Rabbi Joel Bakst: Interview Archive

The recording opens with an announcement that this is A Psychology of the Future, an online summit put together by Erik Lenderman, gathering voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, medicine and related fields to talk through the practical side of psychology.

Erik Lenderman then greets his listeners and introduces his guest for the session. Rabbi Joel Bakst has written a number of books, among them "Beyond Kabbalah: The Teachings That Cannot Be Taught" and the "Jerusalem Stone of Consciousness," with more of his writing available through his site, Cityofluz.com. Erik welcomes him, and the Rabbi thanks him.

Erik frames where they are in the conference. This is the day given over to psychedelics, and the question on the table is how to make sense of the spiritual experiences people report after taking these chemicals, read through a religious lens rather than only a clinical one. He asks the Rabbi to sketch out the broad shape of his work, particularly around DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, and to say something about his training as a traditional Jewish scholar.

The Rabbi suggests they rewind to when he was twenty. He had grown up in Southern California and decided to leave. During the 1960s there he had run into the psychedelic movement and, alongside it, a heavy dose of Eastern religious thought. He describes himself back then as someone restless on a spiritual search, and that restlessness carried him to Israel.

What he actually wanted was to learn Kabbalah. He knew almost nothing about it, only that it belonged to his own tradition somewhere. When he got there he discovered the door did not open directly. Years of study came first: Talmud, Halakhah, the law and the ethics and the moral teaching, all of it ahead of any Kabbalah. There was also a plain obstacle. He did not know Hebrew yet, though he could read the letters. Over time the language turned into something he genuinely loved, and it became a real asset in the research he went on to do.

He keeps returning to that word, searching. He had been one small part of the shared mood of the 1960s. Many of the people he came up with eventually let that early hunger fade and settled into lives as observant Orthodox Jews, with families and children, and he speaks of that warmly as a good life. He kept pressing on, though, after something past that point. The pressing eventually brought him to an odd and specific thing he calls the Foundation Stone.