Hasidic Judaism and Psychedelics: 5 Questions for Jewish studies scholar Sam Shonkoff
Shonkoff discusses psychedelics’ role in the history of Hasidic Judaism, and how that role is evolving.
The study of religion, says scholar Sam Shonkoff, is really the study of human beings: spirituality, altered states, politics, psychology, literature, sociology. “It’s studying what human beings have done communally and individually forever,” he says. Growing up in Berkeley, California, Shonkoff developed an interest in understanding people and consciousness, and studied psychology and English before graduating from Brown as a religious studies major. He went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in the history of Judaism from the University of Chicago. He’s now an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. (Shonkoff also collaborates with the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.) The Microdose spoke with Shonkoff about psychedelics’ role in the history of Hasidic Judaism, and how that role is evolving.
What is Hasidism, and how would you characterize its position within Judaism?
Hasidism is a mystical movement that emerged in 18th century Europe. It was a populist movement, very experimental and countercultural. There was a great emphasis on joy, and on devekut, or a direct connection to divinity. Many believed that connection was not only for the highest spiritual or intellectual elites of the Jewish community but that it could be democratized, to the point where some suggested that intellectual erudition and study could get in the way of this divine contact, and romanticized the capacity of so-called “simple” people to have maximal revelations. Hasidic Jews, at this time, had a reputation of doing literal somersaults in the streets and in synagogues; they were drinking and singing, dancing and clapping in their prayer. They brought a general effervescence and experimentation into their rituals and traditions. And Hasidism was controversial at the time; it was banned by major rabbinicauthorities in Eastern Europe.
By the early 19th century, many Hasidim saw the rise of secularism and modernization as a threat to the world of traditional Judaism, so they joined forces with traditionalist opponents. Today, Hasidism is one of the most ultra-orthodox expressions of Jewishness.
What role have psychedelics played in modern Jewish mysticism?
In the 1960s, psychedelics played a really significant role in the development of neo-Hasidism in North America. It reflected the counterculture of that time, and there was significant emphasis on practice and personal experiences of the divine. In the summer of 1963, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was Chabad Hasid at the time, was experimenting intellectually, spiritually, and culturally. He tripped on LSD for the first time with Timothy Leary at an ashram in Massachusetts, and in my research in the Schacter-Shalomi archives at University of Colorado at Boulder, I found an unpublished typescript of his oral trip report. There was incredible detail and vividness as he recounts his experience that night; the trip purport was unfiltered and he was extemporaneously delivering Hebrew and Yiddish phrases, references to traditions ranging from the Hebrew bible to Hasidic sources and stories. For me, this is where things get most interesting: you could see ways that his first experience with LSD was profoundly mediated by his Hasidic spirituality and cultural orientation, and you also see ways that psychedelics were in real time transforming his own Hasidism. He ended up becoming one of the major leaders and formative figures in neo-Hasidism.
Today, the neo-Hasidism movement is comprised mostly of Jews who are not Hasidic and tend to be relatively secular, yet draw upon Hasidism for purposes of spiritual or cultural renewal in some way. There’s a tendency among neo-Hasidim to see their own neo-Hasidism as closer to Hasidism’s radical early roots. In general, Hasidism and neo-Hasidism are not in conversation with each other. But Schacter-Shalomi shows how interestingly blurry the borders can be between Hasidism and neo-Hasidism. For him, psychedelics were a nexus between Hasidism and neo-Hasidism, and he was kicked out of the Chabad Hasidic world because of his public talks about psychedelics.
The neo-Hasidic movement was heavily influenced by psychedelics, but as you mentioned earlier, neo-Hasidic communities are not necessarily in conversation with modern Hasidic groups. How are psychedelics regarded by Hasidic communities?
I’ve not seen any evidence that use of psychedelics has become a normative part of any Hasidic community, in terms of above-ground practice. But there is mounting evidence, from anecdotes and journalistic investigations, that there are individuals or even groups of people from Hasidic communities who are experimenting with psychedelics. Many people in Hasidic communities have left or are leaving, or going through something that isn’t quite that binary: they’re still oriented in the Hasidic world but secretly experimenting with taboos. In that respect, you could compare Hasidic use of psychedelics, with reading or producing taboo literature, having romantic or sexual experiences that would be taboo, having friendships and being in conversation with people beyond the boundaries of their community.
Their use of psychedelics raises some big questions about “recreational” use: is there such a thing as recreational use when it comes to people who are in these really intense religious communities? Hasidim, or people on the fringes of these communities, seem to be using psychedelics in a way that’s detached from their religious practices, but not completely detached. Some of these folks do psychedelics at trance festivals in upstate New York, and sometimes those are organized to intentionally coincide with Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, or Jewish holidays. There have been reports of people from these communities wearing ritual objects, like a shtreimel, a fur hat often worn by Hasidim, or tefillin, which are strapped to the arm during morning prayers. Some eat traditional Hasidic foods at these festivals, like gefilte fish.
If you think about the word “recreation,” it means to re-create, to re-create yourself; that reminds us that even if the intention in using psychedelics is cutting loose, these experiences can still be transformative.
In your view, how might psychedelics influence Hasidic communities?
Just as ideas, social movements, and viruses impact even the most insular traditionalist communities, so do types of experiences. For all efforts of many Hasidic communities to stay totally walled off from surrounding influences, that’s never foolproof, and as more people in those communities are having different kinds of experiences through psychedelics, it’s going to be interesting to see how that reverberates. It raises big questions in the study of mysticism about the tension between mysticism and authority; if you have direct personal experiences of divinity, those can erode or threaten existing power structures and institutional hierarchies. If more Hasidim are experimenting with psychedelics and having their own powerful experiences independent of Hasidic leadership and normative frames, will that somehow change the very fabric of those communities over time? There has been a widespread tendency for people to imagine that the use of psychedelics is automatically correlated with a shift to more left-leaning social sensibilities, but that’s not necessarily true, so I’m not suggesting this will make Hasidic communities more secular or humanist. In fact, some of the Hasidic or para-Hasidic communities using psychedelics embrace ultra-nationalist religious Zionism. It’s unclear what kinds of social spiritual political orientations will emerge.
What do religious studies add to psychedelics scholarship?
Psychedelic studies, as a field, is predominantly oriented in the sciences, which tries to universalize and standardize the ways in which we think about the effects of psychedelics for all human beings. But one of the things that approach often masks are the significant ways in which cultural orientations and backgrounds will shape psychedelic experiences, as well as interpretations and integrations of those experiences. As psychedelics become more common, we’ll need to understand how people from different cultural and religious backgrounds experience these substances. Hasidism and neo-Hasidism are case studies for thinking more broadly about psychedelics and culture. The more interdisciplinary psychedelic studies can be, the stronger it will be.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
