Altered States, Sacred Questions: Reflections from the 2026 Dr. Fritz A. Bamberger Memorial Lecture

In 1930s Germany, with Adolf Hitler in power and Jewish students all over the country expelled from public institutions, Dr. Fritz A Bamberger did something extraordinary: he helped establish new types of Jewish schools and educational innovations to make up for the education that had been ripped away.

Nearly 100 years later, and in a different country with a different set of needs, his legacy continues in the form of the Dr. Fritz A. Bamberger Memorial Lecture. This annual lecture series honors Bamberger and uplifts scholars and experts across fields and generations to introduce new avenues of study to the Hebrew Union College community.

This year's lecture, hosted by Dr. Jessica Roda, was about psychedelics.

Roda's credentials are both impressive and expansive: as an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist trained in Europe and North America, her research explores the intersections of music, religion, cultural heritage, gender, health, and media. She's currently the Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Her recent talk at Hebrew Union College felt like listening to both an ethnographer's travelogue and a bedside conversation about faith, pain, and repair. Titled "Sacred Drugs", the lecture dove into a surprising corner of Jewish life: psychedelic and plant-medicine practices among Haredi Jews, not as a sensational headline, but as a lived reality.

At the heart of her talk was Chaim's story, a moving account of abuse, trauma, and slow work of healing. Therapy helped open a door for him, but it was ayahuasca and other plant-medicine ceremonies that pushed him forward and accelerated a shift: visions of the Earth from above, a sense of connection, and waves of images that helped him make sense of how his life had been pulled apart.

Roda stresses that these experiences rarely produce dramatic breakaways from communities. Instead, they create spaces for negotiation, where people learn to hold belonging and doubt all at once. "Psychedelics," she says, "emerge here as a tool to reframe existence and trauma, even among those who are expected to already find answers within their religious texts and belief, yet continue to seek [them] elsewhere."

Nevertheless, Roda doesn't romanticize the scene - during a later Q&A with College President Andrew Rehfeld, Ph.D., she flags safety concerns, potential overuse, and cultural appropriation - but she also shows how these practices answer needs that traditional institutions sometimes fail to meet.

What lingers after Roda's lecture is a simple yet long-standing question: How do communities hold tradition and transformation at the same time? Her work doesn't solve that puzzle, but it does make the conversation urgent, humane, and impossible to ignore.

Watch the full 2026 Bamberger Memorial Lecture below: