RNS via AP — For nearly two decades, Larry Hertz, a 64-year-old professional, had found healing and spiritual enrichment through underground ceremonies where he and others took psychedelics. But there was a part of him missing: Raised in a culturally Jewish home in California’s Bay Area, he found that few in psychedelic circles knew much about Judaism; if religion was present, it was usually Christianity.

At the same time, his psychedelic practice made him feel as if he were living a double life.

“I think a lot of times when you’re in the medicine world, you can feel very isolated because it’s below ground,” Hertz told RNS. “A lot of my friends, I couldn’t tell them that I was taking medicine.”

That changed last year when an online search led him to Shefa Jewish Psychedelic Support, a spiritual community that, according to its website, bolsters “Jewish psychedelic explorers in North America and abroad.” Shefa does this by conducting psychedelic-fueled retreats that integrate Jewish beliefs and rituals, as well as by hosting a mix of events, from Purim dance parties and Hanukkah gatherings to courses in breath work and other healing techniques.

If its mission statement emphasizes exploration, Shefa’s focus is just as much aimed at healing, especially for American Jews grappling with trauma and fractured identities in a post-October 7 world. “We know people are holding a lot of trauma, whether it’s conscious, unconscious, immediate with their own trauma, or ancestral,” said Shefa’s founder, Rabbi Zac Kamenetz.

“We’re not going to resolve a global crisis, but we are going to be ourselves in the pain, the alienation, the anguish, the anger, whatever side you’re taking, or taking no sides.”

Kamenetz came to the world of psychedelics through his participation in a Johns Hopkins-New York University study in which clergy of various faiths took doses of psilocybin, the compound found in hallucinatory mushrooms, to test how spiritually attuned people would respond. While the study itself has generated as much controversy as firm results, it has fostered the launch of at least two other organizations touting its work.

On a hot August night in 2019, Kamenetz, then a director of San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center, stood in the back of a crowded Judaica shop in Berkeley to describe two psilocybin trips he experienced on separate “dose days” during the study. On the first occasion, he saw a vision of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, a diagram central to Jewish mysticism; on the second, he encountered a dark void. “Yes, there is the bliss and color and light, but then there’s a higher reality that falls away to experiencing the void,” Kamenetz said, according to The Jewish News of Northern California.

Kamenetz’s inbox quickly filled with inquiries from people........

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