“Magic Mushroom Rabbi” Faces Jail Time as He Fights for Religious Freedom |

Brushes with the divine are often ineffable, but “Magic Mushroom Rabbi” Ben Gorelick gives gorgeous language to his encounters. “It was everything I always wanted religion to be,” Gorelick says of his second experience with psilocybin. The younger Rabbi Ben had the kind of earth-shattering revelation we all chase. “Oh,” he recalls, “this is what spirituality means. I feel it in my body, I feel it in my heart.” 

Gorelick is impressively unfazed for someone facing a felony drug charge. He is the founder of Sacred Tribe, an underground psychedelic synagogue which was daylighted by a police raid in January of this year. Cut to six months later and he’s still trying to gain a religious exemption for charges of possession with intent to manufacture or distribute a controlled substance.

Gorelick’s story has been told and respun with exaggerations and misleads. The story focuses on Rabbi Ben’s mohawk rather than his mysticism, or his small stake in a rave music promotion company rather than his steadfast commitment to thousands of years of tradition. Despite trying to paint him as a novelty, Gorelick claims he is not a mohawked raver masquerading as a Rabbi to skirt the laws and shroom up Denver –– he is a classically educated religious leader exercising a 2300-year-old pillar of Kabbalah. 

A Brief History of Entheogenic Use in Judaism 

Where the rabbinic tradition is the heady and intellectual spine of Judaism, Kabbalah is the soft heart. And some say that mushrooms have been used to facilitate access to the Kabbalah for millenia. 

But Kabbalah neither originated nor owns the role of psychedelics in Judaism. Like many of the world’s oldest religions, Judaism was informed by the ceremonial use of entheogens. Archaeological evidence reports cannabis residue at holy sites in the ancient city of Tel Arad in Israel. Additionally, scholarship points to acacia wood (containing DMT) and a cocktail of other entheogens used in Israelite incense rituals –– not to mention the kaneh-bosm (cannabis) in Christ’s holy anointing oil.

Kabbalah translates to “that which is received.” And to receive, we must be receptive. We must open ourselves to a higher reality where our perception is completely changed, and the divine within all creation –– even the ugliness — are recognized. “The notion that we should only experience ten percent of human emotions to be our higher selves is absurd,” Rabbi Ben says. “If you’re sad, go be guiltlessly, shamelessly sad.” 

The entire ethos of religion, some could argue, is to explore mystical and altered states in search of meaning. And this all-emotions-deserved-exploration experience is exactly what Gorelick facilitates. Monthly, Gorelick hosts a weekend-long retreat that creates space for people to explore their “relationship to self, community and God” using psilocybin mushrooms that the team cultivates in Denver. The organizational and spiritual heft behind the ceremonies is…