True Left

Psychedelics & The Future of Judaism (R. Zac Kamenetz)

As psychedelics re-enter the mainstream through potential therapeutic applications and shifting legal frameworks, there is growing enthusiasm amongst Jewish individuals and communities to wonder about their integration into Jewish spiritual and religious settings. What could a “psychedelic Judaism” look and feel like? How might the treatment of intergenerational and personal traumas shift Jewish narratives of peoplehood and shared destiny? What wisdom traditions and spiritual practices of our own might we look toward to help support Jewish consciousness expansion?

Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring psychedelic-assisted chaplain based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012.  As the founder and CEO of Shefa, Zac is pioneering a movement to integrate safe and supported psychedelic use into the Jewish spiritual tradition, advocate for individuals and communities to heal individual and inherited trauma and inspire a Jewish religious and creative renaissance in the 21st century.

In other words, these Jews are advocating for a rebirth of Jewish identity in the 21st century!

If psychedelics could stop people from wanting to be "white" or Jewish then I'd be all for allowing "whites" and Jews into any serious psychedelic movement. As it stands however, allowing "whites" and Jews into psychedelic movements ensures that the psychedelic movement will steer toward more western colonialism, as written about extensively and expressed here:

Why the “Psychedelic Renaissance” is just Colonialism by Another Name

...one could argue that the initial psychedelic movement of Western culture was more akin to a stillborn than a finished labor. Can a movement have a rebirth if it never had a proper birth in the first place?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/counterculture-era/counterculture-and-western-civilisation/?message=16765



Letting colonialist and racist "white" bloodlines into the psychedelic movement is the worst possible thing that could happen to it. At that point the movement will become another "still-born" as happened to it in the original counter-culture!