ZACHARY SCHAFFER

Judaism is psychedelic!

 

It is past time for us to reclaim our ancestral rituals and our right to the sacred, and respectfully re-imagine what Judaism is.

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The traditional Haggadah commands us: “In every generation, a person is obligated to see oneself as though one had gone forth from Egypt.”

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The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which means a “narrow or constricted place.” Our tradition has long told this story of Exodus literally, but in this haggadah we center the spiritual metaphor of the Exodus narrative. The Narrow Place, Mitzrayim (Egypt) is a place of spiritual constriction and narrow-mindedness.

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The rituals set forth here recognize that in every generation we experience narrowness that burdens & bounds us. The journey through the Red Sea and Desert, from bondage to freedom, is the arduous path from narrowness toward expansiveness, from the boundaries of ego and habit that limit us to the infinite space of the human soul and creation.

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The seder ceremony is our opportunity to collectively re-enact the journeys of the generations before us, as we go forth from our Narrow Places toward expansiveness, from slavery toward possibility.

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With deep appreciation for the intersections between the liberatory qualities of psychedelics and the Passover story of liberation, we relive the trip of the Israelites through a “trip” of our own.

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The injunction of Passover is to relive the emergence from the constriction of slavery to the enlightenment of Sinai, and the technology of the Seder ritual offers a fantastic set and setting for such consciousness expansion, allowing the mind to open and receive the divine influx.

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A giant shout-out to my co-conspirator, co-facilitator, co-writer Zach Sterman and our brilliant designer, Brianna. This was developed with tremendous gratitude to psychedelic Jewish leaders like Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, Madison Margolin, Rabbi Ami Silver, and so many others who have inspired and forged this psychedelic Jewish moment in time