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(New York Jewish Week) — To not be a buzz kill, however I’ve by no means been a lot of a pot smoker and don’t intend to begin.
However I do love Jewish materials tradition and studying about unexplored byways of Jewish historical past, which is why I’m excited a few new exhibit on the YIVO Institute for Jewish Analysis devoted to Jews and hashish. “Am Yisrael Excessive” (see what they did there?) shows texts and artifacts tracing the connections — some speculative and most very actual — between Jews and weed, and the way an typically taboo topic and substance has intersected with faith, politics, crime and science.
On Friday I spoke with the curator, Eddy Portnoy, who’s the tutorial advisor for YIVO’s Max Weinreich Heart and its exhibition curator. Portnoy also maintains one of my favorite Twitter feeds, through which he shares uncommon and typically wacky artifacts from YIVO’s archives – which, just like the weed exhibit, by no means fail to remind viewers like me of the unusual, unexplored prospects of being Jewish.
The exhibit opens Could 5 on the Heart for Jewish Historical past, 15 West sixteenth St. in Manhattan.
Our dialog was condensed and edited for size and readability.
New York Jewish Week: We should always get this out of the best way first: Is weed kosher? What’s the conventional Jewish angle in the direction of intoxication and psychoactive substances?
Eddy Portnoy: It relies on whom you converse to, however in the principle, at the very least so far as Orthodox Judaism is worried, leisure use of hashish will not be acceptable. Nevertheless, medicinal use is. This goes together with cigarettes in that smoking is dangerous for you, and also you’re not imagined to hurt your physique. However as a result of legalization is a comparatively new phenomenon, that in the end modifications issues. The precept is “dina d’malchuta dina” — obedience to the civil regulation of the nation is religiously mandated. So some rabbis will say, if that is authorized to do, that is acceptable.
So it’s extra about well being than an aversion to altered states?
Students imagine that sure Kabbalists in Morocco, in North Africa, did use cannabis as a result of it was thought-about to have elevated their consciousness indirectly. But it surely was for a spiritual function. It wasn’t for recreation.
What acquired you began on this? And by this I imply, an exhibit dedicated to Jews and weed.
I smoked lots of pot in faculty, however stopped after I had youngsters. I didn’t suppose it was accountable to be excessive round little youngsters.
About two years in the past, I stumbled throughout a glass bong within the form of a menorah. It’s like a sculpture. Clearly, you’d by no means actually consider smoking eight bowls, however I believed to myself, I work at a historic analysis institute, and YIVO has been amassing Jewish materials tradition for nearly 100 years. And this object brings collectively each Jewish spiritual tradition and modern hashish tradition in a manner that I had by no means actually seen earlier than. So I contacted GRAV, the corporate that makes it. And as soon as it was in my workplace, I requested myself, is that this only a kitsch merchandise, or is there an actual historical past behind Jews and hashish?
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So let’s return in historical past with a time period featured within the exhibit. What’s kaneh bosem?
It seems in Exodus [as an ingredient in “sacred anointing oil”], it seems in quite a lot of completely different conventional texts and rabbinic literature. It’s sometimes translated as “aromatic reed” or fragrant cane, and typically as calamus. Within the Mishneh Torah, [the medieval sage] Rambam interprets kaneh bosem as Indian hemp, which is hashish. Kaneh bosem even appears like hashish. There’s a scholar who claims that the phrase comes from the Scythian phrase for hashish, and the Scythians have been recognized to have used hashish of their spiritual rituals, as did a number of ethnic teams all through the Center East for 1000’s of years.
About two years in the past, Israeli archaeologists discovered and excavated third-century BCE synagogue websites at Tel Arad. They discovered two altars that had the burned residue of sure materials, which they took for chemical evaluation and carbon courting. They discovered on one altar the burn residue of frankincense and on the opposite the burned residue of hashish.
Archaeologists digging at Tel Arad in Israel discovered an altar, left, that had residue from burnt hashish. (Israel Antiquities Authority, Photograph © The Israel Museum, by Laura Lachman, courtesy YIVO)
And that may have been about the identical time as the primary Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
Nachmanides, in his commentaries on Exodus, seems to say that kaneh bosem is hashish and that it was one of many components in ketoret, the incense providing within the Temple.
To skip forward a bit, you show a purchase order order for pot discovered within the Cairo Geniza, the synagogue storehouse that dates to the Twelfth or Thirteenth century.
There are a variety of paperwork from the gathering of the Cairo Geniza that reference cannabis. This one is a notice in Judeo-Arabic that confirms that an “esteemed elder” obtained “two carats of ingot silver,” for use to “receive cannabis for me with them.” It’s the Thirteenth-century model of somebody Venmoing somebody and saying, “Please get me some weed,” indicating that Jews have been utilizing cannabis, for no matter purpose – recreation or drugs.
For the exhibit I spotted I needed to go the place hashish was a part of the overall tradition, and that meant the Center East and North Africa. One Israeli scholar of Moroccan Jewry advised me that it was a convention for Moroccan Jews to sprinkle cannabis within the couscous at marriage ceremony events.
A doc recovered from the Cairo Geniza (Twelfth-Thirteenth centuries CE) thanks a traveler for buying cannabis for the letter author. (Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris)
You even have artifacts from Ashkenazi tradition, like a Yiddish-language e book known as “Cannabis.”
That could be a 1911 translation of an 1879 German novel, a form of “One Thousand and One Nights” Orientalist fantasy. It was translated by Rudolf Rocker, a well-known anarchist who wasn’t Jewish, however discovered Yiddish so he might, , do kiruv [recruiting] amongst Jews for anarchism.
However the actuality is, in Yiddish tradition and Jap European Jewry, pre-World Struggle II there’s not a lot linked to hashish use. Moyshe Nadir, the well-known Yiddish satirist [1885–1943], has a brief story known as “Cannabis” through which he visits a Jewish artist in Greenwich Village who smokes cannabis. Often within the Polish Yiddish press, typically the American, you’ll discover an article a few drug bust through which Jews are concerned.
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There may be one man [Yoseph Leib Ibn Mardachya] who wrote a e book known as “Hashish Chassidis,” and one of many arguments that he makes is that each one the early Hasidic masters smoked pipes, and their acolytes all wrote that once they smoke their pipes, they went into ecstasy. I don’t know the way a lot proof there’s to show that. Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote an ode to cannabis in 1901 when he was a scholar in Vienna. It’s an anomaly, however it’s within the exhibit.
“Cannabis” is a 1911 Yiddish translation of an 1879 German novel. (YIVO)
However the Jewish connection is basically sturdy beginning within the Sixties, when marijuana is deeply tied up with the counterculture.
One of many objects now we have within the exhibit from the Sixties is a press launch from a company known as LeMar, which stands for “Legalization of Marijuana,” a company that was co-founded by poet Allen Ginsberg, who was actually a central determine in each hashish advocacy and the legalization motion. LeMar was the primary legalization group created in America. Ginsberg participated in legalization rallies in 1964, lengthy earlier than anybody began to do that.
Jews appear to play an outsized function within the counterculture. The Yippies have been based by 5 Jews: Abbie Hoffman, his spouse Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krasner. I had no concept what a central situation marijuana legalization was for them. In nearly each situation of The Yipster Instances, their newspaper from the Nineteen Seventies, there are articles about hashish. Their official flag is a black flag with a crimson star that has a marijuana leaf embossed on it. It’s not clear that there was any Jewish content material in that regard, spiritual or cultural, however Jews have been on the forefront of this counter-cultural motion and this is among the issues they promoted.
You additionally cope with the intense facet of hashish, particularly the medicinal facet and the Israeli researchers who’re on the forefront of the science.
Raphael Mechoulam is an Israeli chemist who was the primary scientist to isolate THC because the part that produces euphoria, and CBD as effectively. This was within the early Sixties. He’s labored on hashish his complete life, and within the Nineties he and his colleagues found the endocannabinoid system, which regulates homeostasis – a big discovery how the human physique offers with cannabinoids. I learn an interview with him the place he says that as a result of he was in a small nation, he must discover a area of interest that different individuals weren’t working in.
Lester Greenspoon was a Harvard College psychiatry professor who within the late Sixties got down to do analysis on hashish when there was a big taboo on doing analysis on this space – it was the “reefer insanity” period. And but Greenspoon determined to do analysis to find out whether or not hashish was detrimental or useful. And his analysis indicated that it was not solely not detrimental, but it surely might have medicinal advantages. He produced a e book in 1971 known as “Marihuana Reconsidered” and it was printed by Harvard College Press.
I’ve so as to add that to a sure diploma Greenspoon was influenced to each work on hashish and likewise to strive it by his shut good friend, the Jewish astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was an enormous pot smoker. Each Carl Sagan and his spouse Ann Druyan have been very a lot advocates for hashish. Sagan wrote the introduction to “Marijuana Reconsidered,” though below the title “Mr. X.”
A rolling tray from Tokin’ Jew, which borrows its design from the seder plate, is featured in YIVO’s newest exhibit, “Am Yisrael Excessive: The Story of Jews and Hashish.” (YIVO)
YIVO is related to preserving the tradition of Jap European Jews and remembering what was misplaced within the Holocaust. At any level did your bosses say, “This exhibit is simply not who we’re?”
Nobody stated that … precisely. However once I described the thought and defined that it will be contextualized traditionally, they thought that this might be an appropriate solution to current this. I imply, it’s authorized – not in all states, however that appears to be the trajectory. It’s a multi-billion greenback trade. It’s turning into a part of the overall tradition. The main focus is basically on Jews in a selected trade. It could possibly be the movie trade, it could possibly be the comedian e book trade. If an exhibit is contextualized adequately, you may do nearly something.
I wish to ask you one thing a little bit bit off subject, however I feel it relates: your Twitter feed. You current every kind of oddball Yiddish and Jewish objects, which I feel could have the identical intent as this exhibit, which is opening up an viewers’s eyes to the probabilities of Jewish tradition and a deeper understanding of who the Jewish persons are.
As a result of I work at YIVO, I’m consistently coming throughout fascinating and weird pictures or objects linked to Jewish historical past. And typically these bizarre issues that I discover in YIVO collections wind up taking off in ways in which I don’t anticipate. It’s an amazing profit as a result of it helps individuals perceive what this place is and what it has.
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The opening of “Am Yisrael Excessive: The Story of Jews and Hashish,” will characteristic a panel dialogue, in particular person and through Zoom, moderated by Eddy Portnoy and that includes Ed Rosenthal, Adriana Kertzer, Rabbi Dr. Yosef Glassman and Madison Margolin. Thursday Could 5, 7 p.m. ET.
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