In our very

Gut

Hello Family and Friends,

(Susan Alexandra’s Seder. Love her brand’s more is more style )

It’s been a little while. I dove into Pesach and family, as many of you have. I am in the ABIDE coffee shop two minutes from the children’s school. It’s Friday when the air is electric with Pre-Shabbat vibes.

As we cleaned for Pesach, it occurred to me that when we think about removing all leavened, we consider the starter— the leavening agents. Since we remove the leavened and perhaps start with an entirely new starter, we are creating a new personality. There is a direct gut-brain connection. The quality of fermentation that we take in, the amount of probiotic foods we eat, affect our mood and affect.

Zushe came home for shul saying that the rabbi spoke about this topic. He raised the question if sourdough starter can be “sold” with the other to be retrieved after the eight days. The deliberation would be if you can sell something in this way, when you have vested interest in not losing it. It is not like the rest of our chametz food, when you will buy back primarily the money value of your stash. Here, and with aged wine, you care about that particular product. Anyway, this is what I understood from what I heard.

The Rabbi later gave a talk about this dilemma and in the course of his exposition, he said that Pesach was indeed a national rebirth.

My friend mentioned as we were chatting that it is hard not to slide into OCD in cleaning for Pesach. I couldn’t agree more. It is hard to shift into the Pesach mindset from the regular one we have. All of the sudden we regard our kitchens and homes on a microscopic level. Yet, if we think about leaven— and I think about it on a spore level— then it is somewhat easier to assimilate this sudden onset of particular attention.

When I cleaned, and the physical investment can be grueling, I tried to think about the fresh start I was giving my family. There wasn’t going to be a crumb or any residue of the previous year’s bread. There were going to be a few levels of restrictions as we quarantined the old us and let them go. Instead, we will line our counters and then line them again and cook from there.

This feeling intensified when we started baking bread again. I am not big on bread, as I try to be gluten-free. But post-Pesach, with a fresh start in an immaculate kitchen, I tried to think about the kind of challah I would want to serve my family. I realized that I didn’t feel good about the store-bought dough we bought to shape the loaves. Too many chemicals and preservatives. I wanted to bake from scratch. I knew it was doable and ordered good flour and yeast. Still, I hadn’t made challah in over ten years. It didn’t fit into my life. But Friday afternoon came, and I couldn’t push off the task any longer.

I frantically searched for a challah recipe and quickly recalled that Abba bought us the best cookbook possible for this situation. I opened to the very beginning, and read the words, “The Mitzvah of Challah”. I was happy to see that there were numerous graphs to explain the amount of flour in the dough that would require taking a portion for G-d and the correct blessing. My dough didn’t meet the threshold.

I was overcome with emotion. Indeed flour, water, and yeast became a tender then supple dough. We hid the key in one of the braided loaves. At the same time, I mixed flour and water in equal parts in a jar, to begin a sourdough starter. My eventual goal (of the past few years) is to make spelt sourdough which I could safely eat.

As I kneaded the dough and watched my boys playing in the backyard, I realized that the experience of baking bread for my family engendered the emotion, “I am enough”. For my family, “I am enough”. I do my best to show up for them. I am not the best mother or wife, but I was put in the place that I am and can feed them to the best of my ability.

I am telling you, making that dough, felt like getting married! What a trip.

The full import of the no-leavened/leavened contrast, the intensity of the culinary restrictions and precautions and the release of indulging in our regular, human consumption was most clear the Shabbat after.

I read an article about the medicinal use of psychedelic drugs in the process of clinical trials. The benefits resonated with the above experience:

The article introduces two doctors working to get LSD and psilocybin approved for use therapeutically and then interviews them.

One line jumped out at me: Dr. Rachel Yehuda says, “What we are most excited about is the potential application of psychedelics to intergenerational trauma.”

The idea of Leaving Egypt came to mind.

Here is why these substances work— (they are only taken once or twice with intense psychotherapy before, during, and after to make sense of the experience.)

Is there a single theory to explain why psychedelics have such a strong effect on the brain?

Dr. [Rachel] Yehuda, [director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai]: There a lot of theories. One reason psychedulics appear to have such a strong effect is that they occasion an experience of insight and self-compassion, so that the person with these conditions can see things in a different way and perhaps develop a sense of kindness towards himself that is conducive to change.

Dr. Hutson [director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances and professor in the School of Pharmacy]: You can argue that the psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD are disruptors of conscious thought, which allow us to consider other possibilities that our consciousness typically doesn’t allow us to. It seems that the drugs enable parts of the brain to communicate with each other better and more diffusely than is normally the case. We can see with MRI and EEG scans that the brain is talking to itself much more widely than is usual.

He goes on to say that they are studying if you need to remember the experience in order to derive the benefits…

Oh my! This is the exact feeling that I had after Pesach. I felt like my brain was open to new patterns of thought. Out with the old…

Was it the dietary reset? The holiday with family? The five days almost consecutively with no phones or Internet?

To be continued! Weigh in if you have thoughts!

❤️Shabbat Shalom!

The Cherry blossoms peaked over the holiday, this was the day after. No filter.