Iyar - On Setting Fires
“Did you know that the very day on which LSD was invented was also the day of the Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw? I feel that there is some profound connection here, the words for which elude me.” — Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z"l in a letter to Timothy Leary, 1999.
This past week, we celebrated two events on the same day in the Jewish calendar, even more extreme in their juxtaposition than Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Memorial and Independence Days, celebrated within 24 hours of one another.
That day was April 19th, 1943, erev Pesach. On that day, in Warsaw, 750 Jewish fighters began to fight back against the final liquidation of the ghetto with smuggled weapons and homemade explosives. The fighters resisted the Nazis for a month before the entire ghetto was burned. It is a day of heroism and horror, of resistance and remembrance, a tangle of the burning brightness of the Jewish spirit with the moment of its extirpation.
From survivor Simcha Rotem:
The whole ghetto was ablaze. All life vanished from the streets and houses. We hid in the cellars and bunkers. From there we made our sorties. We went out at night. The Germans were in the ghetto mostly by day, leaving at night. They were afraid to enter the ghetto at night...
I don’t think the human tongue can describe the horror we went through in the ghetto…Besides fighting the Germans, we fought hunger and thirst. We had no contact with the outside world; we were completely isolated, cut off from the world. We were in such a state that we could no longer understand the very meaning of why we went on fighting. We thought of attempting a breakout to the Aryan part of Warsaw, outside the ghetto.
Some 850 miles away from the burning ghetto, Swiss-born chemist, Albert Hoffman experienced humanity’s very first high-dose LSD encounter after having synthesized the compound twenty-five times searching for a novel drug to stimulate circulation and respiration. Becoming disoriented and dizzy, he rode his bicycle home in a terrified state. Nervous that he had poisoned himself, he spent several hours lying down at home until his panic gave way to a world of color and connectivity. Hofmann recalls his internal state clearly:
Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridising themselves in constant flux…
This day is now known in the psychedelic community as Bicycle Day.
These events couldn’t have been farther from each other, and their various kinds of distance between them are obvious and striking. Although Reb Zalman wished to discern some numinous connection between them, others are not as tempted.
Because of the gravity and anguish surrounding the Ghetto uprising, both the event itself and what it has come to mean for the larger picture of the destruction of European Jewry, some people who responded to last year’s post were offended, turned off, or just found it plain bizarre. These two moments have nothing to do with each other save that they occurred on the very same day. Attempting to connect them, even through creative interpretation, even by dipping one’s toe in the pool of synchronicity, is forbidden.
And yet, some aspects of Jewish traumatic memory and time work exactly like this: Tisha b’Av is loaded with three-thousand years of myriad tragic events to be sprung all at once, once a year. Asara b’Tevet commemorates the beginning of the destruction of the First Temple, but its sheer gravitational pull also came to include remembering the day the Torah was first translated into another language, some other unnamed event even the Rabbis themselves could not remember, and most recently, the preferred day of the Chief Rabbinate to say kaddish for those murdered in the Holocaust.
A Jewish psychedelic movement invested in individual and collective healing, in transcendent awareness and facing the wounded places, exploring the furthermost spaces of cognitive liberty while integrating psychedelic insight into conscious social action and justice, will inevitably create complex and authentic connections between the beatific visions of the father of LSD with the smoldering heap of Warsaw, with its children physically defeated yet spiritually victorious.
Hodesh Iyyar Tov—may it be healing for us all.
Z
