The Jew in the Phish

But if you aren’t here, you will say that the answer is incorrect.

You will say there is no “here.” You will say there is no “answer.” You will say there is no knowable king. You will say that to say otherwise is to blaspheme. You will say that joy is self-indulgence. You will say that community is orgy. You will say that worship is sin. You will say that dark is light and without is within.

You will say a lot of things, and you will make a lot of noise and your anger at such a self-indulgent orgy of devil-worshiping sin will be full of holy fiery righteous indignation.

You will interview the disenchanted dissidents, the broken angels and the recovering addicts. You will write a book based on these interviews. The book will claim to defend all that is good and decent and moral. The book will say that all that is good and decent and moral has been lost and forgotten. The book will be an impassioned plea. It will speak to all who are happy and free and make them realize that their happiness and their freedom are faint wisps: feelings, delusions, illusions, moments—nothing more and nothing less than sin. Heresy. Idol worship. Eternal damnation. The End.

Or maybe you won’t write this book because such a book already exists. In Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandment in America, journalist-cum-theologian Chris Hedges sets up a neat little argument for why Americans have descended into the pits of hell: Ten chapters, 10 commandments, 10 true stories of sin.

For the sin of idol worship, Hedges pokes his golden finger square in the chest of Phish—the band, the fans and the culture. He quotes a couple former Phunky Bitches, women who gave up everything for a “road toward spiritual obliteration, a road that led them away from life, a road that led them toward nothingness, the final essence of death.”

Says one of them, “For us it is like going to synagogue or church.”

Says another, “The band takes over a crowd. They throw everyone into a fury. You cannot move or shake quickly enough.”

And yet another, “There are parts of their music that can be a spiritual experience, but at the same time it can be very easy to make that experience idolatrous. It can remove you from the real world. It can become a cult.”

In this conception, the cult is phandom and the manipulative cult leaders are none other than Page, Jon, Mike and Trey. To Hedges, Mike Gordon does not euphemistically “drop bass bombs” and Fishman is not the quintessential comedic troll. To Hedges, Phish are literally the Four Horseman. OK. Maybe he wouldn’t go that far. The Four Horseman work for the white-bearded man upstairs, while Phish, in this conception, work for no one but themselves. They are, Hedges writes, “False prophets, who say they can harness the power of God for us, lead us away from the worship of God into the corrosive idolatry of self-worship.”

Idols? False prophets? God harnessers? Really?

I’m not up on Christian theology, by any means, at all. But those 10 Commandments are my commandants, Phish plays music that speaks to my heart and, in this conception, I am, like other Jews who have also fallen into the perceived trap, a part of the Phish cult, too.

Aish.com writer Jenny Hazan interviewed American-Phishhead-turned-Israeli-soldier David Sussman about his time skipping through the lily fields with the band. Sussman stares fondly back on that part of his life, but sees only a period of youthful abandon:

“Sometimes when I look back at my Phish days, I feel like I wasted time. There was a lot of great energy there that never really went anywhere, never accomplished anything. There would be this explosion of energy at concerts, but they always ended flat. With Judaism, I feel like I’ve tapped into something real, long-lasting, even infinite. Living in Israel as a religious Jew provides a framework with boundaries to contain that energy, and now I feel I am investing my energy much more wisely, toward a real greater good, toward ‘tikkun olam’, trying to truly repair the world.”

That explosion of energy is something that Chris Hedges pointed out in his declamation. About Phish’s fans, he said, “They sought, over and over, what the band, what all idols cannot give: permanent rather than transitory meaning. A life dedicated to transitory happiness is poisonous and impossible to maintain.”

Wait. What? Fans who repeatedly sought peak experiences, tried to glean wisdom from such highs and even wished for those experiences to become long-lasting reality, those fans were merely “dedicated to transitory happiness”? That sounds like a contradiction in terms, or, at worst, a cop out. Explosion of energy, mind expansion, dveikut, psychedelia, loss of ego, peak experience: These are all the same thing: goals of the spiritual endeavor.

Jay Michaelson, founding editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture and a scholar at Hebrew University, doesn’t mind a little transitory happiness. In an article for Zeek about Jewish meditation he writes, “These peak experiences are really nourishing. They show us that there is far, far more to this miracle of life than what we ordinarily experience. They give us a glimpse of possibility, of Light.”

Such experiences show the seeker that his search is not in vain, pushing him or her or them further along the path, in obvious and subtle ways. But there is always a but.

“Unfortunately, peak experiences tend not to last,” Michaelson went on. “You can’t chase kicks forever.”

Which is why such a high, or “showing up,” as he puts it, is a “beginning, not an ending.” Reach the same high repeatedly and the seeker is pushed, sooner or later, to the constant realization of divine immanence. Which is where meditation, contemplation and raw effort come in. Such focus aims to normalize the peak experience. Like launching a rocket into the sky, but instead of briefly leaving the atmosphere and falling just as fast back to earth, the rocket pushes through the atmosphere, reaches zero gravity and then everything seemingly stops and just is. There is time then to watch the wonder, to watch with wonder.

Let’s be clear: Phish is a band of musicians who play improvisational psychedelic rock music. The members met in college, where they studied music and film and philosophy and other things. They did drugs. A couple of them are Jews. The other two are, I don’t know, staam dudes. Phish played their music in small bars. They practiced a lot. They worked real hard. They played in small theaters. They practiced a lot. They worked real hard. They sold out this country’s most prominent arenas. They toured Europe and Japan. They did drugs. They partied. They played music. They faced demons. They started families. They broke up. They got back together.

They play music and they play it well. This is why they have fans. Those fans sometimes take drugs. Sometimes those fans are irresponsible. Some of them don’t lead healthy lives. Some of them are bad people. But people are people. People are responsible for themselves.

Can’t get a glimpse of ecstasy brought to you by four guys who are really good at what they do—which is play music—without losing your shit, leaving your family, getting addicted to drugs and aimlessness and your self? Well, I would say you have some growing up to do.

Don’t blame Phish. Don’t blame the music. Don’t blame the culture. You are a part of that culture. Take responsibility for it. Take responsibility for yourself. Phish is a band that plays psychedelic rock music. They tour the United States of America, a country of freedom and opportunity that is often addicted to excess. The members of Phish are not prophets any more than Chris Hedges is a prophet or Jesus Christ was a prophet or you are a prophet or I am a prophet. That is to say, they are people with the same infinite potential of all other people.  Though Phish, maybe, has realized more of that potential. They work real hard. They practice a lot. They play music.

As Trey said:

“Music can’t lie — it really is the universal language. People can hear your intent. If you intent is to sell records and make money, people will hear that, and it blackens the music. That’s why the live thing has been so exciting, and so spiritual for us. Once the fans are in the room, there’s nothing we can do on-stage that will bring us any more monetary gain. So we’re then free to explore and celebrate the spiritual aspect of the music.”

OK. Fine. Only a cult member would defend the cult with the cult leader’s words. Only an idol worshiper would let the idol speak for itself. I hear that. But these people who say that once they ran from life and now they live life, these people imagine that life can be segmented into the times of mistake making and the times of answer knowing and that the former segments of life were not life in the way that the latter segments are life. They imagine that their definitions of happiness and spirituality and community and God and evil and good are now definitions of truth while their old definitions of such things were misguided, dishonest, blasphemous heresies—a result of stupid, reckless, Godless youth. Oh! but they were so much younger then; they’re older than that now.

An oft-mentioned story from the Talmud (Hagiga 14b), with additional details from the Zohar (I, 26b): Four people entered paradise, an orchard. They were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Ben Avuyah and Rabbi Akiva. Before entering, Rabbi Akiva spoke to them, saying, “When you come to the place of the shining marble plates, do not say: ‘Water, water!’ For it is written: ‘He who tells lies shall not tarry in my sight.’”

Well, so, the rabbis entered the orchard, and they came to the place of the shining marble plates that probably looked a lot like water and Ben Azzai gazed and died, Ben Zoma gazed and was burned and Ben Abuyah became Aher, The Other One, a heretic. Only Rabbi Akiva entered and left in peace.

Shining marble plates are shining marble plates. Water is water. Words are words. Feelings are feelings. Divisions are divisions. Definitions are definitions. God is God. But “God” is by no means God.

As Professor Matt writes in The Essential Kabbalah, “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name ‘God’—these, too, are definitions.”

Rabbi Akiva knew that the shining marble plates were unique shining marble plates and he knew that they were not unique shining marble plates. He did not seek to define. He came and went in peace.

But Akiva was a disciplined mystic, a seasoned practitioner of meditation. The story about entering the orchard is, in part, a metaphor for mystical study and for serious meditation. He came and went in peace because he was worthy to do so. But the others were unworthy?

Gershom Scholem translated an account of Ma’aseh Merkavah, or descending the Divine Chariot — also variously known as the Hekhalot texts or descriptions of the palace of the eternal king or entrance into the orchard — in his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

“But if one was unworthy to see the King in his beauty, the angels at the gates disturbed his sense and confused him. And when they said to him: ‘Come in,’ he entered, and instantly they pressed him and threw him into the fiery lava stream. And as the gate of the sixth palace it seemed as thought hundreds of thousands and millions of waves of water stormed against him, and yet there was not a drop of water, only the ethereal glitter of the marble plates with which the palace was tessellated. But he was standing in front of the angels and when he asked: ‘What is the meaning of these waters,’ they began to stone him and said: ‘Wretch, do you not see it with your own eyes? Are you perhaps a descendant of those who kissed the Golden Calf, and are you unworthy to see the King in his beauty?’…And he does not go until they strike his head with iron bars and wound him. And this shall be a sign for all times that no one shall err at the gate of the sixth palace and see the ethereal glitter of the plates and ask about them and take them for water, that he may not endanger himself.”

Many people get lost at the top of the mountain. The path up is obvious. Descent is another thing. Ascending and descending and ascending and descending—acting like an angel can be disorienting. But even Moses eventually had to come down. For the seeker can easily become addicted to the seeking and forget to find anything at all. The definer can easily forget that each definition is an interpretation of the thing and not the thing itself.

Or, as the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, once told his disciples, as recounted in Elie Weisel’s Souls on Fire, “Imagine a palace with an infinite number of doors. In front of every door the visitor finds a treasure. Satisfied, he feels no urge to continue. Yet, at the end of the hallways, the king is waiting to receive those among his subjects who think of him rather than of the treasure.”

Thus, The Golden Phish are idols only insomuch as we call them idols. And if we call them so, then every unsavory act – every modicum of morality lost in the context of a Phish concert or a Phish tour or a blinded-by-Phish world – can be attributed to the seeming source of that world (i.e. Phish) rather than to the fact that life is full of both mistake making and question asking, climbing and falling and climbing again, and that that is OK. Meanwhile, the source of the source of that world, of all worlds, sits silently by, indefinable, infinite and unfathomable, waiting.

And, like, I get it. Saying the “source of sources” instead of saying “God” does not a mystic truth-bearer make. And it does not get me out of defining. “Source of sources” is a definition. But, Professor Matt goes on, “Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition—these, too, would engender heresy.”

Definition is the plight of language, and heresy is the plight of question asking. So why define Phish as that which is worshiped—an idol? From fear of being heretical? Rav Kook teaches, according to Matt, that “Even heresy plays a spiritual role, challenging us to continually expand our concept of God.” So, instead of limiting faith with fear — or worse, confusing faith with fear — and eternally pointing an accusatory finger, why not define Phish as that which serves, ultimately, only to facilitate worship—a vessel?

Why not? If all that this band engenders—which undeniably includes joy and grandeur and goodness as much as it includes self-absorption and addiction and darkness—can be defined as profane, wouldn’t it instead be better to look at Phish in terms of that which is sacred? Phish is world unto itself, and to look at such a world in terms of blinding light rather than empty darkness, that’s a tikkun if I’ve ever seen one.

Uplift your eyes, your language and your definitions. Uplift for the sake of uplifting. There are idols, sure. But do not say “idol, idol.” The stream flows—through idols and through everything else that exists. Denying that it flows or acknowledging that it flows does not change the fact that it flows. Let it flow or do not let it flow. Either way, it flows. And that is good.