Marcheshvan 5786 - Our Ancestors are Everywhere
In the early days of Shefa, when I began putting myself out there to support Jews struggling to integrate their psychedelic experiences—some dating all the way back to the ’60s—one overwhelming concern kept surfacing: many had no idea who their ancestors were. They knew the names of their grandparents, maybe one great-grandparent, but no one had cared to share the name of the town or village their family had left to start over. Some had pieced together fragments of a generational puzzle from trace bits of information, but the motivations for why and how their ancestors moved—and, ultimately, why the seekers themselves had come to exist in the places they now found themselves—were lost. For many Ashkenazim whose families left Europe before and the war, the silence itself became an inheritance—no one spoke of what drove them to leave or what was lost along the way. For Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Jews of color, the rupture took other forms: exile, erasure, slavery, the quiet and violent pressures to assimilate. Each lineage carried its own unspoken wound, its own version of “we don’t talk about that.”
Given this profound ancestral silence, how could they ever heal what came before them? How could they honor what was nameless and faceless?
My brief obsession with digging up my family roots was largely inspired by my even briefer obsession with Mormon theology and culture during the last years of my undergraduate studies. Once I had learned about proxy ordinances for deceased relatives, dependent on intensive genealogical database research, I began interviewing as many of my still-living relatives as I could and uploaded all of the information on www.geni.com. I could only go back as far as my second great-grandparents, hailing from all over the places known as Ukraine, Galicia, Poland, and Russia, depending on the map of the moment, with the earliest births estimated between the early to mid-1800’s. From notable provenances like Kamenetz-Podolsk and Yampol, there were no remains of their vocational or spiritual legacies save that they mostly moved to New York before the turn of the century with their small children, avoiding the peril of the next fifty years for Eastern European Jewry. Without knowing anything else about them, this would be their greatest, simplest gift to me—life itself.
Yet with no real extended family to speak of and fragile bonds in my own nuclear family, I have often felt like an orphan in this world—even with both parents still living. That lack of rootedness became more pronounced once I began my own psychedelic therapy in earnest. As I met the buried layers of my own belief systems and self-concepts, the sting of the second arrow came from my inability to ask anyone where they (and I) truly came from. It was around this time that I encountered a line from the Ramban’s commentary on the first chapter of Genesis that I had read countless times before, now with new eyes.
“And God said: Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness.” (Gen 1:26)
The meaning of “Let us make” is to teach humility. Scripture speaks in this way so that the great will not say, “I shall do this alone,” but will say, “Let us do it,” as one who consults with those beneath them. Thus the prophets took counsel with angels before acting, and so it is the way of the humble — all the more so with the Holy Blessed One who is the most humble of all.
Our Rabbis taught (Genesis Rabbah 8:8) that God took counsel with the ministering angels while creating the human being. God said to them: “In our image, after our likeness,” so that they would not envy humanity, and all agreed that the human should be created. This is the meaning of “Let us make,” and because God said “in our image” and “after our likeness,” Scripture speaks here in the plural.
But Rabbi Elazar said there (Genesis Rabbah 8:3): “With all the works of creation the Holy One, blessed be He, took counsel — with the heavens and with the earth, with the sea and with the depths — as it is said, ‘Let us make the human.’ I and you together shall create them.”
This means that God spoke to all the works of creation and told them to join in making the body of the human, for all would contribute their power: the earth would give the body, the sea its moisture, the heavens their breath.
And this is a very beautiful interpretation, for God created all existence ex nihilo, and afterward placed within each created thing the power of continuity — to bring forth and to reproduce according to Divine will. This is the meaning of “I and you shall create.”
In my opinion, there is also a deep secret contained in this verse, to be revealed only to those who understand the mysteries of the Torah.
Without getting into the Ramban’s mystical anthropology he alludes to at the end, the simple meaning of the Midrash he favors is strikingly akin to Carl Sagan’s image of “star stuff,” though rendered in a more ancient idiom. Our most distant, and yet most intimate, ancestor is Creation itself: the elements, the light of distant stars, all of plant and animal life, gathered into the mystery of human consciousness. For the modern Jewish psychedelic explorer, this reading carries a quiet but radical charge. If, as the Ramban teaches, we are made through partnership with all that came before—the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the depths—then our journeys aren’t simply inward; they are ecological. Psychedelic experience reminds us, often wordlessly, that the world is alive and communicating, that consciousness didn’t begin with us and won’t end with us. What the Midrash calls “I and you together shall create” is still happening: creation is ongoing, and we are part of its dreaming.
To touch that awareness is to feel both awe and accountability. Terrence McKenna said that psychedelics dissolve the boundaries that separate us from the living world, revealing that intelligence is not confined to the human mind but woven through leaf, stone, water, and wind. In that light, to “integrate” is not merely to stabilize after a trip—it is to learn how to live as one small expression of the cosmos’s own self-awareness. The task is no longer to protect the earth as if it were an object outside of us, but to remember that we are the earth, remembering itself.
In honor of the month of Marcheshvan and our prayerful focus in the late fall and winter for abundant rain, inspired by Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine, consider reflecting on your relationship to water—as your ancestor, your first home, where all of your internal processes exist.
How do you feel by the sea? By a lake, a river, or in the rain?
What memories does water bring up for you—comfort, fear, longing, calm?
Do you prefer still water or moving water? Why?
How does your body respond to cold water? To hot water?
When have you felt most alive in or near water?
What is your relationship to drinking water—do you savor it, forget it, take it for granted?
Where does your water come from? Do you know the name of its source?
How do you feel when it rains for days on end? When it doesn’t rain for weeks?
Have you ever experienced a flood or drought—literal or emotional?
When have you cried in front of someone else?
What role does water play in your Jewish life—handwashing, mikveh, the tefillot for rain and dew in their proper times?
When have you felt “in over your head”? How did you find your footing again?
How do you feel about swimming—pleasure, fear, control, surrender?
How do you relate to winter—its stillness, its frozen water?
What are you afraid of losing control over?
Do you ever feel restless or anxious when you’re still?
What does the color blue mean to you?
How much water do you use in a day? Where does it go when you’re done with it?
What kind of weather feels most like home to you?
When have you felt awe—standing before water, or standing before your own reflection in it?
Hodesh tov,
Z
