5 Questions for Zac Kamenetz

Kamenetz, a rabbi living in the Bay Area, discusses his experiences with psychedelics and what drew him to found Shefa, an organization dedicated to Jewish psychedelic support.

When he was fifteen, Zac Kamenetz had his first mystical experience while visiting an archaeological site outside Jerusalem called Tal Gezer. Up until then, Kamenetz, who grew up going to synagogue in North Carolina, hadn’t been particularly devout. After his vision at Tal Gezer, Kamenetz bought a yarmulke and started wearing it. When he returned home, he told his parents he could no longer eat pork, or ride in cars on the Sabbath, and in the years after, he continued to dedicate himself to Judaic texts and community. At thirty, he was ordained as a rabbi. 

Then, in 2017, Kamenetz heard about a university research study involving psychedelics. He’d never been interested in drugs — he describes himself as a “very good D.A.R.E graduate” — but he was intrigued. His friend had applied to be a participant in the research, but he was rejected because he’d previously used psychedelics.The study sought the “psychedelic naive”: people who, like Kamenetz, had never tried the drugs. After two psilocybin sessions and weeks of integration, Kamenetz says the experiences brought him peace. He founded Shefa, an organization dedicated to Jewish psychedelic support. The Microdose spoke with Rabbi Kamenetz, who lives in the Bay Area, about his work connecting psychedelics and Judaism.

As someone who was “psychedelically naive,” what were your experiences with psilocybin like?

At the time, I’d just gotten married, and we experienced some infertility challenges. The first psilocybin experience was incredibly powerful and meaningful and beautiful, full of light and color, with lessons and affirmation. We’d just had our first child after a successful round of IVF, and I felt overwhelming gratitude. It was a profound, prayerful, deep moment, to be there and to be held by the team, and their care. 

The second experience I had a few months later was very different. It felt like I was stuck in a void, in a shadow with no light, no relationship, no meaning — just hopelessly bored. I felt disappointed. But over time, integration helped me put these two experiences together. One of the most powerful spiritual teachings I’ve read about is the experience of absence and presence. As a religious person, the thing that got me to where I am is presence: a feeling of fullness and relationship, like in that first experience. When it was gone, I was like, “Ok, I guess it’s all over.” Even though the second experience was difficult and made me feel empty, it was an important lesson about the balance between presence and absence.

What gave you the idea to start Shefa?

Once I started speaking publicly about my psychedelic experiences, I got so much traffic from Jews all over the world. It was overwhelming — it felt like we were poised to have this public conversation. I started the organization to create a container for all of that. For Jews who have had psychedelic experiences or mystical experiences, whether that was in the 1950s or 50 minutes ago, this is a place to talk about those experiences. 

So we developed a structure and a model for Jewish integration circles for Jews and by Jews. Sometimes, Jews in psychedelic experiences don’t always feel like they can bring their full selves, because of other people’s feelings about Jewishness, or their own feelings about their Jewishness. So to create a culturally and religiously respectful space where people could bring their full selves and talk about their psychedelic experiences in confidence with other Jews has been really impactful and so needed. 

In Hebrew, Shefa means flow or abundance. A lot of Jewish literature that talks about the relationship between the individual and the divine is about flow, like water or light into a container, or flow between the two worlds, flow between the self and other. I wanted to focus on relationships, on connection, on having a deep, mutual connection with each other. 

In addition to integration circles, what other work is Shefa doing?

We’ve also done public teaching about what a psychedelic-integrated Judaism might look like. That teaching has happened in Jewish educational settings and communities where people are at the beginning of understanding what psychedelics are, what psychedelic therapy is, and what it has to do with Judaism or Jewish spirituality. Last year, we co-founded the first Jewish Psychedelic Summit with Natalie Ginsberg from MAPS, and Madison Margolin from DoubleBlind. We had 1,500 people sign up, and 5,000 people sign up for our mailing list. It was a major cultural moment, a celebration of psychedelic experiences since the 1960s, with people like Rabbi Art Green and Rabbi Shefa Gold, who are our Jewish psychedelic elders. So much of contemporary Judaism was born out of individuals having powerful psychedelic experiences, so we honored and recognized that, and created a space to talk about Jewish-informed psychedelic trauma work. So many lineages have been lost because of genocide, displacement, and murder — our teachers were wiped out, our books gone. The Judaism we live today, as venerable and noble and courageous as it is, is missing a few limbs. So there’s something inherently political in our work, too. 

Right now, I'm speaking with a researcher interested in doing a study about rabbis, and how a well-curated, safe, and supported psychedelic experience could influence rabbis’ religious life. We talked about what we have not seen yet in the clinical world: the experience of a prolonged integration, not just one or two sessions, but up to six months of integration and support for people. That’s an exciting model, one that builds community. We can bring someone to eat drugs, but that feels like the easy part: how do we introduce religious practice, or a life of study, to people who are looking to support their psychedelic experiences? That’s something unique to a religious tradition. If people are having Jewish psychedelic experiences, either that we have curated and provided or that others have, we could match them up with other things that could bring them to a life of practice. It’s what religious scholar Huston Smith calls going from altered states to altered traits. 

You mention psychedelics’ influence on contemporary Judaism. Are there any teachings you feel are particularly relevant today?

Our tradition includes people who are harmed by mystical experience. There's a famous story about four rabbis who enter what's called the pardes, or paradise: that’s often interpreted as mystical apparition, or the world to come, or the Garden of Eden. One dies, one goes mad, and one becomes an epicurean: he loses all faith. [Editor’s note: Followers of philosopher Epicurus are often regarded as heretics; one famous depiction of this is in Dante’s inferno, where Epicureans are assigned to the sixth circle of hell.]. Only one of them comes out unscathed. 

That means we need to take the utmost care in what we're getting people into. Honestly, I don't think that we know enough at this stage about the long term effects of ongoing psychedelic use in groups or as individuals supported by religious traditions. We really want to wait for more research, and wait to perfect our own assumptions, rituals and practices before we even can entertain the idea of bringing people into a space like that. We want to be super careful. If religious leaders are becoming involved with psychedelics, I hope these people are doing deep work on themselves about their own motivations, intentions, and wounds. In other places, we’re seeing people getting high on their own egoic supply. 

There are religious leaders from other faiths interested in psychedelics as well. Are there any themes that have come up in your conversations with other religious leaders?

There’s a mycelial web of Jewish psychonauts, and through that, I met Reverend Hunt Priest, who founded an organization similar to mine called Ligare, but for Christian communities. We’re close, and we’ve spoken publicly many times about the role of religious ritual in psychedelic spaces. We’re also talking about the role of ethics: there’s so much focus on mysticism, but we’ve also seen in the past two years what’s broken in the psychedelic world. We have a profound ethical tradition — let’s make sure that’s present. How do we start to design safe and supported religious psychedelic experiences that happen in legal settings? How do we offer opportunities to people for these experiences who are not looking for treatment, but spiritual development? 

There’s a deep humanism, ecumenism, that is possible in the psychedelic space between faith leaders and communities. We don’t have to talk about how we’re the same or different, or compare theologies.Where do we go to support each other in building out safe and ethical experiences supported by our religious traditions and practices? As people who are newly integrating these materials into our faith traditions, we have to be very upfront with honoring Indigenous teachers and lineages — we are dependent on their work. And so much of our religious and mystical literature is written by men, so we must make sure that the voices of women and non-binary people are eminently present, too.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.