What was Moses smokin'? Burning bush and divine sounds linked to psychedelics

Like many modern Israelis, Moses may have been stoned while he wandered in the Sinai way back when. At least one Israeli academic, who sampled strong hallucinogenic potions during his own South American fieldwork in the early 1990s, asserts that similar psychedelics derived from the desert acacia or the Bedouin stimulant rue may have fueled the patriarch's religious visions shared with his tribe in the wilderness.

Benny Shanon, a cognitive psychology professor at Hebrew U, has no explicit proof, but revived a venerable controversy in a recent scientific article, Ofri Ilani reports in Haaretz.

“And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.” Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

The “perceiving of the voices” has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca.

“One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says.Shanon presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in the Negev and Sinai, he says.

“I have no direct proof of this interpretation,” and such proof cannot be expected, he says. However, “it seems logical that something was altered in people’s consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.”

Shanon, former head of the Hebrew University psychology department, said his first experience with ayahuasca was in 1991 when he was invited to a religious ceremony in the northern Amazon in 1991 in Brazil.

“I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” he says.

Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant.

“Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials,” Shanon says. He believes the Israelites used two plants in Sinai and the Negev: one of them is wild rue, a hallucinogen used by the Bedoin to this day. However this plant is not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible.

The acacia tree also has psychedelic properties, Shanon says, which the Israelites could have used. The acacia is mentioned frequently in the Bible, and was the type of wood of which the Ark of the Covenant was made. According to Shanon, he drank a potion prepared from a species of acacia while he was in South America, which caused similar experiences to those produced by the ayahuasca.

Shanon also sees signs of a hallucinogenic vision in the story of the burning bush. “Moses ‘looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed,’” Shanon quotes from Exodus 3:2. Time passes differently when under the influence of the plant, he notes. “That’s why Moses thought the bush was not consumed. It should have been burned in the time he thought had passed. And in that time, he heard God speaking to him.”

“But not everyone who uses a plant like this brings the Torah,” Shanon concedes. “For that, you have to be Moses.”

Bold Boulder Judge Richtel hears static in Jerusalem's Peace Forest

A runners's view from Abu Tor
After a heads-up that a dynamic teacher, Judge Murray Richtel, will soon be a teaching another joint course to Israeli and Palestinian law students, Izzy Bee went cyber-sleuthing to see what's so compelling about this jurist from Boulder, Colorado.

His take on whether Israelis and Palestinians can ever learn to live together, after witnessing them learn together in the classroom, is worth sharing, particularly in the run-up to the High Holydays and Ramadan.

Static in the Peace Forest
By Judge Murray Richtel (guest post)

I have learned a lot over my nine fall semesters in Jerusalem, including the painful and difficult lessons of being a new immigrant, even on a part-time basis.
Nothing is easy. Buying stamps, going to the bank, picking up the cleaning the simplest daily task is an adventure for the newcomer. One of my best learning resources has been Reshet Gimmel, FM Radio 98.7. "Kol Muzika, Kol Muzika Israelite," (All Music, All Israeli Music) which I religiously listen to while running up and down Jerusalem's hills three or four times a week.
From its hourly five-minute news reports, I have learned to understand the weather forecast, when the Supreme Court has rendered a significant opinion or, during the years when there were never-ending terrorist attacks, how many people had been killed, how many injured and how seriously. It took me awhile, actually several years, to learn that my favorite song was in fact a commercial for a sore throat medication.
On those runs which in better times have taken me to Bethlehem, on occasion around the walls of the Old City, and on a regular basis from my apartment past the president's house, down the hill to the olive trees of the Valley of the Cross where tradition has it the tree used for Jesus' crucifixion was cut, up the rosemary lined path near Israel's Parliament and back home passing the Prime Minister's residence I have often reflected on what I have absorbed about the political situation here.
Last week I did just that as I set out to run to the biblical Hill of the Evil Council, another standard route. In the 20 minutes it took me to get there, I heard only Israeli music from FM 98.7. At its summit and my turnaround point, I had one of Jerusalem's best views: the Old City and the Golden Dome on Temple Mount gleamed in the morning sunlight about a mile to the north. To the east about an equal distance was a new addition to the Jerusalem landscape, the Security Fence.
As I sped up on the downward trail through the Jerusalem Peace Forest the music on FM 98.7 changed. Drawing nearer to the Arab neighborhood of Silwan and the mixed Arab-Jewish area of Abu-Tor, there was static and a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic songs. If I turned my head to the right, toward the Arab and mixed neighborhoods, the songs were no longer in Hebrew. Rather, Arabic songs drowned out FM 98.7. If I turned my head back to the left and my Jewish neigborhood, I heard the Hebrew songs loud and clear. Only when I got out of the Peace Forest and was back on Hebron Road on the home stretch did the static disappear.
As the week progressed, I couldn't get the static in the Peace Forest out of my mind. It was there when I watched Jewish Israelis walking through the streets of Jerusalem on their way to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The ubiquitous traffic noise and horn-honking was replaced by the quiet greeting, "Shana Tova," a Good Year, and by the ancient sound, of the ram's horn or shofar, being blown in hundreds of synagogues to acknowledge the New Year.
And again when the doors of Arabs' shops in the Old City closed on Friday afternoon and the mercantile hustle-bustle of the Muslim Quarter was replaced by the thousands of Arabs who streamed by me on Bab al-Sisilia Road en route to al-Haaram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, to offer their prayers on the first Friday of Ramadan.
The lines of worshippers were so much alike, so parallel. But however close the distance, parallel lines never meet.
And that, sadly, is my perception, that there are still parallel lines here. Yes, there has been progress: fewer deaths, and the withdrawal from Gaza sponsored by a tough Israeli Prime Minister who has indeed carried out "painful concessions" as promised.
But I continue to hear disturbing things from Arab drivers who operate most of the taxis I take home from the Hebrew University's Mount Scopus campus high above the Old City and Arab East Jerusalem.
Assah told me: "The Towers came down in New York. They say it was the Muslims and bin Laden. I say, no, it was the Jews. There can never be peace with them. This is our country but we cannot trust the Jews to make peace. They will screw us. My kids can be drivers and construction workers and their kids all have computers. They say there are terrorists. Tell me, if you take my land what should I do, give you a flower?"
"I read it in the Quran this morning," Hussein, another driver, said, "as soon as the Israelis finish their security wall, we will win." When he told me that he considered Palestinian President Abu Mazen to be a thief, I asked if that meant he supported Hamas. "No," he said and, "they are bad people created by the Israelis. But, I am not worried about it, someone will come to lead us. It is in the Quran." When I hear these things I worry.
When I repeated Assah and Hussein's comments to my Jewish Israeli friends, they argued among themselves about the implications of my conversations. Anat thought the statements were made for the shock value they would have on me as a "tourist" and should not be believed, while Yehuda vehemently agreed that Assah spoke the truth about the plight of the Palestinians. His wife Myan expressed anger toward him: "The Palestinians hate Israel and will never make peace. They have a different culture and we cannot trust them." I didn't like hearing what Myan said.
And so it goes, more or less nothing changed for nine years. The static on FM 98.7 brought home to me the most obvious lesson I have learned as an outsider here during those years and the hardest lesson for Israelis and Palestinians to accept: The dream of the Peace Forest will not be realized until each side learns that its own clear message alone cannot prevail and that it must live with the static of hearing the other message.
As I approached the Jaffa Gate to the Old City to watch the march to the Temple Mount for Ramadan prayers, an Arab man in stylish Western clothes, with a cell phone on his belt, sprinted from the line of worshippers over to a car with Israeli license plates and gave its occupants a big greeting in colloquial Hebrew. My hope for this holiday season is that in the next year, more Israelis and Palestinians will step out of line, creating and living with the static that is necessary for peace.

Murray Richtel, a district court judge in Boulder from 1977 to 1996, teaches at the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Israel.

Hidden Spectrum of New Age ideas found in Sir Isaac Newton's secret journals

Sir Isaac Newton's colorful private notebooks went on display in Jerusalem this weekend, at the Jewish National library at Hebrew University. Scholarly jaws are dropping. The celebrated scientist who sussed out gravity three centuries ago reckoned that the end of the world won't come before 2060, and went on to suggest that the world may keep whirling long after that carefully calculated date. So take a deep breath and relax. We may live in interesting and perilous times, but apparently we have at least 53 more years before nuclear apocalypse or the resource-depleted planet sputters out, according to this renowned physicist.

"Newton's Secrets", archived in Israel since 1969 and bought at auction from his heirs in 1936, are on general public view for the first time. They include arcane theological calculations, based on decoding prophecies in the Book of Daniel. Puzzling over the phrase "for a time, times, and a half," Newton concluded that it signals 1,260 years would pass from the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne in 800, until the End of Days.

Yemima Ben-Menachem, a philosopher at Hebrew University, is one of the exhibit's curators and explained that not all Newton's musings are strictly rationalist: "For a long time, Newton was regarded only as a great scientist and mathematician. These writings lay in crates... but today we're in the New Age period, and scholars are more open to manuscripts like these. During the scientific revolution, religion and science were entwined with each other. Newton was also a very religious man and, as opposed to other learned people of his day, he even believed in a personal God."
He also was a keen alchemist, though this gold obsession was underplayed by many of his scholarly acolytes.

Newton decoded ancient texts to predict that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the apocalypse. The end will bring

"the ruin of the wicked nations, the end of weeping and of all troubles, the return of the Jews captivity and their setting up a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom," he wrote.