Life on the Dead Sea, Part 1

Like any kid, I dreamed of adventure. The flames of my desire for it were fanned by the many daring and amusing tales I'd hear from the well-traveled guests at my Friday night dinner table. In a Jewish household, Friday night through Saturday night is a mini-holiday. We’d dress up in our best clothes to greet the sacred day and refrain from even speaking about matters of the week. Electronics were hidden in drawers and floors were cleaned until spotless in preparation for the sabbath queen. Guests were welcomed in and songs were sung about the angels that accompanied them. My family’s Friday night dinner tables were full of guests from all walks of life—my parents worked in Jewish outreach, which meant we spent a lot of time and effort inviting Jews from less religious or even secular social circles to our orthodox home with the aim of educating them about the true Torah path, true Jewish food—and perhaps they’ll meet someone nice, a true Jewish spouse, so that the spiritual holocaust of intermarriage might be avoided?

We located guests in all manner of ways. Sometimes we’d go to the mall in search of a very specific kind of person- an Israeli kiosk salesman. There are a lot of these. Definitely more than you’d think. Someone in the kiosk industry realized that if you want to sell products to Americans out of a kiosk in the middle of a mall, the best, most brazen, confident, unrelenting, savvy salesmen in the world were available in the form of young Israelis, fresh out of the military service, who are willing to do their time in the malls so they could experience the thrilling sights and sounds of the United States of America and Beyond. But what those Israelis don’t know, is that another kind of salesmen—spiritual salesmen, employed by God, subcontracted through a faithful and white-bearded servant, was selling a product to them, one with the potential to change their lives far more than the dead sea salt face scrubs they peddled out in the malls of America could.

The Judaism of my childhood home was a relatively nice one. Warm challah on a Friday night served with amazing dips, the kind an Israeli wouldn’t expect to find in the pacific northwest. Hummus to die for, cloudy baba ganoush, spicy chatzilim. Songs, sung with no regard for talent but much regard for the soul, and for the God the lyrics focused on. A few words of wisdom here and there, but almost nothing that could be accused of being preachy. For a secular Israeli thousands of miles away from home, a bit of orthodoxy was no problem, especially with such good food on the table. The warm glow of candles becomes the object of focus- so warm, and so glowy, you might not notice that my mother’s hair was covered by a wig made of another woman's hair- a mandated requirement for an aishes chayil, a religious woman of valor. We sang a song with the same name (Aishes Chayil) every Friday night, we’d smile at her and say things like “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

But that Judaism is not the only Judaism. There are as many Judaisms as there are Jews, one could say, but one could also say that some of them have qualities that could be described as abusive, sinister, and rotten. That's what I'm saying. When I was 13 years old, I was sent away from home to become steeped in that kind of Judaism. To learn it, to live it, to love it. I gave it my best shot. I'd rather be shot than do it again.

On the first day of rabbinical school, or yeshiva, which means sitting- which is most of what we did, the dean of the school gave us a book about repentance. He didn’t have to say we had sinned- we already knew. The gates of repentance outlined exactly how to correct our errors. Instructions like ‘constantly place the severity of your punishments before you’ and ‘increase worry’, ‘wallow in shame’ filled its pages. For context, the book was written by a 12th century rabbi who felt he needed to repent, because he had ordered the books of another rabbi, Maimonides, to be burnt, for being ‘anti-religious’. Maimonides had attempted to reconcile reason and faith, and this angered Rabbi Yonah deeply. Later, he came to regret it. His actions led to a lot of strife, including a lot of Jewish children being kidnapped, due to the book being branded as anti-Christian, for example. Yonah later felt bad and so he wrote this book. It was essentially taking what any mental health professional worth their salt (admittedly, not that many are) would define as mental health, and inverting it.

I took it very, very seriously. Taking things seriously is a lot easier as a kid when you are on adult-horse-sized amphetamine doses, which I was prescribed to help aid in the 7 years of sitting I had before me. I memorized the steps, took them to heart, placed them before me constantly. It tightly coiled, and then unraveled me. Religion and amphetamines are similar in that the first few doses can feel amazing- life becomes full of life, and meaning is literally everywhere you look. But too much of it will unravel your psyche in horrifying ways. Put both together, in a body that hasn’t yet completed puberty, but has inherited generations worth of cultural trauma, and you get the kind of sustained, repeated mental health crises that make for interesting writing a decade later. In my case, the kind of crisis that eventually explodes in a geyser of counter-will that ends up with you half-naked on acid in a hippie commune with a spliff behind each ear and a deep steadfast desire to violate every rule you once devoted your life to obey. One can only delay the call to adventure for so long.

In yeshivah, I sat on the neck of the soft animal of my body all day as it squirmed toward natural resources it evolved to depend on and love over billions of years. All-day, every day, and all night, even in my most private moments, I reached below my legs and every time any impulse toward the wide-open fields threatened my studies, I squeezed it as tight as I could so that God would not kill me. This is barely a metaphor.

Almost ten hours a day of Talmudic study. On really good days, past a dozen. For the entirety of my teenage years, I was striving toward an ideal that never fully made sense to me. Wallowing in guilt, drowning in shame, straining under infinite, divine pressure, believing that the best way to live would be to keep doing that until I died, and hating myself for dreading it. Judging myself for dreaming of adventure, of girls, of faraway places, and prohibited chemicals. Of dead seas and lively islands. Of drugs, dancing, and relaxing not for the sake of recharging, but simply because that's what I wanted to do.

I tried every version of Judaism offered, and even invented my own kind, but I am just not the right kind of consumer for it. It turns out I am a good fit for dead sea products, though. Not face scrubs, but the hot springs and the mystical sunsets. The faint singing and the alien landscapes, the multicolored mineral deposits, and crystallizing salt structures. The humming cliff faces and the heaviest, still nights. There are no kiosks at the dead sea, but intricately crafted little structures called zulas, stick and stone shelters packed with gigantic human energy.

My original reason for going to Israel was not to double-dose acid in the lowest place on earth. It was to debate rabbis. The very same rabbis who had introduced my parents to orthodoxy and its many truth claims. I was nearing the end of my faith crisis and this was the hail mary, or the hail Moses, if you will. To be perfectly honest, I was already fairly convinced that Yahweh and Elohim and El were separate gods, that foreskins have just as much a right to exist as forehead skin, and that witches could indeed, be suffered to live. But I needed to be sure.

I had a good amount of money in my bank account, some of which was leftover bar-mitzvah money, and most of which I earned as a grape juice rabbi in eastern Washington. By the time I had finished talking, debating, dialoguing, and arguing with the rabbis, most of the money was gone. I had spent all this time rejecting the paths behind me, and I began craving again the shining path ahead of me; the real reason I was leaving wasn't just because the Torah ways to experience God were so unhelpful, but because far more direct methods were now available to me. The biggest adventure I could think of, the only one I could think of: go to the dead sea, and do what I had been dreaming of for several years: trip balls in nature.

My friend Alex suggested Metzoke Dragot- and told me he’d be willing to trip sit me, given his extensive psychedelic experience (which consisted of having done mushrooms exactly once several years prior on a camping trip) .

We packed our bags and caught a bus south to the sea.

We were in Metsokeh.

I’ve written and rewritten a description of Metzoke Dragot, this crazy sliver of the Dead Sea coast, dozens of times since I was there. I keep scrapping them for the same reason I’ve thrown out numerous drafts of all my trip reports: Language, as Mckenna said, slides off these experiences like water off the back of a whale.

First time camping. First time tripping. First time seeing naked human bodies. First time being naked myself, in the outdoors. First time waking up in the sand with nothing above me but the open sky, with no idea when I’d return to ‘Babylon’ (the term the local hippies used to refer to civilization). It was the first time I realized I could curate moments that would change my life.

Our arrival was a truly ludicrous sight to behold. Two 20-year-old kids dragging luggage designed for airport floors to the sand in the lowest place on earth, falling over ourselves and staring wide-eyed at sights we had never dreamed of seeing. I was so ready.

The mushrooms were in my body before we had set up camp. I imagined them working their way through my gut and into my mind as one of the first naked human beings I had ever seen exited a tent a few dozen feet from us. She walked directly up to me, wearing nothing but a hair tie and a genuine smile. She was beautiful. She told me she was a musician from France, and I told her I had never been camping before and had just ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. She lit up and immediately embraced me. Her blessing began before we broke the embrace: “I wish you a trip of infinite beauty, ” a sentence that in any other circumstance may have elicited an eye roll from me, had it not been said with such complete earnestness.

Until then, most blessings that came my way usually originated from rabbis and were deeply passive-aggressive ways of pointing out one’s flaws in public. This was not that kind of blessing. For starters, this blessing was almost immediately manifested into reality. Sitting next to Alex on the beach, staring out into the dead sea, I felt as if someone had gently removed the top of my head. I could see from the horizon in front of me, to the horizon behind me, from Jordan to Israel, and every glorious thing in between. When the stars came out I was treated to an unrivaled, dazzling display of the cosmos. Throughout the night, our fire was visited by dogs, hippies, Nanachs (like hippies but ultra-orthodox), and hallucinations. It became increasingly obvious to me as the night unfolded that things were only going to get more intense, more absurd, more alive and I was profoundly okay with that.

We left the next morning, and I returned to the beach the day after. I couldn’t stay away. A man I met there, who would later become a close friend, shook his head slowly when I told him I was leaving. “Foolish,” he said. “That's foolish”. I knew he was right, so I was back within a week. I rolled a fistful of spliffs, bought some apples and nuts, and got back on the bus to the desert.

I stayed for another week or so. It was one of the best weeks of my life. Hippies and sunsets. Spliffs and songs. Moonrises and deep conversations. Most of us slept and lived in little zulas, built with and in the landscape, each one with its own unique character and functions. It was life lived in a way I had never witnessed: for its own sake, with no distinct goal in mind. Not mere survival, but still refreshingly primal. Not outdated, but deliciously ancient. I wish someone had prescribed a few days of semi-naked fireside meals to me earlier. It was such a heady mix of experiences; I got bit by a German Shepherd at one point, which was some foreshadowing to the night when her owner, a belly dancer whose personality swung as suddenly and effortlessly as her hips, climbed into my tent and on top of me while threatening to kill my friend, who was asleep in a hammock a few dozen feet away. I ran out of food but survived on the seemingly infinite generosity of hippies. The best of such meals was served to me by a retired, bearded ex-boxer, with kind eyes and a stained white beard who would start every morning by walking the length of the shore while playing a homemade Berimbau.

My buddy and I helped a group of Arabs who had arrived blasting psytrance out of a Dodge Ram pickup (a rarity in Israel- the pickup, not the psytrance) and got its wheels stuck in the salty mud, in return for the strongest cup of coffee I have ever ingested. We talked for hours in the sand, playing catch with half-filled water bottles, bathing in hot springs, floating in the weird buoyant water of the dead sea. Those are just anecdotes, though; the real highlights were ineffably peaceful moments spent staring into campfires, blowing smoke at the naked cosmos at night, and swimming in hidden freshwater pools beyond the salt flats.

I lived. I really fucking lived the shit out of that week on the Dead Sea. After a week, I was, for the first time, physically in sync with the rhythms of nature. Circadian, lunar, what have you- I woke up and fell asleep at what felt like the perfect time. The salt and sand worked their way into my brain. This combined with the motions of my body, were causing friction just strong enough to scrape away the plaque of a life lived for someone else.

I was in Metsokeh.

We were in Metsokeh.