…During my trip to the Catskills, a sheet of LSD was acquired and then greedily consumed in a matter of minutes. Magic Jews were frothing at the mouth with psychedelic lust. Hershel took my arm and said he would like to speak with me alone.…
…We walked down an unlit road and looked at each other’s silhouettes. “You know, Hamilton, some people want to do this for the wrong reasons,” Hershel said. I nodded as he went on. “Sometimes they only want orgies, and sometimes we have orgies, but you must understand your intentions.” I nodded again, wondering what he was suggesting. He continued, “These are powerful places. When you bring light back into the picture, it automatically takes care of a lot of darkness, but I don’t think it’s inherently good. I think it destroys everything you’ve got. If you’re focused, you can rebuild. But not everybody is.” By that point both of us were tripping pretty hard and I was capable of understanding about as much as he was capable of making sense. Still, I think his point was something along the lines of: We are toying with powerful things here, and some of us are naive people. Therefore some of us could be permanently damaged by the stuff we’re doing now.
A few hours later one of the Magic Jews railed a line of ketamine while navigating the lake in a rowboat. He staggered onto the shore, then collapsed in the driveway, spewing vomit all over himself and dropping into a deep and unresponsive K-hole while everyone watched in horror. Eventually they got distracted, turned him onto his side, and returned to a bonfire to snort more ketamine.…
…When I first walked into the apartment on Ridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I didn’t see much because the lights were off. It was a long empty room with couches lining the walls. Empty cans and bottles everywhere. At four in the morning all that was left were the remnants of a party. Nothing unusual. A Hasidic Jew was passed out on his back, yarmulke resting on the cushion next to his head. His cell phone was wildly ringing digitized klezmer music from within his wool pants. He lay totally still. I walked toward him, wondering if he was alive. The phone cycled through four more rings before he swiped at his pocket, at which point I let out a sigh of relief.
I could hear muffled singing coming from behind a closed door down the hall. I stepped over the passed-out Hasid, making my way into the next room. Inside, it was completely dark. The air was warm with the smell of bodies. Ten, maybe fifteen, naked Jews were perched, chanting in flawless harmony with one another. They stopped briefly to greet me and then resumed. I watched them speechlessly for a moment before posing the question “What’s going on?” A voice in the dark made an incomprehensible remark about LSD, and everybody broke out in bouts of electrified laughter. And then the chanting began again. I only stayed for a few minutes, watching them in awe before I felt for the doorknob and got up to leave. Back in the other room, a Hasid I had not noticed before informed me that the party was over, the acid was gone, and I should come back the next day. I asked him when and how frequently this sort of thing happened. He responded: “Constantly.”…
…I woke up harshly the next morning to a screaming argument between two Jews. “You behave this way, you won’t get anywhere. You want to have women, don’t you, Yoni? You want to fuck a woman in her vagina?!” Yoni wore a yarmulke and was still in the gray area between Magic and Hasidic, like some sort of deeply uncomfortable psychedelic puberty, doubtful of the old way but afraid of the new one. Offended by the Christian icons, he had scratched the faces of Jesus and Mary off their respective candles the previous night. A Jew named Lavvy screamed at Yoni, “Jesus loves you even if you scratch off his face.” Yoni screamed, “NO! NO! NO! Fuck Jesus!” while he covered his ears in agony. This sort of scene was not uncommon and was done for Yoni’s own good. A seemingly insignificant lesson turned into a painful paradigm-shattering, reality-crumbling theological crisis. Lavvy, who comes from the same part of Brooklyn as Yoni, adjusted with more ease. He has made a name for himself as a burgeoning fashion designer, causing an uproar in the Orthodox blogosphere for sending models down the runway wearing outfits made from deconstructed prayer shawls, yarmulkes, and other traditional Jewish attire.…
…Two days after the party I received a phone call from one of the Jews. I expected it to be along the lines of another party invitation, but to my chagrin it was a request to attend the funeral of one of their friends. He had overdosed on cocaine the previous night. I got on the F to Parkville, Brooklyn, and then walked toward 39th Street nervously. Attending the funeral of a Hasidic Jew I had never met, without a yarmulke, wearing a purple leather puff-coat, made me generally uneasy. Outside the Shomrei Hadas Chapel, Hasids paced nervously while smoking cigarettes.…It was here that I met Aaron, one of the few in attendance who was without religiously sanctioned clothing. He began to explain things a bit.
The previous night one of his ex-Hasidic friends had been on a drug binge, taking massive doses of coke, ecstasy, and an assortment of benzos. He was fine, if extremely inebriated, when he retired to bed, falling asleep next to his girlfriend. The following morning she woke up next to a corpse.…
Remember Chulent? What you just read is a pretty good description of a significant chunk of Chulent people.
(Jennifer Blyer of the New York Times did a piece 18 months ago on Chulent that whitewashed the drug scene that is an integral part of it. What you read above is pretty much what she she knew – but did not report. Blyer herself was (and may still be) a regular Chulent attendee.)
These "magic Jews" come from Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Borough Park and Monsey. They think they're in touch with God, that they've returned to the roots of hasidism. The Ba'al Shem Tov, one has remarked, would find them to be very holy people.
I doubt it.
Magic Jews- From Manischewitz To Mescaline.pdf
[Hat Tip: Ben Atlas.]