Cannabis Rabbinics with Yoseph Leib Needelman-Ruiz (Ibn Mardachya)

Yoseph Needelman-Ruiz a.k.a. Yoseph Leib Ibn Mardachya is the author of Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs (Autonomedia press, 2012); an epic devotional study of Cannabis and other ethneogens in Judaism and its heresies throughout history, into super-modernity, in the hopes of passing on a useful counsel with regards to their use beyond “do” or “don’t.” Every week he will share a new chapter of Cannabis Rabbinics with CJM. Currently, Yoseph is working on a book about Pop Cartoon Kabbala, and living in Israel’s Elah Valley. Let him know if you want to come for shabbos!

Smoking cannabis is relatively modern, which is why my first work about Marijuana in traditional Judaism focused on the Hassidic movement: that’s where smoking as devotion has remained a traditional custom, with intentions and associations galore relatively intact. But surely Judaism has had a relationship to Cannabis predating that! It’s a mideastern thing, bound up in the Mediterranean and Eastern religious and mystical practices since before history!

Let me start with the real question when it comes to Cannabis Rabbinics: where is cannabis in the rabbinic tradition?

Within Temple Judaism, since the beginning of the narrative, at least back to Moses and arguably to Melkitsedek: Anointing Oil and Inscence. These are the tools of initiation and healing, that Jacob carries with him on his way back from Beit El, conveniently in his bag when it came time to anoint the Rock where he had the vision of the Ladder, angels going up and coming down.

Traditionally, it was what he had in his little jars that drew him back towards his twin brother, to fight an angel and win a new name: Israel. This Oil pressing, which traditionally is the one the Hasmoneans found in the back of the Temple when they retook it from the Selucids “Greeks” is also traditionally associated with the first Olive pressing from the branch that the dove brought Noah, to tell him the world was not destroyed. That’s some pretty special oil!

Everyone knows, Kineh Bosem in the Bible is Cannabis. It’s described as a special Olive Oil mix with ADDED “SPICES” poured on initiates in order to make them able for divine service, as king or “Cohein”— a transitional role between Shaman and Priest, more institutionally educated than a Shaman but more accountable than a Priest. To experience and share the Divine meant being a Kohen of some kind, and the two main tools of the Kohanim are the Anointing Oil, which is kept pretty tightly under wraps, and the inscence which is shared, and enjoyed by literally everyone, although only made and distributed by the Kohanim.

It’s one of the only spices in the anointing oil, along with two kinds of Cinnamonium to activate the stuff within the oil. This was mixed in during the desert shlep with Moses and used exclusively for the Kohenic practices. The inscence, on the other hand, was made with some regularity by the Kohen family of Avetinas by the time Egypt becomes Ptolmeyic, and the option to buy it directly from Egypt emerges, during the Second Temple period. But the Egyptian Shit just isn’t as good, and the Kingdom of Judea goes back to having their own Kohanim make it, for however much they’ll charge. 

When I was a young scholar, I took great pride in saying that the ancient Jewish Cannabis use was in the oil, not the inscence, applied topically. I also approved the tradition of post-meal spice burning in the tents, since it’s really better to smoke after a meal than before, if your appetite is fine and you’re hoping to feel full and satisfied in your high.

It wasn’t until I went to Israeli prison for weed stuff in 2016/2017 that I had a chance to see inside the Ramban, Rashi’s main student, where in his commentary on the biblical section commanding the use of specific Inscence and Anointing Oil argues that EVERYTHING that was in the Anointing Oil was ALSO in the Inscence!  Some examples are literally self-explanatory (the assorted Cinnamonium and Cassias) but the one glaring one, the Kineh Bosem, he somehow refuses to justify or explain.

Why not explain the need for Kineh Bosem if you’re going to explain everything else? The only answer can be found in context: Cannabis, and psychedelics like it, tend to be controlled or illegal under The Great Roman Empire, maybe for similar reasons to why it was controlled and monopolized by specific Shamamic Priesthoods (like ours!) but unlike those, it becomes completely repressed by Roman Christianity as an intoxicant.

This bias against comes up throughout the Bible, Isaiah and Jeremiah both concerned about the problem our reliance on the Canna from the East poses for our peace, even as the Queen of Sheba seems to come with a large supply of it in her encounter with King Solomon.  The ambivalence about cannabis throughout Jewish history reflects Rabbinical anxiety that we will fall back into the abuses and psychosis of prophetic religion and adopt the idolatrous habits of ecstatic cults.

But this very hostility, like that against things like Grace, Beauty, Gold and Silver is itself a testament to how central these now criticized and compromising staples had become! So too with the inscence: ostensibly reviled as idolatrous, it’s also the law that they burn it every day where everyone can smell it and be healed by it in the Temple in Jerusalem for as long as it stands. All the liturgy in the morning services recording the order of the sacrifices starts with it, just after the telling of the lighting of the morning fire and the pouring of the morning water.

Judaism does away with almost all of this.

That’s not fair of me to say on some level. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem did away with the central cult where the Kohanim were centralized.  When Babylon destroyed the First Davidic/Judean Temple, questions were inherently raised about the distribution network of “authentic” holiness and “Kosher” divinity in the wake of the annihilation of the one place that the people had associated with the divine for at least fourteen generations.

This is when prophesy starts to slow down, and rabbinic Judaism begins.

I mean– the center held, in that Isaiah and Ezra and Daniel and all those guys come back to Jerusalem and keep a culture active around the temple ground until the Second Temple is built, a long slow project ostensibly initiated by Cyrus the Great, Koreish of Persia, also identified notably as “anointed of G-D” (משיח יהוה). Let us here note also, how important Haoma was to Persian religion and revelation, a Haoma that Chris Bennet makes a strong argument was always Cannabis, specifically, especially initially, for many reasons.

Judaism isn’t quite that hardcore necessarily but let’s note: The first Jews were expelled from Ancient Rome under suspicion of being Dionysians, ostensibly for erroneous homonymic reasons. But Plutarch of Rome insists it was not a mistake! The use of wine in our “Kiddush” rather than Honey is all the proof he needed to identify the God of Judah and Israel with Dionysus specifically. This is the concern within Judaism that rabbinic Judaism built its philosophical adaptagenity amidst the ecstatic visionary nature of pre-empire “Eastern” religion.

The bias against Dionysian literalism fueled the philosophical sobriety of Hellenism that, despite having been built around the Mysteries of Elusis and Demeter, pivoted hard away from the visionary delusions of the traditional ancient entheogens, and rebuilt around the more social and agricultural Wine and Alcohol cultures with the advent of big enough fields and a big enough Empire to monopolize and control such produce. 

The Ancient Rabbis, the early Pharisees, modernists that they were, embraced this direction in their (our!) reconstructed theology in the wake of 70 AD. and the utter defeat of Judea by Rome that took away our sacred dyes and “indigenous” customs. They no longer had access to the Oil or the Inscence, since they no longer had much trading autonomy with the East and anyway, most everyone who knew anything had been tortured to death.

But what did the inscence become?

Liturgy. Placeholder. In lieu of the service– a telling of the story of what they used to do AS the service, the words themselves our inscence bound up in all the most ancient and continuous of contemplative menorah-yantras and acrostic letter posters.

This is my read of the esoteric, entheogen fueled, cannabis accessing tradition in Rabbinic Judaism writ large. It starts with the generation of the First Rabbis. Some were even Kohanim, despite the general Sadducee bias endemic of the Hasmonean Kingdom, and the most important of them all in a certain Rabbi Ishmael(!) ben Elisha, as well as his Grandson, Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha. Yes, two important Rabbis from the first generation of Rabbis to the third, implicated deeply in the construction and reconstruction of Judaism, legitimized by the deepest and most personal association with the Temple of Judea– as its High priest, its Kohen Gadol!

We’re going to look at the first mention of the Inscence to give some background on what the inscence became: a weird thing whispered ritualistically amidst the most arcane of morning prayers, in between one out-loud part and another. In the seventh chapter of the first book of the entire Talmudic project, “Blessings” (ברכות) right near the beginning, in the hopes of explaining why Jewish ritual prayer is weird the way it is, we find The Order of the Inscence, and a commemoration of R Ishmael: 

We Learned, R Ishmael said

One time פַּעַם אַחַת,

I went In. נִכְנַסְתִּי

לְהַקְטִיר קְטוֹרֶתTo burn-offer Incense(“Binding”)
 
 לִפְנַי וְלִפְנִים, Before me and Within Me
And I saw A-Katriel (I will crown/I will smoke) וְרָאִיתִי אַכְתְּרִיאֵל

YH~YHWH of legions “ יָהּ ה׳ צְבָאוֹת,  (I.e the angel WAS G-d! At least in some form) 

 שֶׁהוּא יוֹשֵׁב עַל כִּסֵּא רָם וְנִשָּׂא Just sitting! on the Throne; High and Guiding 
!!!!!!

 וְאָמַר לִי:  (“And, get this: )He said to ME!”
 ״יִשְׁמָעֵאל בְּנִי, בָּרְכֵנִי!״  “Ishmael my boy!   BLESS ME.”
!!!!!

 אָמַרְתִּי לוֹ: So I says to him

Please may it be the will, before yourself ״יְהִי רָצוֹן מִלְּפָנֶיךָ

, שֶׁיִּכְבְּשׁוּ רַחֲמֶיךָ אֶת כַּעַסךָ, That your mercy occupy-dominate your anger

 וְיִגּוֹלּוּ רַחֲמֶיךָ עַל מִדּוֹתֶיךָ, And your mercy be exiled into/onto your Ways

 וְתִתְנַהֵג עִם בָּנֶיךָ בְּמִדַּת הָרַחֲמִים, And that you guide yourself with us, your kids, in the way of Mercy

And that you bring them תִכָּנֵס לָהֶם

 לִפְנִים inside, beyond mere judgement מִשּׁוּרַת הַדִּין״ .  

(Brachot Chap 7)

So right away is a visionary experience of incense as prayer
But not our prayer exactly, 
As our experience of G-d’s prayer
Not to himself
But to us
To want him to be better
This is the incense. 

The history and context of this liturgy to follow, including R Ishmael’s whole story, and that of his amazing friends like Nehunia Son-of-the-Reed (בן הקנה) Elazer and Eliezer, Ben Arach and Hyrkanus  respectively, and of course, Rabbi Akiva and the journey into PaRaDiSe.
Stay high, keep G-d high too.