Sivan 5785 - Shefa as a Psychedelic Theology

In 2016, I had hit rock bottom--spiritually, psychically, and socially. My wife and I had experienced pregnancy loss, failed rounds of IVF, isolation and alienation from friends, family, and community for almost two years. My private love affair with God, which surprisingly and non-negotiably began with a natural, intense mystical experience when I was 15, felt like it was being ripped away from me with each appointment, each painful choice point. As a rabbi serving a community, it was impossible to show up for Jewish joy when I couldn't open up my siddur and utter a word a prayer without feeling tremendous solitude. Even after our successful last round of egg fertilization, my unprocessed grief had rendered my faith illegible.

It was at that time that someone forwarded me an email about participating in a research study for clergy which would see how a mystical experience, "occasioned" by psilocybin in a safe, comfortable environment, might support my work as a spiritual professional in a communal context. My experiences at Hopkins--both the profoundly beautiful one and the one where I stared into the unceasing void of Cosmic Boredom--provided me with a new ground of being, a somewhat stable but decisively weirder place to continue my work as a rabbi. Yet, there was a nagging sense about my time at Hopkins that I couldn't shake: if these experiences were to become more available to more people, through medicalization, legalization, etc., Jews and their communities should be having more open conversations about how psychedelics have impacted their spiritual and communal lives since the 60's, should have more opportunities to explore Jewish teachings, music, and rituals which support journeys into consciousness, should contend with generations of inherited traumas and gifts of resilience which still invisibly shape our reality today.

Like a premature birth, my little idea became an sudden existential need when I was let go from my job during Covid lockdown, and I quickly found support to launch Shefa as a container to hold all of the stories and questions and heartbreak and redemption and ethical concerns and inner yearning that came my way from Jews around the world who were ready to learn together and have these conversations in an open and good way.

It's been seven years since my time on couch at Hopkins, and five years of Shefa. During this time, I've met thousands of Jews who simply want to encounter something different--more direct, more close--than what they grew up with and left or what they now find through spiritual attrition. A Bible scholar finally speaking to God about their abusive father because of MDMA. A woman whose body turns into Auschwitz smokestacks processing Holocaust trauma that doesn't even belong to her own family's story during a mushroom journey. A rabbi committing to non-violence after ketamine IV infusions. A young person--a devoted Jewish atheist--feeling joy and pleasure in her body for the first time during an ayahuasca retreat. We have so much to learn, and we know so much already, about how to do this work in a good way that benefits the individual and collective, to create safer and more ethical containers for experience, to advocate for non-directive or least-dogmatic care in altered states. It been an honor to continue to learn and share what I know. I now think of psychedelics as "short-long medicine"--they might get us somewhere fast, but it takes an incredible amount of effort, discipline, focus, and commitment to make the journeys have meaningful impact. That is what Foucault called spirituality: "the search, the practice, the experience by which the subject operates on himself the transformations which are necessary to access the truth."

Michael Pollan's article marks another turning in this story. I'm excited for my fellow study participants to share their light and their stories. I'm grateful to have played some small part in the scientific method. I thank the God of my mothers and fathers for playing with me, finding me, again and again, no matter where I might hide. But after all of these years of waiting, or building while waiting, what have I actually learned about my time at Hopkins, my experiences since, and my desires for our growing community?

I'm learning that God is the source of all consciousness — not only the transcendent light but also the flicker of awareness that allows us to notice it. I’m learning that there is a sacred flow between divinity and humanity, what our mystics call Shefa, and that this flow still pulses beneath the surface of everything, even if we’ve forgotten how to feel it. I’m learning that modern life has scattered our ancestral maps, torn the fabric of our sacred canopy, and left many of us spiritually disoriented, searching for home without knowing what it should feel like.

But I'm also learning that the doorways remain. That practices of prayer, study, meditation, ritual, and yes — when held with reverence — psychedelic medicines, can help shift our awareness and reopen the connection to Shefa. These substances are not shortcuts or spectacles. They are reminders, reweavers. In the right hands, with the right intention, they can help restore the canopy we’ve lost — not just as individuals, but as a people.

I’m learning that these journeys aren’t about escape. They are invitations to return. To integrate what we’ve seen and felt into our relationships, our responsibilities, our joy and grief and choices. The medicine only begins to work when the ceremony ends.

And finally, I’m learning that none of this is sustainable without a life of grounding — in learning, in spiritual practice, in humility, and in community. That the only way to receive Shefa and not drown in it is to be anchored in obligation — ḥiyuv — to be a vessel not just for insight, but for service.

This is what I’m learning. This is the theology unfolding beneath my feet.