Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground

by Madison Margolin

Through the perspective of having grown up among "HinJews" in the Ram Dass community and cannabis legalization movement, journalist Madison Margolin takes the reader on a journey inside New York's Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground, reconciling her roots, tackling ancestral Jewish trauma, and finding intersectionality between the Jewish and psychedelic experience.

Exile and Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism. It's a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic.

Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison Margolin prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation, facing different issues than those Ram Dass faced as a generally well-to-do boomer. In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers practices that help us integrate our psychedelic experiences in mundane life, as well as in the context of our roots and religious identities.

This book is for anyone looking to feel spiritually kindled, to make peace with where they come from, and to reconcile seemingly disparate experiences of spirituality and psychedelics, with traditional religion.

229 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 7, 2023

Reviews

[Noah Eckstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. Memoir meets new-new journalism. Margolin’s writing is stellar and the stories are fascinating!

[Kian Lavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

heavily biased because i grew up with the author and love her dearly. but i found this a fascinating memoir and retelling of madison’s life. not especially because i was around for vignettes in and out of chapters of the story, in the periphery of her life. makes for a wild ride to hear your friend’s life story in book form.

madison is a brilliant journalist, and as a fellow jew with similar political leanings and lifestyles, loved hearing how she came into her own with her jewish ancestry and future. lots of enlightening stories about hasidish culture, the many strains of jews that we’ve encountered in our lifetime, and the ways that all things intersect with spirituality if you care to look long enough.

she makes gonzo journalism feel like it should be the only type of journalism — proud of our jewish generations hunter s. thompson.

mostly, as a mizrahi jew, i appreciated the yiddish glossary in the back 😹

[Des Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent exploration of Judaism and the psychedelic experience. Madison's life story is fascinating, and I just love hearing people's tales of how they found light through the darkness and confusion of early adulthood. It's not a primer for psychedelic Judaism, nor does it offer any new insight to psychedelic usage and practice, but it does serve as a very specific story of those two things coming together, and how so many of our actions, traditions and behaviors can intersect at the space of awareness and prayer.

I'm encouraged to get some friends together, host a meal, tell some stories and seek G-d in each other.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn’t for me. I usually find other people’s description of their spirituality fascinating.

[Penni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Familiar, yet foreign. I felt like Margolin was often describing my own surroundings only in middle earth.

(The authentic little davkas and bichlals made me roll my eyes just a bit)

So much bullshit and so much beauty.

Would love to meet the author.

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating read!

This book reads like a thriller! It’s a fascinating book on various elements of the psychedelic and chasidisha world! I learned a lot from it and have gained a lot of insight’s and integration from this book!

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ram Dass has been my spiritual teacher since 1973, and I was born into a Jewish household. I have also used various chemicals to explore consciousness when I was younger. So when I saw there was a book about Ram Dass, Judaism, and psychedelics I was intrigued. I had no idea the rabbit hole I would fall into reading this book!

I didn't even know there was a "Jewish psychedelic underground". I knew a bit about the author's father, as he has had a high-profile career as a cannabis lawyer and we share the same spiritual teachers. For me, Jewishness has always been a turn-off. It felt dry, humorless, and dogmatic. My family followed traditions with no belief behind the rituals they performed. My atheist father read what he considered fairytales from the Torah on the bima during High Holidays, yet demanded I be present to hear it and "sit like a mensch".

At 17, I read Ram Dass and his words articulated my own inner truth; it was like coming home. When he said he, too, was turned off by his Jewish heritage, and felt "Jewish on my parents' side" I could say the same.

This author comes from a Jewish family that is steeped in counterculture awareness. Ram Dass, Hinduism, and Buddhism were everpresent in her home growing up. Her parents were not strangers to psychedelics. She takes the tenets from Ram Dass and his guru Mahara-ji and psychedelics. She became interested in exploring her Jewish identity beyond the secular- towards the mystical aspects of the original thought. It turns out all the religions have much in common.

Younger Jews , many of whom come from OG counterculture families, have explored their Jewishness in an atmosphere of celebration, meditation, ecstasy, and psychedelic drugs. They have created communities across the globe and settled in New York and Israel. They use psychedelics not available to the Baby Boomers, and learn much from the explorations.

The author does a seamless job of integrating herself in her own memoir with the overlapping teachings of Ram Dass, Judaism, and psychedelics. I sure did learn a lot from reading it.

Thanks to the author for the eARC,

[Edy · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I’ve always wondered why that is, why someone’s mental disturbance perturbs us more than, say, the sight of someone in physical pain. Perhaps because we all have the capacity to lose our minds. And lord knows when or how it’ll happen, which drugs will instigate it.”

“Too much light, he told me, could shatter one’s vessel- his point being that sober, daily practices, like prayer and keeping kosher, always trumped the psychedelic shortcut to illumination. A steady religious discipline in the end offers more light than receiving it all in a heavy dose that could be too much to handle.”

“More often than not, I’m mostly just self-conscious of not having a stronger reaction than I do.”

[Sherri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Madison has done a wonderful job of entertaining the reader, inviting the reader into her Hinjew “hippie” yet in many ways very traditional and mainstream Jewish upbringing, while also delivering background information in chassidic and Jewish spiritual thought woven together in a touching and oftentimes humorous style that is relatable to both the boomer and millennial generation and those in between. A must read for Jewish and non-Jewish soul searchers alike.

[Daniel Warden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful! Well written, accessible and inspiring, and very relatable in many ways. Highly recommended!