Cheshvan - Plants as Teachers
While I don't share everything about my work with our daughter, we often talk about how nature, plants especially, has its own wisdom from which we can learn about our world and ourselves. We spoke this way about our lulav and etrog from our Sukkot celebration, seeing how they, as embodied representations of certain qualities, can remind us of who we truly want to be. To my amazement, the new parashah magazine we began receiving from the Hadar Institute included another instance of learning from plants in our tradition--a well-known midrash attempting to answer the age-old puzzlement of identifying the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden.
Through textual clues and inference, several sages offer their own suggestions, namely the grape (what other fruit could lead to such a terrible fate?), the etrog (the woman sees that the tree was good for eating—what other tree has the same flavor as its fruit?), the fig (as the first humans immediately sew clothes from grape leaves once they realized they are naked), and the wheat stalk (it seems it was common practice not to give children bread until they could say Abba and Ima). “But what do the fruits teach, Abba?,” my daughter asked.
In advance of a meeting I had with author Michael Pollan, I purchased two books of his he would probably expect a psychedelic rabbi living in Berkeley to have read, namely The Botany of Desire and his newest This Is Your Mind on Plants. In the former, Pollan identifies four plants whose cultivation tell us something about human beings and what makes us tick, what we as species desire most. Was the midrash I was learning with my daughter trying to communicate something similar, an attempt to express the beginnings of Jewish yearning in the language of plants as master teachers? If so, our sages offer us four fundamental desires of the Jewish path, namely, to exercise caution in ecstatic states, the unity of disparate parts, healing trauma through trauma itself, and evolution through speech. Taken altogether, this story serves as powerful inspiration for the deeper desires at play in a future model of Jewish entheogenic exploration.
While we haven’t sent a newsletter in some months, it has been an incredibly productive and expansive time for Shefa. We celebrated our first organizational anniversary by hiring support staff, forming our first board of directors, beginning our first rabbinic internship program, and building a year of programming we are supremely enthusiastic to share. With all these exciting developments coinciding with the end of 5781, I’m proud of the work we were able to accomplish in our first year, during a global pandemic, and grateful for the incredible support and allyship of people across the globe who believe in our work to prepare Jewish communities for the psychedelic renaissance and share the Torah of consciousness, creativity, and healing with all people.
