did you get a taste?

I do belive that all plants and really, all things, are to teach us in their way of relating to God, a lesson for us about how to be, and the finer a plant is, the more it's trying to teach us, me thinks. Doesn't plant spirit medicine say something about that? Every grass has a song, and every song can heal a soul.

any one that smells extaordinarly nice and provides great healings against a spiritual malady can certinly be appreciated, and can only be understood as something in creation that is willing to be beautiful for the sake of any thing willing to smell it, the smarter the better.

Why is sinsemillia so strong? From all the desire that a virgin cannabis princess builds, from all the beauty it invokes in trying to charm the bees towards it. What fine honey that must be!

don't get me wrong, now.

Shabbos though, is certainly finer than anything else ever.

Kineh-Bosem: Cannabis IS profoundly symbolic... of us!

So any how, ever body knows marijuana's mention in the bible. Kineh Bosem is a word, or rather, word-couple That tells profound secrets about how marijuana is rooted in the universes above and below.

Kineh is a reed, yes, "aromatic cane", I suppose that's a reasonable trans lation... But hebrew is such a sublimely simple language, where many divergent ideas are rooted in the same three letter roots. KiNeH is not just reed, It's also a wind pipe, a voice box, the space from your elbow to your fist, a nest is a KaiN Tzippurim, any aquisition is called a KiNYaN, to accuire is LiKNOT, and the greco-latin word "Konnect" is basically what reeds do

They connect
one divine thing from one place
to another

And bosem? (tee hee hee) Fragrant is kind of a beautiful word I guess, but know that it's the most general hebrew word for perfume or spice. But only one word in hebrew describes something so specifically as to have the word bosem in the name.

In some modern halachic opinions, this makes marijuana the most Mehudar (wonderful) spice to use for havdalah, the seperation ritual after The Sabbath.

Cinnamon is a close second. "Head Spices" come first, I guess. They are officially "important" (chashuvim, also meaning honored and hinting at thought and consideration of the brain science)

Thank the good lord for making I-and-I senses so well taken care of
thank you for feeding my mind and heart so with your lives oh lord

for more info on the holy annointing oils, see http://thc-ministry.org/forum/
The dude there recomends smoking calamus with the weed. Funny since, that's the popular other translation of "Kineh Bosem" (as opposed to King James's sugar cane theory, which is so offensive in it's sugestion that sugar cane would be a more popular balm (alm words rock, like balm or palm, psalm and calm) for wounds and skin than Hemp oil)

he dude maintains that the cannabis/calamus mixture is vedic, and it makes sense, as calamus can heal much of the damage over over-psychedlification. anyone out there try it with good results?

tantra torah: sex in the context of drugs

I just called it that to distract people

The yeshiva was more interesting to me than sex for a while, teaching me to refocus my erotic imaginations into devotional conceptual narratives, and the yearnings into their essences: the yearning for the divine, for the infinite and the all-assuring consolations. Know that while you're davening, if it's real, then it's actually like copulating with the divine presence

no! that's not what i mean! oops--- er, unifying the supernal name of my lord, as it rams it's love back and forth into itself, Yud and hey! wow and Hey! With new letters being born as children of simple ideas marry off into larger memeplex communities, as simpler ideas spawned progressively more complicated ones, as 1 became two and ever since back in the day when Adam ate from the originalist tree.

Oops again! I promised a tu bishvat torah, but i'm a bit late with is, but this is the torah that went around some Seders monday night. It's a Shlomo Torah, remixed and slightly retranslated as the profound mystery of what the trees are fixing. snakes of course.

What is the snake trying to say to Chava, when he talks to her about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, what's he really saying?

This is how G-d became G-d, right?

----

As if to say, pfaw, you think G-d is so deep? He's a Kabbalist, the serpent, and he's trying to say, oh, it's not so deep. A little apple is all it is.

What is the serpent is always saying is oh, here's all it is, here is what G-d's really about. and it'd just... I'm so heartbroken I (my mind anyway) have done the same thing, in attempts to break down terms and specific definitions for situations and relationships. this is the voice of the abstract unconcious which speaks from the root of our soul. It is the power to make a law and decree in the world, from the world, the voice that responds Baruch cavod malchuto l'olam waed.

Thank style empire forever and ever! yeah!

Words are fun, but only half the experience, shapes and intuition are heart language, and can only sense clearly if it's being trusted to. The mind is so in love, and is so desperate to say it, the heart just smiles, and doesn't have to say a word.

A happy mind is one that lets the heart shine free into the world

Can the mind make anything safe? If he's not there to do that, what good could he possibly be? entertainment? entertainment is pretty important? skills? fixing cars and feremting pickles for the winter?

It's shabbos so don't worry about it, she said.


Not for commercial redistribution.
Yerushalyim, Shvat 5741.

Until the month of Shvat Everything is Dead, because Everything is happening on
the Inside. According to Beis Shammai, the first (Ras Hadash) is Rosh Hashona
(New Year of Trees), and according to Beis Hillel, the fifteenth.


What's happening?

Listen to this.

What's "beitah -- stuffing"?
Why can't I chew? <<<<<<<****Why Lord why?****>>>>>>>
According to the Arizal, every month (((((On de' Hebrew Calandah! ))))) corresponds to a letter of the
Hebrew
alphabet and to one of the twelve tribes.

This moonth, the letter is
"tsaddi" --

whose letters stand for

Amhha
Kuolom
Tszaddikim -- Your entire nation is righteous.

---What could that possibly mean?----


(whispered intensely)
Listen to this:


The holy Izhbetzer says that

a Tsaddik
is someone
who helps you get your outside shining,
who
gets
your
out
side

shining
into
your
in
side.

The inside-- we have it already.

The only
thing,

sadly enough,

when it comes to the outside,


we've lost the shine. (from fear?)

An
awesome Torah.

It's so deep, you know, it's beyond words.

The Tsaddik is one who gives you the vessels,

that your outside should be vessels for your insides.

What happens to most people? Inside they're a gevaldt, right?
But their outside has
absolutely no vessels
for what they have inside. So the inside gets lost. (chas w shalom!)

You know what the Izhbetzer says? The moment we got out of Egypt we
make Moshe Rabbeinu so much trouble.

We do it all wrong

In Egypt we never
did anything wrong (Can you imagine? sigh!)
Why now?

In Egypt, everything was "inside".

Inside, you
don't do wrong.

Listen to this. Imagine, without saying anything bad, when somebody gets divorced.
After getting married or before?

You know, on a joke level, someone once told me,
he wants to get divorced first and then married-- why should he ruin his marriage
after?

Ok, it's a joke. But you know what it is? What's marriage ?

Marriage is
connecting your outside to the inside.

Inside,
it's ok,
inside I connect. The outside,
mamash, day to day life.

Washing negel wasser (dishes), brushing your teeth -- outside.
That's what summer is all about. Summer is the inside coming outside.

Ok now listen to this.

awesome, awesome.

Everybody knows that this month
is the fixing
of the beginning
of the downfall of everything.

The snake tells Eve,

Listen to this, deepest depths.

You know what G-d told you not to eat from
the Tree of Knowledge.

That's how G-d became G-d.

Listen to the deepest depths.

Do you know what brother snake is saying?

What do you think G-d is about.
He's a famous kaballist. He took an intensive weekend in Kaballah.
Do you really
think G-d is anything special, something awesome.
Nothing.
You eat an apple.
You eat a PhD in Kaballah (Or a Mushroom?) and you have it.

What is "stuffing"? ("Pounding" might be a good ebonic translation)

No inside. Just stuff it in. Who cares, right?

Holy stuffing is the other way around.

I want the inside.


I want the holiest to shine into me.

I don't want the outside to interrupt from the inside.

G-d should put it into me
the way it really is.

Ok, now here comes a really deep Izhbetzer Torah.

What's the difference between
a cute little vegetable and a tree?

How come a vegetable is dead when it's done?

A tree can live for hundreds of years. He says the deepest Torah.

The tree prays
to G-d,

please


make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make something out of me. make

You know what's praying the most?

And this is one of the top ten Izhbetzer Torahs.

It's good to remember. How come
one apple tree
tastes so good
and another one not?

When the apple seed is praying
before G-d
the very last second
before its completely disintegrated
it's the prayer of the deepest depths.
And if its prayer is not so deep...There you have two trees.

I mean the depths of this Torah is awesome.

Gevaldt, it's the very last prayer
we say before we leave the world...
A vegetable prays a cute little prayer.

A vegetable grows and then just stops...
But an apple seed, it prays so much.

its every second. It can't stop.


The apple seed's prayer is a "forever" prayer.

So the tree lives forever because this seed prayed so hard.

Shvat is the Rosh HaShona L'Elanot, the new year-- the headquarters-- of the trees.

Now listen to this, it's so deep.

A vegetable
when it disappears
doesn't cry.

It says,
"I had my day.
I'm happy.
I had a summer.
I had a good time on the earth,
saw the sun,
went to the food co-op, ended up in the stir fry, in the chulent...
halivei (it should only be).

Do you know what the tree is crying out?

The tree is at is end, each year.

Listen to this.

The tree when it reaches the end, mamash,
all its prayers are rising up again.

The tree prays all its prayers again. Awesome.

I want to tell you something very very deep.

Imagine
I need coffee.

I say, "Please G-d,
give me some coffee."
And G-d answers me,
"Ok, I'll get you some coffee".

But when I pray for something very deep,
my prayer is all that there is.
The more
I need something from G-d,
the deeper the depths my prayer touches my neshama(highest soul).

And that prayer
touches all the prayers
which I ever prayed in this lifetime and
perhaps other lifetimes as well...

what do we know...

You want the real truth. I don't know.

You see there are two types of Torah --

from the Tree of Knowledge
and from the
Tree of Life.

The Tree of Knowledge Torah, cute...


the Tree of Life Torah -- beyond choice.

Don't choose.
Just stuff it down.

I don't have words to explain it -- it's the
deepest Torah... so deep...

What is seder night all about?

Seder night, G-d is mamash giving me His light.


What is the deepest freedom in the whole world?

You know what our problem is?
We take the deepest holiest thing (within ourselves)
and we cut them short.
Chew here, chew there,
change it all so that it fits...

What is Kadeish about -- the first item in the
Seder -- what do we do with the cup?
Everyone is chewing it down from all sides so that it fit...




You want to love someone the most?


Stop chewing!


What is the fixing?


Can you swallow it without chewing it?
Take it in,
not like Esau (traditionally equated with Rome).

Esau wants to swallow up
the whole world.
Right?

<

first seed sacrifices

A bunch of folks in different blogs and places have expressed the concern that I shouldn't fall into a classic stoner pattern of writing inconsistently. I guess this is a pattern folks have seen with alot of good work over the years, good ideas that started in moments of inspiration and died in puddles of nevermindwhocaresmanamihungry.

Let me clarify something here: I am not a stoner, at least not in the decedant sense, at least not usually... I don't think i ever crossed the functionality line with herb, except very intentionally, usually for either experimental, devotional or celebratory puposes. I'd rather be inspired, healthy and awake than stoned.

All plants and all medicines are in the aspect of tiferet, harmony and balance, and their use depends on the individual extremes that the individual is trying to heal.

I heard from a noted underground Jerusalem Kabbalist the idea that marijuana is only a fixing for Kayin (Cain) souls, those rooted in the universe of chaos, the folks that Robert Anton Wilson would call Neophiles. The passion for the new, the instability and ennui can benefit from the effect of cannabis. Souls from the universe of order, Hevel (abel) souls do not benefit nessesarily from the shake up of Johny Blaze, usually tending to become uncomfortable, tired, paranoid, or otherwise disturbed when smoked out.

I had been very Chaos-ed since the frustrating soul bottling of primary mandatory education, my continuing Jewish education being too infintie and demanding for most any kind of pre-meditated imposed curriculum.

The first Yeshiva i tried in Israel was Bat Ayin. They'd had a reptuation attracting and inspiring diverse, radical and devoted searchers of torah, with an emphasis on not telling people who to be. I tried it out, for like a week and a half, having just come back to Israel from a rather embarrasing return to my parents house, having blown alot of their money and hopes for my acedemic future. Self-righteously, i insisted on going back to Israel to contue my education, with a vow to not get into any situation where I'd have to be dishonest about who I was, what I was doing, and what I was looking for. That commitment in mind, I went to Bat Ayin.

Some three years earlier it might have been all the crazy things I wanted most. Co-founded by one of Shlomo Carlebach's most devoted and earliest disciples, who had freaked out of society and gone on dead tour with the Spinners cult in the early eighties before settling back into a now blown open re-understood Judaism in Jerusalem, Bat Ayin had once been a motley crew of wild eyed Anglo mystics, drawn to the primal ancestral magic of Israel for the resolution of their soul's passions and for some way to live witht he presence of G-d.

Some guys form the early days there would later wistfully tell me about the early days there, with the giant pipe smoking wizard painted onto the local Yishuv store, when they would have a big ganja plant growing behind the Yeshiva, and the chassidic-hechalotic-Enochian torah was flowing like wine...

Then there were the purges. To avoid police coming down and either shutting down the yeshiva as a drug and anarchy den, the straight administration there put a foot down on all so-deemed innapropriate behavior, and expelled anyone there even suspected of hippying around too much.

I got there around six months after all this. I was eighteen and honest, and came there to check it out. Very impressed by the library and the comunity, by the views and the relative closeness to Jerusalem, I very upfrontedly, went to the Rosh Yeshiva as he was interviewing me to see if I should be there and casually remarked:

"Ah yes, ah, you know, I'm tring to organize a million marijuna march in Jerusalem in May, and I may need to take sometime off school for a month or so before hand to do so. I hope it's not going to be a problem..."

No, you can't talk about marijuana or any other drugs in any context while you're out here, oh, alright. Thanks anyway I guess.

I would come back a year later, in an attempt to become "serious," and would then find out that here were other easons why I could never be there. In the meantime, I had to find somehwere new to sleep, because the weather was getting colder, and there weren't too many free rooftops in J-town.

I wound up crashing by some mad Kabbalists from England and Arizona respectively who I had met in the street. I knew that I could not stay by them for long, that my welcome was bound to run out faster the more often I was around, and I tried to delay the inevitable by crashing at someone else's house every night for as long as I could either make new friends, or bump into old ones in time. It was a pretty effective social strategy, introducing me to pretty diverse and fun situations and teaching me the topography of Jerusalem as i explored all those parts of it that I never had or would otherwise. Bored Litvish yeshiva bachurim amused by the novelty of me, zionist gutter-punks with their parent's out of town, homeless men with spare blankets on their rooftop villas...

One night a friend of a friend of a friend agreed to a trade: a puff of some super kind bud i'd brought back from the states (a small and precious stash) in exchange for a place to crash. he had no place of his own, so he snuck me into HIS friend's yeshiva dorm. he snuck me down some back road into a part of town i'd never seen before, into a wood gated yeshiva. It was three in the morning, and when we came into the sanctuary, people were sitting up, learning. One of the strangest sleeps i would ever had, where i kept waking up feeling mysterious presences and gazing out to the door, I woke, got up and out, and by the time i was a block from the place, looked back, and couldn't for the life of me imagine how to get back where I'd just come from...

It was one of those weeks where every day feels like hundreds of years of growth and development. I've become strict to make sure to have weeks like that every so often ever since, especially in the summertime.

One night. I'm walking back to The Guy's house with some groceries. If I bring food, maybe he'll want to have me around more. It's pretty cold outside, and I peruse zion square to see if there's anyone there I know. Sure enough, this one head, an American Yeshiva kid from Queens, runs up and asks, hey! where are you living man? You've got groceries in your hands, so you're probably not on any kind of structures program!

Aha, excellent deduction Dr Watson! Yeah, I got kicked out of the program i was on like a month ago, so i'm staying by this guy's house...

No shit? I just got kicked out of my Yeshiva this morning!

He then told me a condensed version of why he got kicked out. He basically was on a rehabish type yeshiva program for "lost" youth, and he got caught with dealers amounts of grass in his room. I later heard the more complete story from a mutual friend who was in the program with him. They guys in the room, unrepentant herb smokers the lot of 'em, used to stash the grass they'd get communally in a hollowed out hard cover book they kept in their room. One day, the head of the program walked past their room and saw a book with the cover mysteriously bulging for some odd reason. he opened the book, saw like a pound of Bedouin Shwag, and demanded to know, "whose is this?!"

Our boy, with charachteristic righteousness, stole the accountabilty from the community and said, "Rabbi, it's my weed!"

The rabbi responded, just yours? If it's just yours, why is there so much?

"Cuz i was gonna sell it, and make money!"

Sure, enough, he was given a two week suspencion, so as not to distance him too far from the program and it's rehabilitory hopes, but to make him put his life into perspective. they gave him the option of a free hostel he could go to, but the dude knew, if he went there, he'd be monitored and reported on. Fuck that, said he.

And so, i, touched by his story, took him aside, puffed some Hawaiian kind bud with him that'd i'd been saving up, and took him to the anarchist office hang-out of Dov Shurin, with hopes of finding a place to crash for us both amongst any of the Israel street folks. We get there, and there this traditionlly dressed gaunt breslov rabbi there giving a class on a piece from Likutei Moharan, the collected writings of R' Nachman of Breslov. I'm already a fan of R' Nachman, his "believe everything" torah having won me over, so i sit to listen intently, while munching on fresh strawberries with my friend. I look around and notice that no-on else is around, really. Cool, maybe someone'll come by, or something. Allah will provide, inshallah, Allah will provide.

Sure enough. Completely uninitiated, the Rabbi comes up to me and my friend and says, hey, if you guys need somewhere to crash, you can crash by my house, my wife's out of town.
He then gives us what turn out to be pretty complicated directions to his house. We follow them, into kind of a spiral pattern into a secret neighborhood smack dab between the old city, the city center, and Geulah/mea-shearim, a neighborhood known as Musrarra. Worn old arab houses sylishly built and sparsely populated, we come down some strange public staircases down into the court yard, until we get to the rabbi's apartment.

We knock on the door, and someone else staying there lets us in. The house is sparsely decorated and the smell of burnt olive oil candles fills the place.

The house is decorated only with Divine names, noteably that one, you know the one, the one with the four letters. Tetragramtrawhatchamacalit.

Yo. Hey! wha? Hey!

It's big and it's small. it's backsward and it forward. upside down and mirrored, spiralled into shapes. Simply inscribed in parchment in traditional black ink, colorfully printed out green on purple, pink on green, gold on silver and visa versa.

The orange and blue felt the best to me, that night, personally. Green on purple would be the one i'd find my self using second most often, next to good old white on black.

Framed in glass, laminated in plastic, the unpronounceable holiness surrounded one everywhere there, comfortably, playfully. A few other divine spellings were around too, noteably the 46 and seventy-two letter names, thoughtfully placed on a shtender in the kitchen for contenmptation.

I crashed gently on the sofa, my friend getting a bed in the other room. I woke up, at dawn to see the rabbi modestly sneaking out for dawn prayers. I went back to sleep and later reawakened. The rabbi got back around like nine, and said hey! I do an english language shiur down at a yeshiva around the corner. Wanna come by, check it out? Sure.

Turns out it was the same yeshiva i'd been snuck down to earlier that week. What a coincidence. Founded by a Morrocan devotee of a European chassidic master, the afformentioned R' Nachman, it was a surreal experience of pious freaks, mostly Israeli, escaping society to study, pray, scream and cry, dance and laugh at the government's expense. A legally anarchistic scene, held together by fanatical religious hang ups, clearly prescribed in the writings of Rabbeinu Nachman and/or his disciple R Natan, It was kind of a dream come true for me. People somehow initated in the secret path of Kabbalistic understand, of what's really going on in the world, and ready to teach me what all the practices i'd been keeping my whole life meant and did and where capable of doing.

Believe anything, and anything can happen. The problem with that, is what do I really want to happen, and do I really believe it can? deep down? I'm pretty sure the function of any kind of devotional acts, especially the more demanding ones, is to convince ourselves that we've "earned" it. We've earned G-d attention, and the right to demand that he affect reality somehow. And, in most tradtional societies, it's been kinda effective, ant least until some stronger force blows the tower down. But that too is Ok, it's part of the process, of G-d listening to you, and asking in return that you listen to hear what she really wants. Believing in the power of the devotional acts to thaumaturgically affect reality is, problematically, the key of both all religion and all idolotry. What Rabbeinu Krishna calls being attached to the fruits of the service instead of the service itself.

Jah don't blame you, nigga's need to get paid, need the rains to fall so's we can eat our grain and basically, money a.k.a. divine authority to decree reality, is the traditional motivation to get children to do stuff, like wipe their own asses and clean their own room so you don't have to.
Maturity is learning, not just to do the right thing, but ultimately for the right reason: pure love.

Which was emphasised at the Yeshiva, make no mistake. Don't practice kabbalah to get power, this is folly and even if it works, won't heal your soul, they emphasised. The true purpose is just to be able to do in love, everything, in rapturous joy, the true purpose of creation. The rhythm back and forth between expanded conciousness and awareness of the divine that we all love so much, and how to deal with the constricted conciousneess of small minded priorities and ego-games in a way that still bonds us to the divine, or at least keeps us from getting bummed out...

Heartbreak was very encouraged, crying was very encouraged. Depression and angst was not.
Silly jokes, just to lighten the mood, very encouraged, even if they weren't, techinically, funny or even intelligent in any way.

You see why it would be a good stoner enviroment.

And good medicine for the wounded soul of Israel. Forget your realities! Forget your weakness! God is One, and the most important thing is not to be afraid! We've been really hurt the last while, and we're not going to come out of our tribal shell until we feel safe again. And we're not going to feel safe as long as we keep seeing threats in the world, from people who want to hurt us.

And people aren't going to stop indulging our mythology and being our Amalekites until we stop being afraid of them. Vicious circle keeping the pattern going. It works for our authorities, keeps eveyone scared enough to keep moving, keep working.

I spent six months in Northern Humbolt County not smoking grass because i was in a comfortably anal Zen Shiatsu and Integrative Nutrition program, learning grounding and balance in a Tai Chi context in order to give Zen Shiatsu massages effectively, with reall presence and sensitivity. And i will now reveal the secret danger of marijuna, the one that neither High Times nor The Partnership for a Drug Free America ever told us about.
It's pretty much the same problem as masturbating or talking too much: the depletion of your very life essence!

This might explain why it's not used more widespreadly in traditional societies, except at the fringes. Traditional chinese medicine has apparently eschewed it, as has much of Ayurveda, occasionally prescribing it for like insomnia or something, but not really at all for people wanting to achieve Satva, or a balnced, clear perspective, free of extremes in one direction or another.
I tend to think of the biblical prohibition on Joe Israelite using the sacred annointing compound, on penalty of death. Any of the individual oils in it weren't prohibited, or else cinnamon would be totally anethema in the west, but the compound was because, hey, cannabis cinnamon cassia oil is some pretty potent stuff. If you're a Levite Shaman (or "Kohein") and your job is basically to bring peace to the world through blood and insence, your lifestyle is already a bit disconnected from normative reality, and ritual ablutions of psychedelic oil make sense. You're not trying to be a human being, you're not trying to live to a ripe old age, or stay connected with the grittier details of life. You're a half dead sub-tribe, phantoms with no landshare of their own to ground them, hovering over the camps, and living off offering left by individual tribesmen.

Why is the modern Israeli government so harsh on psychedelics and their users? For the same reason the rest Babylon is, right? It's a good reason. They fear our weakness. Their afraid that once it's time to get back to work or war, because the winter is coming or the Amelekites are coming to raid our supplies, that we won't be grounded enough and connected enough to physical earth to recognize the danger until it's too late.

In the city, I love marijuna. Drugs are for when you're trapped, and there really is no other way out.

There's a great chassidic story, from the school of Pshische, in Poland.
The headmaster there, the holy Yehudi was talking, late one night, with his closest disciple, R Simcha Bunim.

When the messiah comes.

The three days before, Elijah the Prophet will come and announce it

And three hours before
Everything you know will be shattered
All the forces you depended on will be taken from you, and destruction and seeming doom will
take over your world

Your God is not the god.
Your messiah is not the true messiah
Your redemption is not the true redemption

And only those strongest in faith will be able to push past that, into the next hour. In the next hour, even your language fails you, everyone.
There is no god
there is no messiah
there is no redemption
there is no hope (chas v shalom!)


and other such terrors fill the heart of the once-believer
And until the very last minute, no-one can survive through it intact, without being broken, utterly broken, to recieve the new world. This is why the messiah has never quite come, we have never strong enough to handle the nessesary pain. But how can any of us survive the terrible pain, to want enough to be able to push through to see the better world?

Ah! said R Bunim, I've got an idea!
I'm an apothecary! I can just mix up some herbs, get really wasted, and just be totally medicated during the three hours! Then, by the time i start to sober up, the better world will already be here!

aha, said the master

That is a good idea.

The whole trick
Is knowing when to dose.

Too early
and you've poisoned yourself for nothing
and weakend the power of the medicine for when you need it

The whole secret of intoxication
Is the mystery of when.

In Traditional chinese medicine, it's called Jing, in Ayurveda, Ojas. The life essence that fuel our physical existence; we get a certain amount when we're born, and though it can be supplemented, it can never be replaced, and when you run out, that's the end. In the bible, i think it's called Koach, or strength, as in , the strength left his loins and that kind of thing. If anyone has a better traditional jewish word for physical life essesnce (not blood or energy, but like, a white fluid, associated with and equated with sperm) Maybe Ohn, as in Reishis Oni (Reuven is not only the firstborn, but, according to rabbinic traditon, also the first time jacob ever ejaculated) ?

Anyhow, there's a principle in the mishneh somewhere (can anyone be a better scholar than me and get sources?) that people are given only a certain amount of words in their lives, and that the more they just waste words by talking for no reason, the more they waste their very lives.
Compare to eastern ideas about jing/ojas being depleted by excess talking. Traditional reasons given for the prohibition on masturbation "letting your seed spill on the callow earth" incude losing your hair and getting weak, unfocused and unmotivated.

Does that sound familiar? Snoogans.

Excerpt from Paul Pitchford's Healing with Whole Foods

"marijuana has been shown to dramatically increase melatonin levels. The traditional chinese medical view of such psychoactive substances is that their "high" results from large amounts of transformed ojas/jing essence being being sent to the brain through the aciton of the substance, in which process the ojas/jing of the kidneys is depleted. It may be that science is confirming part of this traditional belief, as melatonin may be considered an element of the transformed ojas/jing essence."


Compare with this excerpt from Cures-not-wars .

"Of all the known ways to stimulate melatonin production, none is more dramatic than smoking marijuana. Marijuana stimulates production of a prostaglandin called PGE2, which may relate to its ability to stimulate melatonin production. Italian researchers discovered that when eight men smoked a cigarette containing the active ingredient in marijuana, THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), they had dramatically higher melatonin levels twenty minutes later. After two hours, their melatonin levels were 4,000 percent higher than at baseline

The fact that smoking marijuana is accompanied by a dramatic increase in melatonin production may explain some of the drug's positive effects. A 1995 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the hallucinogen is being used to counteract the toxicity of chemotherapy, treat migraines, reduce intraocular pressure, minimize pain, treat menstrual cramps, and moderate wasting syndrome in AIDS patients.(12) Melatonin has been shown to ameliorate each and every one of these conditions.

Smoking marijuana as a vehicle to increase melatonin production, however, may not be a good idea. The increase is so marked that it is not likely to be beneficial, especially if one smokes marijuana during the daytime, when melatonin levels are normally so low that they are just above the level of detection. Causing such a dramatic surge in melatonin levels in the daytime could phase-shift your circadian rhythms or interfere with your health in other as yet unknown ways...

Yes, talking, smoking, drinking and coming, do seem to disspate life. Does that mean don't? No, life itself dissipates life, If the purpose of life was longevity, we'd all be faliures.

It cannot be emphasised enough: the purpose of life is Life! to create and rejoice and make God feel like wow, maybe it's worthwhile after all. The main responsibility of the Israelite is to bring joy to the world, and we must never lose track of that. There's a buncha things that jewish tradition encourages dying for, mostly under the category of Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying G-d's name.

Is your smoking, talking or ejaculating sanctifying G-d's name? If not, you may want to, if not cut down, at least re-contextualize.

R Mordechai Yoseph Of Iszhbitz says, an easy way to know if what you're doing is worthwhile, is to ask your self:

If i had to die to do this, would it be worth it?

If not, you can make the nessesary adjustments, if in perspective or if in action.

For god's sake, just make/feel your life worthwhile. That's all.

Next: tu-bi-shvat special. Happy new year!

Zion Streets is mighty sweet

So... after high school, I went to Israel, ostensibly to learn Torah, and experience the holiness of the land... but also to find

a) community wrestling with this same question. I could ask my shul rabbi for insight, and listen to him repeat a modern rabbinic prohibition based on lies and suck-up-to-the-man disinformation, but maybe there were people in Israel really struggling with these mysteries, and maybe they'd found something good, and

b)sources, written ones, dealing with Marijuana, in some way or another. Be it in the Pentateuch, the Prophets, Psalms, mishna, Talmud, Midrash, Old Kabbalah, Chassidus... Wherever I could and also

c) Organize a million marijuna march for Jerusalem. How could the international roster of cities hosting ganja day protests not include the very center of the universe.

I first went to Israel on a Young Judea year course program. Set for the first 3 months in Jerusalem, it seemed an easy enviroment from which to somehow be centered close to Jerusalem's strange living culture, while being slowly weaned into Israeli culture, the ultimate goal of Hadassah's young Judea.

Theoretically frustrating, we were, thanks to the newly born security threat of a fresh intifada just in time for the new year, forbidden from going to either the old city or most of JTown, with the exception of the Russian Compound.

Why the Russian Compound? Because that's where the bars were, and, as one adminstrator confirmed, the program wanted us to be able to drink our problems away.

Drug use was strictly forbidden on the program too, something which frustrated the hell out of most of the students on the year course, leading to a pretty fair amount of excess drinking and constant kvetchery. These were well educated hardcore party kids from across the U.S. and the British Isles, not used to obeying rules like that, and generally kind of irritated by the program.

I was at the time, just for the first time learning Kabbalah and Chassidus, by way of Areyeh Kaplan's translation and exhaustive commentary compilation on the Sepher Yetzirah, and some of the works of R'Nachman of Breslove. Smoking less grass than i did in the states (I-ditation maybe once or twice a week) I was getting much higher, on ancestral Bahkti and simple faith.
The program offered a decent day structure and some fun community, my main learning was from the books and from the streets.

It occured to me one night that Jerusalem was, like all cities, a woman. If she knew you were listening, she'd show you all her secrets.

I was walking in the streets one night after classes, past an ice cream cream shop right off Zion Square, the center of Town. Some crazy old drunken mystics would hang out there, talk shit about what was going on, in their lives, in their minds, in the country as a whole, in grandiose romantic apocalyptic ways. These particular drunks had a particularly ecxtatic relationship with nihlistic messianism, one that would marvel me with it's poetry and hope. The end of the world was going to come, and clarify how nice and kind nice and kind people are, and inspire everyone to want to just love each other. All the friends they'd watched die over the years, from overdoses and suicide bombs, car accidents and liver cirroci, would be ressurected and be able to hang out and hug again. And the mystery of why we've had to struggle and suffer over so much would be revealed.

I really believed in it all, ultimately. I think still do, whenever confronted with it. These are parts of the ultimate promise, that one day, all the stories will be clarified... clarified and appricated, so deeply. All my enemies will come and apologize, crying, "i'm so sorry... i didn't realize... I was hurting so much, i just couldn't see, i just couldn't-- couldn't"

And i'll cry, and say, I know, I'm the same way. One of the major ideas that was introduced to me at the time was the Simple Faith. Very popular in most orthodox christian sects, it's generally assumed to be eschewed by logic-convoluted rabbinic judaism. Not so, R' Nachman says.

"Truth and Faith are like day and night. The ancient Torah law is courts can only convene during the day, never at ngith, because Truth, revealed truth corresponds to the day, when the sun is shining and everything is clear. All the details and imperfections are clear, and there's no question of what reality is when it's "day." This is the aspect of the moment when God's presence is revealed and open, when everything is going "right" and the hand of Jah in synchronicty ("hashkachat pratit" lit. "specific maintanence") is openly visible and there are not questions. Miracles and so on.

This is not the highest revelation of the divine. A higher level is that of Faith, corresponding to night. Judgement is difficult at night, and not really as worthwhile, as it's hard enough to see anything. Demon can be confused with people and visa versa, but when do all the really great celbrations happen? When is your beloved most beautiful? When are children genrally concieved, and when do we dream? Only at night. In the sunlight, all our imperfections and mortalities become painfully clear. In the moonlight, they all fade away, and our true beauty is revealed.

So it is with God. Only when she's a bit hidden does she become most attractive. An overpowering, un avoidable presence gets overbearing, and makes us have to leave our home just to feel independant and free. But in the moonlight, in the faith that guides us through the things we can't see, does the desire for more divinity manifest. Faith is the aspect of prayer, of desire and grace. We only believe in things that we want to, and our realities can only follow after our expectations of what's possible, what's reality.

Simple faith, R' Nachman says, is the only way miricles can manifest and that the heart can be truly opened. A cynical, probing mind can useful theoretically, but will not let the heart be touched. A friend of mine recently compared it to a jealous boyfriend, that's only trying to help keep the heart safe by acting all tough, and needs to be silenced, gently, by the heart, told, sh, it's ok, don't worry about it.

There's a principle in a Kurt Vonnegut book, Breakfast of Champions, that human have clearly demonstrated by their mad passion for trivialities like gold and teenage girl's undearwear, that we as humans can program ourselves to believe anything, so we might as well believe in the best things possible, the things that help us help the most.

And the other trick, with believing impossible things, is to know that they're essence is true, even if the language of how the hope is expressed is not nessesarily. There's an old Judean legend that heaven is basically a great house of learning, full of all the ideas you studied while alive, and allt he greatest teachers there to clarify for you, what they really mean... and apparantly what they really mean grows with every generation, as the secrets are revealed from the collective unconcious into what we as human can become open to.

One night in Jerusalem, I was sitting by the Ice Cream Shop, where the holy drunkards sit and scream and laugh and cry... some guy came up and we started talking about the messianic process. He was a relatively recent Ba'al Teshuva, "master of repentance" the religious jewish equivelent of a Born Again... We started arguing, gently, using proof texts from scripture, both ancient, medieval and relatively modern, over whether or not the King Messiah was and individual (his position) or a generation (mine.)

Any individual messiah can just be killed, thus ending the movement everytime it get's too close to revolution, as has been the traditional way of maintaining structure and consistant authority. Only once it's everyone can it really take hold, i maintained.

No, it's one guy, who just has the power to really impress everyone, so much so that there is no opposition that can stop him, said he. We met up with some other street mystics, and asked them what they thought. One of them, and older, long bearded Briton, invited us back to his flat to smoke some herb and ponder the question. We arrived at his house, a small second floor walk up decorated in kabbalistic art work, much of which was painted by his roomate, who lifted out from his Hebrew letter meditative practice to join us, and offer us use of his plastic bottle bong.

The Older man had studied in some of the finest Yeshivas in Gateshead, the son of one of the major Rabbis there, before rebelling off to Israel, tripping very hard for years and years, and blowing his mind into shattered yet coherent pieces. We all talked for hours as the bong went around, I just overwhelmed by the majesty of the moments and how mch I'd been longing to share with friends this way.

All the dope smoking I had done in high school had never been under jewish or devotional circumstances, except when I was alone. All my friends in high school were gentiles, and not very spiritually curious ones at that, generally. All i'd wanted for so long was to have my dream of elevated community Torah interactions realized... It was a very deeply touching moment for me.

The conversation floated around the messianic tip, sometimes it feels like that's the only thing we dare talk about in this generation, i thought. I brought down obscure legends I hadn't even thought about in years, which were too obscure and heretical sounding to be believed until our older friedns, named Max btw, confirmed and cite the sources for them. I felt like all the beautiful things i'd learned my whole life finally found a community/context where they'd be appreciated, and where all my ideas could finally be properly sown and sprouted. Hahaha... sigh

Ah, Jerusalem... where the madness and the fantasy is not only tolerated, but encouraged, presumeably because to try to hold it back would only invite condescention and distrust. Don't you know that the visible reality is pure illusion, and only God is true!? City of sacred dreams and devoted fools.. Oh Jerusalem...

I shuffled home to the year course program. A week later i would be expelled, as they would find marijuana in my urine after someone reported me to the school authorities. I was inspired and illuminated by faith and confidence in my willingness to do the right as would be revealed to me, and my trust that the God who could make water into dry land could make my urine sample come out clean, if it was what i was needed for.

Shlomo Carlebach says, why do people go crazy and think they're the messiah when they come to Jerusalem? Becasue G-d's presence is sooo close there, that they see the secret truth: They really are the messiah, and really are responsible to save the world.

The tragedy is, they're usually so disconnected from other people, that they think they're the only one. I was spared that particular delusion, at least, thanks to some essencial educational priciples:

Kabbalstic Principle #1:
It's much deeper than you think, or can imagine. And once you think you've understood a Truth, is when you've stopped being able to learn it any deeper. Any true statement will tell you something new everytime you look at it.

Kabbalistic Principle #2:
Don't ever give up trying to grasp it, longing for more of it, because these ever-revelations are the purpose of creation. and the main thing God is hoping to talk to you through. She is like the girlfriend, waiting for you to understand better all the time. And righteousness mixed with coolness turns her on.

I blew the money my parents spent on the year course program, felt pretty bad about that, and vowed not to put myself into a situation where I would have to be dishonest about who i was, what i was doing, and what i was living for from then on. It would be my first time free, away from my parent's house, and i would live it honestly and as truthfully as possible.

And i still had to find teachers who could give me real insight onto the mystery of marijuana in the messianic process. What new Aeon was this strange grass harbringing? Why did it relate so closely to all the many subcultures of the world? What did it mean?

Soon enough, i started to get answers.
Not as good as questions, but they'll help you feel alright sometimes.


next: The Yeshiva. Marijuna in the bible, zohar, and roots of hasidic theolgy, revealed!
Plus, the secret name of harmony is green.

responsa

I got some response to the blog that i wanted to explore a little bit before moving ahead in the narrative.

cannabis torah? kinda sounds like the aish toraj codes to me. i dunno... i've always kinda felt like you only need these funny proofs if you're trying to justify something that you're not 100% sure is ok. is there really a need 4 cannabis torah?

The inyan (context/theory) of looking for the torah of something is not to prove it's good.
Like it says in psalms, Ta'amu ooh reoo ki-tov, once you've tasted it and see that it's good, that's it. Nothing has to be proven. Torah is not just to see if something's "ok"... It's to recieve guidance on how to use, on what something good is for, what it MEANS, what it's ABOUT.

"Let a person ever study what his heart desires"
(B. Avodah Zarah, 19a)

Two good general drug use torahs, that really do apply for any intoxicant or poison used to transcend my stuck ideas about what reality is and how I am, include:

guidance for the indulgence of sweetness

"If you get a taste of honey
take only as little as you need and let the rest pass
lest ye take too much and
vomit it all up."
(Is that pirkei Avos?)

Very deep, right?

Anything "sweet" this applies for. A child will eat cake endlessly, because our longing for sweetness is infinite, but the nature of sugars is to digest mostly and best in the mouth, not in the gut. Taste it, don't pound it. Take too much, and, worse than anything else, one loses the true taste of how good the swweetness is.

This is true about Torah too, or course, and anything else that's sweet.
In traditional chinese medicine, it's considered very important to balance the sweet flavor with the bitter flavor, to keep one from getting mucusy, sluggish, and spaced out, to say nothing of fat and tumorous.

Guidance for harmonious use of medicine

It says in the Gemara in Brachos, talking about medicine

How do you know when someone needs a certain medicine?
If your healer says you should take a certain medicine and you trust their wisdom
but don't really particularly feel like you need that particular medicine
try it anyway!

Because maybe he can see something that you can't

And if you feel like you need a certain medicine but your healer says you really don't
take it anyway!
because maybe he can't see the sickness that only you experience

This is true about torah too, and anything else that heals but might hurt
You know better than anyone else what you need, if you're really being honest with yourself, And God is trusting you to be honest with yourself.
And when in doubt, right? When you really don't know which way to go, the talmud says, go right, a euphesim for the right hand path, that of action and doing as opposed to passivity and not doing. Balance is important and if you really know that you don't need the medicine, don't take it!

But if you're not sure about the right path, make a mistake on the side of doing as opposed to not doing, because living out of fear is not the purpose of creation. Fear is only to keep us from expanding to far too fast, the purpose of creation is to BE.

i think that we can be on the level that whatever good we recieve from smoking we can do on our own work without the crutch and to always rely on it put's you in crutches now maybe it's good to have a lchaim once in a while i can't tell anybody what to do and i even think it's good to bring out positive attributes of pot because so much negativity is associated with it.. it is really good to focus before you smoke the pot rather than just letting you take it were it wants you to go but if you try to find torah on it why won't you look for torah on heroine too and ecstacy and cocaine i know soeone who becane frum because he was overdosing on cocaine and now teaches torah and saves jews from missionaries just because you have an affinity for pot should'nt exclude acid and mushrooms now i think that the comparrison to wine is very good and the torah looooves to talk about wine how it can be a stumbling block for the fools and how it should be poured down the throughts of the righteous is very apllicable to drugs but wine is only healthy in limits and is better when you drink at a table with friends and family with a meal not alone in a room or in a back alley (though it was fun at times)

Heroin Torah? as opposed to marijuana torah? You could say the problem with heroin is that it doesn't really make people happy for very long, but maybe that's true for all drugs, and all Torahs. If someone is hurting so bad that the only way they feel like they can deal with life is to abandon it, I'm not going to be able to help them by taking away their medicine, that won't force them to cope, it'll just force them to scurry for shelter undersome other idol. Did you ever meet an ex-junkie who gave it up because he found something so much more fun? Are those guys amazing? Yeah... There's one way of saying, it's better to deal with the world and it's pains and struggles face on, and not use anesthetics to get past them. Have you ever had a root canal and said: no! no drugs for me. I want this to be real! I haven't. it just doesn't seem worth the trauma. You could say, anything really special, the less you do it, the specialer and healthier it is when you do. It might not be kiddush if we did it everyday, although some communities might have benifited from a period of daily intoxiation. It probablly saved alot of sould, alchol in russia and eastern europe. Doesn't meant Vodka is good good, or healthy, even in moderation, only that the joy that comes from having your troubles lifted off your mind might be healthier than the kidneys and liver you'd have without it. Apparently, wine, even in moderation, is really not as good for people as like, vinegar. We don't make kiddush on wine because it's good for us. We do it because it gets us high. If heroin made you seriously happier and more sensitive to your family and community the way that marijuana and/or psychedelics have and do when used harmoniously, then it would be wonderful. I've worked with harm reduction agencies, where they maintain that heroin, even at it's hgihest, isn't as much a really inspiring joy as much as just a nullification of reality.

Which is pretty deep of itself. What is deveikus if not self nullification in the passion for divine comfort? I've never messed around with heroin or cocaine, I eschew refined white anythings personally, but if anyone out there has hearda ny really good, profound heroin Torah, feel free to bring it down here.

I was searching less for particular Torah insights recieves through drugs, and more Torah insights about drugs, what we learn out from them and maybe guidance as how to use them more positively. Pious Rastas and Saddhus seem to do better with the stuff than bored teenagers generally, is that true? What's the good intention, any ideas?

"Anything that Jews find delight in has to have something perfect and holy at it's essence"
(paraphrased: secret of the Aishes yifas toar according to the Ishbitzer)

This week: Israel. Stay tuned.

420 is the gematria of smoke

A few years ago, i went to Israel to find the mysterious hidden Torah of Marijuana.

Torah, by definition, as I had grown up with it in Hebrew Day School, was the source a root of all good and all truth, and dealt with everything. If so... Where's the Weed?

Might sound like a flippant question to anyone who doesn't take marijuana seriously. But I did. I was seriously touched by it, around the third year of high school. I had been horrendously bummed out by romantic and intellectual frustration, coupled with an inability to do any much homework despite harsh attempt at self discipline and committment... and then along came Mary.

I had been turned on by the littlest trickle of heart and mind expanding music and culture, Nirvana, Sublime, 311,The Beatles, Ginsburg and Kerouac and Hendrix... positive radio and bookstore cheese that gave me some inspired insight on, you know, a sweeter way of relating to life.

It was clear since the first time my mom told me that no, Columbus did not discover America, the "Indians" were already living here until they got slaved and poxed to death, that the authorities' descriptions of Reality were comming from a priority other than a pure devoted search for the Real Truth. Marijuana prohibition seemed to my teenage soul to epitomize this Governmental dishonesty regarding not-just-our-history.

Like, as every half-concious stand up comic has pointed out (from Lenny Bruce to Chris Rock)
Marijuna, unlike alcohol, tobbacco, or refined sugar, doesn't kill people, has never been atributed to any death except maybe the folks who get shot by police or federal officers sometimes, and tends to actually, uh, discourage violence...

Blah, blah, everybody knows, everybody knows.

When i first smoked weed, it gave me a peace with my surroundings that i had not had in a long time. When i third smoke weed, It gave me memories of feelings that i had not experienced since i was 4 years old, simple burbles of experience that i had been too word addicted and perspective-caught to relate through. When I tenth smoked weed, I had a chance to actually see infinity work, as cicles within circles, going all the way in each direction, until they came around the otherside.

And I thought, wow, where did this go? How could it be we didn't know about this?

And by "we," I mean the Jews of course.

I'd hate to give this away, but maybe everyone knows about this already too... I've wondered if this secret assumption isn't the secret of the healing of Christianity...
The tradition passed down to religious Jews in the schools we go to, i do think pretty much across the orthodox board (which can otherwise be pretty diverse theologically, make no mistake) is that, on Mount Sinai, after we left Egypt, God told Moses everything.

Mamish everything. how it begins, how it ends, right? But furthermore, how to relate to people and families, how to build the perfect utopian economic system, how to enforce social justice and prevent corruption, how to ressurect the dead and animate clay, how to conjure demons and make them wait your tables, how to make people's kidney explode...

The secret names that all the angels answer too, the secret languages of all the animals, the secret of folding space to be able to teleport from place to place, the secret of how to transmogrify cucumbers into venison, the secret powers of every plant, and the appropriate context.

In Yeshiva, we all heard the story of the Lithuanian (or was it Portugese?) Rabbi who taught his brain surgeon how to do brain surgery better, because he had learned it out of a passage of the talmud somehow. Becuase, ostensibly, it's all there.

I had this fantasy about the desert Israelites... Moses taught them everything. They could win every war and conquer the holy land because they were like tantric ninja masters, who's daily prayer services included asanas now unknown to us. They had the knowledge of how to be ideally developed human beings, and they devoted it all to G-d, because, truth be told, what else is there?

And all the invasions they did were justified, because the peoples they were anhiliating were child sacrificing whore-mongers-idolators, but we still cried over every baby we smashed, and prayed that the world would soon come to it's senses.

But, sadly enough, as the generations progressed, we forgot more and more... just boiling down our tradition to whatever we thought was most important for our kids to know. But, for anyone with the eyes to search, it could all be dug out...

As such... where's the ganja? And the yoga for that matter, something that touched my life and re-sensitized me to my body too right around then, where did they go?

The oral tradition was forbidden to write down until we got scared that if we didn't write it down, we'd forget it. Yogic positions and breathing patterns I guess are easier to show some one than the are to write down maybe... but how could i relate to marijuana in a sacred way, without a tradition of how to sacramentalize it?

Was there a blessing I could say? A particular intention I would use to open up cosmic portals while toking? What guidance did my tradition have to give me with this, since it seemed to have so much to say about all my other everyday activites...

How could it be we didn't have a tradition, of Pot as much as we do of wine? I guess it was hard to score bud in exile maybe, but... some hint of it had to be somewhere in our tradition, right?

So... after high school, I went to Israel, ostensibly to learn Torah, and experience the holiness of the land... but also to find

a) community wrestling with this same question. I could ask my shul rabbi for insight, and listen to him repeat a modern rabbinic prohibition based on lies and suck-up-to-the-man disinformation, but maybe there were people in Israel really struggling with these mysteries, and maybe they'd found something good, and

b)sources, written ones, dealing with Marijuana, in some way or another. Be it in the Pentateuch, the Prophets, Psalms, mishna, Talmud, Midrash, Old Kabbalah, Chassidus... Wherever I could and also

c) Organize a million marijuna march for Jerusalem. How could the international roster of cities hosting ganja day protests not include the very center of the universe.

Next Blog, i'll start to tell you what i found. But before i finish this one, i'll tell you about one of the cutest marijuna torahs ever uncovered.

The Hebrew word for Smoke is AShaN

AShaN is a three letter root word, Ayin, Shin and Nun.

Get ready, this is cool...

In hebrew numerology, every letter is a number. Like, if in english, instead of writing "1" we wrote "a" and "b" was 2 and "j" was 10 and "k" was 20 and "t" was 100
and so on... It's called Gematria. Y'all saw Pi, right? yeah, cool...

Ayin is 70
Shin is 300
Nun is 50

what does that equal?

hahahahahhahahahahahahaha

The same numerological equivelent to the word "mimitzrayim"
which means "Out from Egypt(lit: constriction/boundary)"

Because all solid objects are held together by boundaries
and attachments
and only Smoke
is free
to float up and out towards the heavens

cute, yeah? more to come, with Jah blessings :>

---Yoseph