P R E L U D E
Long Strange Trip I
“There is a road, no simple highway.”
A journey which is neither simple, nor straight. A destination not revealed at the outset. A single, unbroken movement of the soul — one whose shape can only be seen when you have travelled far enough to look back.
Consider a coal. A small black stone, lying dormant and still — nothing remarkable in its appearance, only the faint memory of fire sealed within it, sleeping beneath a crusty gray blanket. Then the wind comes. The breath reaches the coal, and the hidden flame awakens, rises, reaches toward the sky like a mystery long kept in secret circles. Out of the darkness, colors appear that no eye had suspected: tender violets, deep indigos, trembling golds — colors that belong neither to the coal nor to the air, but to the longing alone. For it is only the breath of longing that can release the light imprisoned within. That coal. That breath. That strange, trembling, upward-reaching.
This is where the soul’s story often begins — not in the revealed, but in the hidden; not in arrival, but in the recognition that light exists, that truth exists.
One journey — one river — told through four different languages of the soul. Slowly, slowly, each one expands the horizon, lifts the veil, reveals some light.
Chasing the Peak
We begin with the story of a soul that encountered the Infinite before it had any framework to hold it. It begins with a momentary epiphany in a sterile suburban park. Then comes the Sunshine Daydream — psychedelic sacraments that tore the veil and revealed that reality is far larger and far more luminous than anyone had told us, and then the good ole’ Grateful Dead — with their unique alchemy of music, improvisation, adventure; and the Deadhead family on the bus, going down the road.
From there it moves into the mystic landscape of shamanism and Native American medicine men: sweat lodges, vision quests, and coyotes howling in the night. It ends — through a long, winding path that surprised its traveller, me, most of all — at the doorway to the ancient pathways of Torah.
Woven through the madness is an account of the dangers hidden inside the light. Chasing ecstatic raptures the way another man might chase any intoxicant — hungering for pleasure, for the next rapturous peak, for the cosmic orgasm. The shamanic world opened a gateway to power — complete with trap doors leading to deep dark dungeons. The taste of ecstasy and the expansion of one’s ego both become dangerous enticements set by the dark side.
The Golden Calf
Can one have self-reflective consciousness in the midst of the peak experience? What are psychedelics? It’s happening! What’s happening? What is the relationship of plant medicines — if any — to the spiritual journey?
The clinical evidence for psychedelics as medicines is real and remarkable. Torah itself honors the healing of the psyche as a sacred duty. Where lies the line between healing the psyche and serving G-d? It is common to confuse emotional release with deveikus, ego dissolution with bitul. A peak experience — however vast, however beautiful, however life-changing — is not the slow, grinding, earned transformation of the soul called avodah. Why is the Golden Calf the most appropriate paradigm to understanding these substances?
The Mystery of Reality
Can one understand the mystical, the spiritual through science? Are there parallels that can illuminate the path of service?
Quantum physics has been circling the same mysteries the Kabbalists mapped over the millennia. The quantum measurement mystery echoes the Chassidic teaching that da’as — awareness and connection — shapes the world a person inhabits. The holographic principle mirrors the Chassidic awareness that in every place everything is contained. Superposition illuminates a clearer understanding of the battle between the yetzer tov and yetzer hora. Entanglement becomes a window into the bond between a chassid and his Rebbe — a bond that transcends time, space, and even death.
Homecoming
Who is the “I” asking “Who am I”?
Ein Od Milvado — if there is nothing else in all of existence other than G-d, then who is declaring testimony to such a truth? The life of a Chassid is not spend resolving this question philosophically. The Chassid lives his life in bitul to dissolve the paradox. Bitul which is not self-nullification. Bitul as self-revelation. Bitul as a conscious choice to set aside the ego-self in order to reveal the G-dly soul. Through the daily work of peeling away the false self, one slowly reveals the true self: the neshama, chelek Eloka mima’al, a portion of G-d from above, returning to its root. The order of the day starts with gratitude, with thanks, with acknowledgement of realities beyond oneself. One aligns oneself, commits to a life of giving, to a life of truth, to a life larger than self.
There are souls which are pure and righteous, whose hands are clean and whose eyes are pure — the entire life lived at a careful distance from the dark side. Luminosity, yes; but limited reach before the deepest chasms of impurity. The sparks buried in the abyss lie beyond such holy ones. The righteous never tasted such darkness. How could they elevate that which they never tasted, that which they do not know?
There are other souls that live a life of constant return — the Baal Teshuvah, the Master of Return. Such a soul has descended into a realm where light does not easily enter. Seduced by bitter wine loaded with artificial sweetness. Such a soul sunk into the darkness, becoming, for a time, nearly indistinguishable from the darkness itself. And then — from the depth of that blackness, from the place where despair reigns and the path back is hidden in thick fog — a momentary flicker. The faintest echo of the light left behind. And in a moment of truth, with a sorrow deeper than any pleasure tasted in the shadows, the Baal Tshuva turns. One small step. “No — I will not be fooled again”. In that turn — in that moment — one’s soul finds redemption. The sparks imprisoned in the dark rise upward. Having tasted the pleasures of the lie, one now elevates those sparks through one’s ascent, through one’s return. The lowest is lifted higher than the highest. From the abyss, the fallen sparks are not destroyed — they are elevated, returning home to their source. It is revealed that they were sent on a mission from Above. And when the wanderer returns, having freed the fallen sparks, their true inner light is revealed. Exile becomes redemption. Rectification is complete. All is revealed. All is one.
The ecstatic Deadhead and the Chassid striving to live a life in bitul are not two men. The seeker who chased shamanic power and the one who prays for his will to be absorbed into G-d’s will are not strangers to each other. They are the same soul, moving along the same river — and the river knew, even when the swimmer did not, which way it was flowing. What appears, from the outside, as a chaotic wandering through incompatible worlds was, in truth, a single continuous movement of return. The broken, captured soul is a soul capable of becoming a Holy vessel. And the vessel — not the light, but the vessel — is what is being built through the journey.
I was fortunate. I did not have to navigate the journey alone. I cannot claim any credit for myself. I was shaped and molded, crafted by my teacher — guided and polished by a holy, righteous man. My Rebbe was like a father, like a grandfather; and when asked, the Rebbe would often tell people that “Yiddle is my friend.”
He met me where I was, without judgment, also without flattery. He showed me that my wanderings had not been mistakes — which we define as “wrong.” The Rebbe showed me, slowly, with infinite patience, that every step I had taken — even the missteps, especially those missteps — had been preparing me for who I was destined to become, for what I was destined to receive. If I stayed on the journey, if I committed to truth, if I worked hard, and if I was willing to honestly look in a mirror. The teachings in these pages, wherever and whenever they reach any depth, passed through my teacher before they reached me. Without him, this work does not exist. Without him, the river might still be running dry in the desert.
To everyone who stood by, or anyone who encouraged me along the journey, along the river — thank you. Some of you tried to understand where I was going. Some had glimpses, others trusted, many doubted. Those that walked with me anyway, sensing that I knew something one could not label, one could not explain — thank you. That support was no small thing. It held me up in moments when I had nothing else to stand on. I hope this journal reads as an adventure that honors the trust you showed me.
A Note on Sources and Errors:
If anything in these pages misquotes, miscommunicates, or misleads — if I have bent a teaching without meaning to, or attributed a wisdom to the wrong vessel, or arrived at a conclusion that a more learned reader will rightly question — I ask forgiveness in advance, and I ask it sincerely.
Much of what I know I learned on long walks in the mountains with my teacher. He was not a man who paused to cite footnotes on a mountain route. He taught breath to breath, soul to soul — and when he drew from earlier sources, he did so fluidly, weaving Talmud and Zohar and Chassidic masters into the fabric of a single sentence while I tried to absorb it all. I received what I could. I wrote down what I remembered. This material sits alongside notes gathered over a lifetime of seeking — some written in journals, some on napkins, some in the margins of books I can no longer locate — often without source, often without date, often without the scholarly apparatus that a more careful man might have maintained.
I have tried to represent every teaching faithfully, every experience accurately, every attribution as precisely as memory and notes allow. Where I have fallen short, the fault is mine alone — not my teacher’s, not the Torah’s, not the sources’.
The river carries silt as well as water. I have tried to present the water. If any silt has slipped through, I trust that the reader with a discerning heart will know which is which.
Do not read these four books as separate works. Read them as one. Read them as a river. Let them carry you. Let them inspire you. May they illuminate the way.