Death, LSD and Beyond: Timothy Leary, Reb Zalman Schacter and Reb Shlomo Carlebach

The era of the sixties hippie revolution brought about a drastic change and evolution in American culture and its` relation to the experience of death. In 1974, Philippe Ariès’, a French historian, published his Western Attitudes Toward Death, which, based on lectures at John Hopkins University, showed how Western culture had evolved a notion of "forbidden death" in which death, previously accepted and even celebrated, had become shameful, forbidden and fearful.

Research conducted by neurologists and psychiatrists in the 1950`s and 1960`s, discovered that psychedelic drugs possessed the ability to create a sense of altered consciousness which reduced the death angst. In 1960, Timothy Leary and his colleagues at Harvard University began to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects. As part of the cultural revolution of the sixties, which rebelled against Western culture and adopted Eastern cultures and spiritual tendencies, Leary co-authored a book named The Psychedelic Experience based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead – that described a "journey to new realms of consciousness."

Keen to the evolving subject at the time, Zalman Schacter and Shlomo Carlebach, two rabbis actively involved with the hippie scene in San Francisco, developed a parallel Jewish discourse on the Hasidic Art of Dying, corresponding to the Eastern cultures and traditions, and even held a Farbregen (Hasidic Gathering) together on the subject. Carlebach further interpreted the spiritual negative effects of death encounters as a post-holocaust historical interpretation of the generation gap and the reason that Eastern spirituality had become popular.