Kislev-Growing Our Container
I’m writing to you on the evening after the 604th mass shooting in America this year, after five human siblings' lives were cut off in Colorado. This has been, according to a few estimates, the deadliest year for gun violence in our country, still with another month left to go. With this and other worrisome trends for Jews in our cultural and political reality, I wonder what the role of psychedelic Jewish spirituality could hold to meet this moment, to help face it, and not be too indulged by wonder, self-growth or even our own healing. As the promise of Hanukkah beckons, how do we live with dignity and divinity in the light of encroaching chaos?
Chaos, as we learn in the very first chapter of the book of Genesis, is the bedrock of reality. It is not that divinity comes to sweep it all away to create some effortless and pristine palace; rather, as at least one rabbinic Sage taught, the world was built upon “sewers, dung, and garbage.” Not only is the foundation ready to slip away, we cannot walk an inch in this world without catching the scent of decay. Nevertheless, it became a suitable place for the abundance of life energy to swirl, for Torah to find a home, worthy of rectification and eternal elevation. When attempting to determine what made the Greeks of the Hanukkah story so contemptuous, it was not that they had contaminated the Temple, but had attempted to “dim their eyes,” to narrow the sight of the Jewish people to only see the chaotic foundation of reality, and not what was possible in spite of it. Fear of gun violence, concerns about our livelihood, real and immediate health concerns, abusive relationships, anything which prevents us from our individual and collective dreams–it is all too easy to get stuck in these occluded spaces, especially when meaningful support seems so distant.
This, perhaps then, is an abiding lesson of Hanukkah. Under the rubble of a world gone mad, there remains something utterly pure, an ancient resource that cannot be exhausted or extinguished, regardless of the harsh conditions which pushed it into the ground to begin with. That hidden preciousness could be enough, yet its existence points to something even greater that lies in potential. As Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook taught, “...if the cruse remains small; if the faith remains hidden in the heart and does not manifest in actuality, in life, how will it survive? And once life has already taken another direction which is not based on the inner faith, then God forbid, the surviving remnant might be extinguished.” In her brief 1996 article “Growing Around Grief: another way of looking at grief and recovery,” Dr. Lisa Tonkin wrote about one patient’s acknowledgement of a pain that could never diminish (the loss of a child), but recognized that slowly, she could still grow around it. The grief we might feel around a personal or communal destruction may never diminish with time, even after thousands of years, but our ability to grow our container to hold it and more is unbounded.
In our spiritual, interpersonal, or social justice or psychedelic work, my hope is that Rav Kook’s words can come to pass for all our highest endeavors: “This is the wonderful power of that hidden flame. Even when it finds values diametrically opposed to it and opinions held by people who don’t even realize that they have embarked on a way at odds with the deepest aspect of their soul – that tiny spark can be fanned into a mighty fire, uprooting all the treacherous aspects of our culture and harmful opinions. The spark can extend to all life’s avenues, returning us to our Divine Parent.”
With warm blessings for a bright Hanukkah,
Z…
