David. Rashi says David wrote it for the Levites to sing when his son Shlomo dedicated the Temple. David never saw the building. He wrote the song for it anyway, and it’s a psalm about healing: שִׁוַּעְתִּי אֵלֶיךָ וַתִּרְפָּאֵנִי, I cried out to You, and You healed me.
The Temple had its own festival of light. Mishnah Sukkah (5:1–3) describes Simḥat Beit HaShoevah, the water-drawing celebration on Sukkot, a night so joyful that anyone who never saw it never saw real rejoicing. Golden lamps stood in the Temple courtyard, each with four ladders. Young priests, still children, climbed them carrying great jugs of oil and filled every bowl. The wicks were twisted from the worn-out garments of the older priests. When the lamps were lit, there wasn’t a courtyard in Jerusalem that didn’t glow.
The children carried the oil. That’s the place I want for my kids: inside the celebration, climbing the ladder with something precious in their hands. They already know some of the songs our Indigenous facilitator sings; they learned them from hearing me sing them at home. They also wrinkle their noses at the cedar and sweetgrass I light at opportune moments. Whether they light the lamps when they’re older will be up to them.
Will my children sit in ceremony with us one day? Will they inherit what we’ve built? Have we made something with enough integrity, safety, heart, and spirit that it still speaks to them? I don’t know yet. Tonight we light one candle, and tomorrow we’ll add another.
Ḥag urim sameaḥ,
Z
