Dunh-nuh. Dun-nuh.

Two notes send shivers up spines.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

Up spines and out of mouths.

Dunh-nuh. Dun-nuh.

More war-cry than shout.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

Thousands chant evil’s name.

Dunh-nuh. Dun-nuh.

A challenge, a scream.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

Up every vertebra, it enters the brain.

Dunh-nuh. Dunh-nuh.

A modern story atop ancient themes.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

A no-good, rotten, sefer-stealing king.

Shock, awe, hoarse-voiced shame — it wasn’t always this way. There once was a land of peaceful forest, frothing river, golden pasture and mystical mountain. A certain happy bunch of people lived there. Lizards, they were called. Lizards, they called themselves. And these people lived in the peaceful forest near the golden pasture by the frothing river that flowed cold and free from the magic mountain. The river kept on flowing and bubbling like that, backward and forward through time, forever. And these people knew peace, they knew it well, they knew it for as long as they knew to know.

You see, the trick was to…

Until the peaceful forest and mother mountain were no more. The Lizards had forgotten how to know. In all their eternal solitude, they forgot that there was nothing to remember and remembered only to forget.

The trick was to…

That’s when they awoke. Every time. Woke into a nightmare. Shock. Harsh light. Eyes open. The world again—still without peace, still without magic. Still. They awoke with a vision blurred. They became convinced that the memory of perfection was just the dream of perfection. They became convinced that when they slept, they slept. They became convinced that when they woke, they woke. And that was it.

The trick was to…

Back in that dream, in that blurry vision, there had been a man. He appeared as a harmless dot in the distance, walked along the frothing river, hiked through thigh-high golden grass and finally entered the tranquil forest. He had smiled. And waved. He had come in peace. He had been greeted with peace.

The trick was to…

And that was it. The memory turned right then to hazy dream. What happened after? Where went the peace? Where went the man? And who, more importantly, are we?

Certain Lizards among men began asking these questions, and since their self-reflection echoed neither infinite nor peaceful heaves but instead obscured tradition and engendered self-rejection, certain Lizards among men began to ask, softly, then loudly, then hoarsely, and finally violently, “Who the hell is He?!?” That once-harmless dot. The end of memory. The beginning of a haunting dream. “He” being past, present, future and everything in between. “He,” of course, being Wilson: the wicked, evil, dirty, rotten, awful, murderous, sefer-stealing king.

Well, these Lizards among men began asking such questions, and then, met with silence, they began answering the questions themselves. Their voices grew louder still. They took up weapons, invented madness and kept feeding the dream. But even the Lizards among men had forgotten that they were Lizards. They asked questions but forgot how to listen for the answers.

The trick was to…

Well, that’s for another time. Back, now, to that awful name, to those devilish notes. Errand Woolfe, one of those Lizards among men—in fact, the Lizard among indignant, self-righteous Lizards—stands above an ocean of raging fists and upturned heads. His revolutionary tirade is reaching its peak. The upturned heads are all screaming the same hated name: “Wiiilllssoooon!” Only their voices are disjointed—unity, after all, only a memory, and memory just a dream.

Everybody knows how the story goes. This is the arena rock anthem of Phish’s sacred scripture. Upon hearing those notes, every head knows what to do: Shout out that evil name.

“Wilson” is sung from the perspective of Errand Woolfe, a revolutionary who eventually overthrows the evil king and uses his new position, particularly his access to the sacred knowledge contained in the Helping Friendly Book, to rule tyrannically over the Lizards rather than restore peace, freedom and harmony in their world.

Burn it around. Turn it upside down. V’nahafoch hu. “Wilson,” the Phish song, is the flipped over mirror reflecting another ancient tale: Megillat Esther.

The scroll we read on Purim, the Book of Esther, tells a tale of exile and redemption. Far away from home, God’s chosen people languished in shame. Idolatrously, they bowed down to a foreign king, Achashverosh, and his evil sidekick, Haman. Seventy years since the destruction of the Holy Temple and already the people forgot the way. Already they forgot the future. Already they forgot to pray.

Except for Esther and Mordechai. Faithful they remained. Forgetful they were not. And oh, how they prayed!

Long story short: Esther married Achashverosh, Mordechai uncovered Haman, and after some serious sackcloth mourning and behind-the-scenes finagling, the genocidal decree against the Jews was overturned, and the heroes of our story were not corrupted by their newfound dominion over the people, and “the Jews had light and gladness and joy and honor” (Esther 8:16).

On Purim, when we read Esther’s scroll and arrive at the evil name, “Haman,” whoever’s around makes a racket that would wake whales, and all of Israel curses the man who sought to put us, finally, in the grave, and everyone wakes up from the nightmare and remembers how we were saved.

A mystical masquerade. A glut of blessing. A shining light in darkness deep. Purim is the Jewish day of redemption, a holy open conclave for all the sinners and the saints. On Purim, everything’s turned outside out and inside in.

So, forgetting for a moment Wilson and Haman, cursed be their names, is it possible that Phish, a secular American rock band, can teach us something about the greatest Jewish carnival on earth?

Well, is it possible that Esther in the Phish song is the same Esther in the Purim story?

In Hebrew, the name “Esther” has the connotation of “hiddenness,” and it is in fact the most hidden of the songs Phish included on their first official release, Junta. It has been performed fewer times than any of the other tracks on that album, appearing at just 124 concerts.

Yet, despite her general elusiveness, “Esther” was spotted at a number of Phish shows in Adar. The first time Phish ever performed on Purim, 3/10/90, “Esther” followed “Wilson,” which was the show’s opening song. (This marks the only time the two songs have been paired.) The following year, they played “Esther” (along with “Avenu Malkeinu”) at a show on Shushan Purim, 2/28/91. In 1992, Phish played the tune on 3/17, which was Purim Eve, also known as the Fast of Esther, and in 1993 they played “Esther” just a few days after Purim.

As the ‘90s faded into the new millenium, “Esther” went deeper into hiding. Phish toured during Adar I in 1997, but only played one show in Adar II, several days before Purim, as a celebration for the release of the new Ben & Jerry’s flavor, Phish Food. Though “Esther” was not played on this date (in fact, it remained hidden away throughout 1997), the following songs were: “Cinnamon Girl,” “Beauty of My Dreams,” “Suzy Greenberg” and “Funky Bitch.” Similarly, in 2003, Phish played a show in Las Vegas on Purim Katan (2/16). Though they did not perform “Esther” at this concert — the song was hidden throughout the darkness of Phish 2.0 — Phish did bust out their cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady.” Taken together, all of these songs about powerful, beautiful women could be allusions to the biblical Esther.

But if all of this is true, why does “Esther” begin, “It was late one fall night,” instead of opening on the cusp of spring, when Adar reigns?

There is more than one answer to this question. First, look no further than the debut of “Esther,” which took place on 9/12/88 and is the only known performance with the original lyrics. This show was the second night of Rosh Hashanah 5749 and the “TMWSIY>Avenu Malkeinu>TMWSIY” sequence contains a “Happy New Year” message from Trey — “We would like to take this time to wish everyone a chag sameach” — before Mike Gordon takes a serious bass solo. The events of Purim took place over a span of almost a decade, and the lack of seasonal clarity as to what happened when is evident in the contrast between the opening lyrics to “Esther” mentioned above and the song’s original introductory verse, “On a hot summer night…”

The Jewish calendar is complex and perplexing. Though Rosh Hashanah — literally translated to mean “head of the year” — is the Jewish New Year celebration, it happens in the seventh month on the calendar. The actual beginning of the Jewish year is Nisan, the month of Passover. When viewed that way, Adar, the month of Purim, is the last month of the year. The third of five complete live performances of the Gamehendge saga took place on the first of Nisan (3/22/93), and the show immediately prior to this one, in the waning days of Adar, contained, of course, “Esther.” Deepening the secret channels that connect Purim with the New Year is the seemingly indisputable Holiest Day Ever, which comes 10 days after Rosh Hashanah. The sages understood the meaning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as Yom k’Purim, the “day like Purim.” But whereas on Yom Kippur, people refrain from food, drink and all kinds of earthly pleasure, on Purim, Jews drink, eat and rejoice to excess. Purim flips Yom Kippur onto its head.

Further still, in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, each month of the Hebrew calendar is associated with an astrological sign, and Adar is connected to Pisces aka fish.

A famous passage in the Talmud (Ta’anit 29a) says, Mishenichnas Adar marbin b’simchah — “When Adar enters, we increase joy.” This dictum is contrasted with the teaching that when the Hebrew month of Av begins, joy decreases.

Av is seared upon the Jewish calendar as a day of mourning and memorial. It’s when both of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem were sacked. After the First Temple was destroyed, Jews were dispersed and many went to Babylon. The Purim story happens in the midst of this exile. Later, after Esther and Mordechai saved them from utter destruction, the Jews returned to the Holy Land and rebuilt the Temple. When reading the Book of Esther, which has its own special tune, there are a number of places where the tune for a different scroll is used. These “teases” from the Book of Lamentations, known as Eicha in Hebrew, allude to the destruction of the Holy City of Jerusalem. Lamentations is read on the ninth of Av, when Jews fast and mourn the loss of the Beit Hamikdash. One of the consequences of the destruction of the Second Temple were the severe restrictions placed upon music, which had been used in Jerusalem and throughout Jewish history for spiritual, ritual or prophetic purposes. Purim is clearly associated with festivity rather than mourning, and the Fast of Esther is the only customary Jewish fast during which listening to music is explicitly permitted.

This pattern of destruction and exile is mirrored in Phish’s career. When they converged upon the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas on Sept. 30, 2000 — Rosh Hashanah 5761 and Trey’s 36th birthday — the band played “Esther” and officially announced an impending hiatus. During that performance, Trey actually flubbed the final verse, concluding, “She died. Dead.” And so it was that the group parted ways to focus on solo projects, then reconvened for a couple years of drug-addled, occasionally courageous jamming, finally breaking up in 2004. This collective shattering would be permanent, as Trey wrote in a letter to fans announcing the group’s dissolution, “We’re done.” And it’s true that the band did not play “Esther” at all after that show in 2000.

But all good exiles must come to an end, whether they last five years or 2,000. It makes perfect sense, then, that Phish chose March 2009 to play a few comeback concerts after their time in Babylon. The last of their three-night reunion run fell on the Eve of Purim in, of course, Adar, when joy is supposed to increase, and the band’s first album since their breakup, perhaps inspired by the ecstatic response from the community at those March concerts, was titled Joy.

Still, the fact remains that the story told in the lyrics of “Esther” does not match up with the story told in the Book of Esther. So instead, let’s look at the song not as a retelling of the Purim story but as a sort of alternate-reality prequel. A close reading of a couple teachings in Rebbe Nachman’s Likutei Moharan, with the help of some other Hasidic masters and Phish-related texts, elucidates what went horribly wrong for young Esther in the Phish song and how grow-up Esther avoided a similar fate during the events of the Purim story.

We know that Esther was an orphan before Mordechai took her under his wing (Megillah 13a), and this is why she appears alone in the song. On top of that, if we understand the canonical Phish story, The Many Who Stepped Into Yesterday, as an account of life in spiritual exile, then many Purim secrets are revealed in the tale of “Esther.”

According to the Phish.net history, Trey has said that young Esther’s hometown is in Gamehendge, and this is why the music in the “flying” segment of the song is also used as interlude music on TMWSIY. Some say Prussia, the setting of the Gamehendge story, actually refers to Persia, the setting of the Purim story. The first time “Esther” was played it followed the song “Wilson,” directly linking her tale with the story of an evil king. Commenting on this, the midrash explains that Esther was the first person in Gamehendge to notice the presence of a strange traveler who called himself Wilson, and after this evil guy enslaved all of the people of that land, he cut down a swath of trees and ordered the city of Prussia to be built “on top of their graves.” Purim was the fixing of this. The tree that Haman cut down and turned into a gallows (Esther 5:14), where he wished to hang Mordechai for not bowing down to him (and his idol, but more on that later) was the same tree that was turned into a gallows where he and his sons eventually met their demise.

Allison Tuthill, in an essay for The Phish Companion (“Dangerous Women in Phish’s Music”), argues that Esther possesses “true Knowledge” and this is what leads to her demise. Like Eve succumbing to the snake’s cunning and eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a direct result of which was banishment from the Garden of Eden, the young girl in Anastasio’s song, who “saw the doll’s eyes and couldn’t resist,” ultimately drowns when the same puppet pulls her down into the deadly depths of a lake. Tuthill, however, views Esther’s death in the song as both the too-slow realization of the nature of humanity’s danger-rife relationship with wisdom and a vindication of her actions. You see, gazing upon true Knowledge can turn even the widest scope of vision into a “hollow-eyed stare,” and Esther should be recognized and commended for exhibiting so much inner strength during her verge-of-death grasp of this fact.

Andy Gadiel thinks “Esther” is a warning about substance abuse. (Specifically, he relates to the perils of smoking too much pot. This could explain why the Book of Esther begins, “It was in the days of Achashverosh … who ruled from Hodu to Kush,” and why the Talmud, in Megillah 13a, describes Esther’s appearance as “kind of greenish.”) Jews are, in fact, commanded on Purim to drink to the point of not knowing the difference between cursing evil Haman and blessing righteous Mordechai. The one day of the Jewish year when literally anything goes — truly, it’s the only time you’ll see ultra-Orthodox men in the most insular neighborhoods of Jerusalem cross-dressing — Purim is a trek to the most extreme climes of consciousness. But, as the Ishbitzer Rebbe points out in volume one of Mei Hashiloach, the commandment to get drunk to the point of confusing good and evil only reaches the level of mental understanding, the level of the Tree of Knowledge, which the sages associated with Haman (Chullin 139b). On Purim, says the Ishbitzer, even if you’re drunker ‘n drunk and you think that you get “it,” that you know there’s no difference between sacred and profane, your heart actually knows the truth. Your heart gets IT: Good is great. Evil is shit. Forgetting that there is wisdom beyond mental cognition is why Icculus, the greatest prophet of Gamehendge, had to explicitly explain:

And a tree of knowledge in your soul will grow
And the Helping Friendly Book will plant the seed
But I warn you that all knowledge seeming innocent and pure
Becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of avarice
And greed

“Simply by naming this song Esther,” Tuthill writes in her essay, “Phish has tapped into several thousand years of tradition that this name refers to a particularly strong woman.”

But acquiring wisdom can doom even the strongest of people to death — physical, spiritual, intellectual or otherwise. It’s a sour pill to swallow, and this is why the song says, “As the frosty water sank its bitter teeth into her hide / She tried to slide the heavy clothing from her skin.”

The protagonist in Phish’s composition is too innocent and pure to see that there’s something deeper, something sinister, to the doll that eventually kills her. Esther’s attachment to the doll was sudden and unbalanced, and its esoteric power, represented by the churning water, “seemed to open and swallow her whole.” In the song, she has not yet become the powerful hero of our story. She hasn’t met Mordechai, her future partner in righteousness and prophetic vision, who would help her save the Jewish people from complete destruction. In other words, she has not yet found a way to access the understanding of heart.

It says in Ecclesiastes, “He has given wisdom, knowledge and joy to the man who pleases him; but to the sinner he has given the need to gather and amass” (2:26). Haman’s plan was to kill all of the Jews and then take their property and possessions. But it’s not as if he needed the money. Haman was the unsurpassed adviser to the king. He actually believed himself to be on the level of the king. When Achashverosh asked him what he should to do to honor someone, first Haman thought, Well, obviously he’s talking about me, and then he said, “Let them bring the royal raiment that the king wore and the horse that the king rode upon, and the royal crown should be placed on his head” (Esther 6:8). In Hebrew numerology, Haman’s name is equal to the word HaMelech, “the king.” So, on the surface level, it seems that Haman wields all the power and wisdom of royalty. In truth, however, he is the embodiment of knowledge becoming “a deadly weapon in the hands of avarice and greed.”

As mentioned before, the month of Purim is associated with Pisces in kabbalistic astrology. This sign is connected to the Hebrew letter Kof, synonymous with darkness and spiritual impurity, and the Hebrew word kof means “monkey.” It takes great wisdom to be control those forces rather than, as happens to Esther in her song, “succumb to a hoodlum on the prowl.” And all of this why Gamehendge is called “the land of Darkness … the land of doom … the land of the big baboon.”

Balanced on both hands, understanding, which includes both wisdom and knowledge, is intimately connected to joyousness. This is why the combined forces of Mordechai and Esther saved the Jewish people. As it says, “The Jews had light and joy, and gladness and honor” (Esther 8:16).

In the beginning of his teaching in Likkutei Moharan #10, Rebbe Nachman says that dancing and clapping can mitigate harsh decrees. Together, he says, these acts, which arise from the ruach (wind, spirit) can even overturn idolatry and Divine judgement.

You might ask, “What does that even mean?”

Over the course of dozens of pages and across many layers of literary meaning, Rebbe Nachman explains. Esther, whose name is related to the Hebrew word hester, hiddenness, is compared to the mystical, secret meanings of the Torah. Mordechai, conversely, represents the Torah’s revealed aspects. Esther, since she embodies hiddenness, is likened to feet, which are generally covered, while Mordechai is compared to the hands. Explaining the meaning of a Talmudic story about the fate of certain biblical heretics, which he likens to idol worship, Rebbe Nachman says Esther is water, and Mordechai is wool. The combination of Esther and Mordechai — of wool and water, of hands and feet, of revealed and hidden — overcame the idolatry of Haman and Achashverosh.

You might still be asking, now with renewed vigor, “What does that even mean?”

Allow Phish to explain.

In the beginning of the song, Esther meets an Armenian man, who proffers a pail-bound puppet. This clearly alludes to Purim as Armenia was long a territory of the Persian empire, where Megillat Esther takes place. Though the man is obviously evil — or possessed — Esther takes the dolls and runs to the church, where she’s greeted with sudden silence from people who “looked mean.” The congregation grows crazed by the sight of the young girl and the doll, and they fight violently to steal it away from her. Outside, meanwhile, “a storm began to rage,” and soon after Esther escapes the church the wind blows so hard that it lifts her up into the sky. Viewed through the lens of Rebbe Nachman’s teaching, Esther’s encounter with the doll is an allegory for the alluring — and real — power of false gods.

In the Book of Esther, Mordechai refuses to bow to Haman because the king’s viceroy is wearing a idolatrous statue around his neck. This act of spiritual disobedience is what ultimately leads to the decree that the Jews should be slaughtered, which Mordechai and Esther later overturn. In the song of “Esther,” however, the young girl takes the doll from the hollow-eyed man and then provokes the ire of the people in the church perhaps because she doesn’t understand or realize the doll’s immense power. Just like Haman’s connection to the power of false gods vaulted him to a position of king-like influence, little Esther’s exit into the rainstorm while in possession of demonic doll sends her skyward, where “she rose above the people and the houses.” And just like Haman fell from grace because his power depended on deceit, in the song Esther plummets from through the clouds and eventually finds herself beset by “an angry mob” near the “nasty part of town.”

Esther’s decision to jump into the lake and swim away from the impending chaos seems well-founded, but “as the frosty water sank its bitter teeth into her hide” she forgot one thing: the puppet had not yet let her go, and soon enough “the sound of the laughing old man filled her ears” and the doll pulled the girl down to an untimely death.

In Rebbe Nachman’s understanding of the Purim story’s characters, the final nail in the coffin of this alternative-reality Esther is when she takes off her clothes, for it’s the combination of wool and water — hands and feet, clapping and dancing, revealed and hidden — that overcomes idolatry. Always there must be a balance. Phish’s Esther hasn’t yet learned how to strike that balance and this proves fatal. In Megillat Esther, equal proportions of these qualities proves vital. In fact, clothing (or lack thereof) and feelings of bitterness/anger are linked in multiple places in the the scroll. Esther’s ascendance to the throne is only possible because King Achashverosh gets pissed that his wife, Queen Vashti, refused to parade naked around the palace in front of his generals and governors, so he offs her and sets about looking for a new queen. Then, after Esther ascends the throne and Haman lands second-in-command and convinces the king to authorize a genocide of the Jewish people, Mordechai is greatly disturbed, as it’s written: “And Mordechai knew all that had transpired, and Mordechai rent his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes, and he went out into the midst of the city and cried [with] a loud and bitter cry” (Esther 4:1).

Through this expression of mourning, the Jews are rallied to repent for the sin of bowing to Haman and his idol and it is through this unity of purpose that the they merited to be saved from destruction. The Talmud teaches in Megillah 10b that Mordechai’s name comes from the phrase mar dachi, meaning, “makes the bitter sweet.” In the Phish song, Esther’s reaction to the bitter water is to take off her clothes, a desperate attempt to separate herself from an unpleasant truth. But it’s specifically through bitterness that redemption comes, which is why the Jews in Megillat Esther are saved while the little girl in the song dies.

One final piece of the puzzle linking the Esthers of Phish and Purim can be understood by looking at Trey Anastasio’s lost lyrics. The live debut of “Esther,” which took place on 9/12/88, is the only known performance with the original verses:

And she ran across the fairgrounds to the old man with the bucket
And she took the puppet out and gave it back.
Up from the water came thousands of souls,
Joggers and muggers and church-going folk,
And they all ran past Esther towards the old man,
Like a raging stampede, they dissolved in a huge cloud of dust.

Rebbe Nachman says that idolaters are dependent on Esther and that is why it says in Proverbs 5:5, “Her feet go down to death.” The feet are closer than anything other part of the body to the dirt, i.e., evil and impurity. In the well-known lyrics of “Esther,” the dolls wraps its arms “around her ankle and … pulled her down through the eerie green deep,” killing her. In the original lyrics, however, Esther emerges from the water and realizes she needs to return the doll, the source of her torture, to its original owner. As soon as she relinquishes the idol, “thousands of souls” storm the old man and then disappear.

Dunh nuh. Dunh nuh.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

Dunh nuh. Dunh nuh.

“Wiiilllssoooon!”

Those who don’t understand will shudder when they hear the collective revelry of a “Wilson” chant at a Phish concert. They will say that this sort of unbounded, nonsensical joy is self-indulgence. They will say that this kind of community is orgy, this kind of worship is sin. They will say that dark is light and without is within.

In Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America, journalist-cum-theologian Chris Hedges, talks to the disenchanted dissidents, the broken angels and the recovering addicts. He claims to defend all that is good and decent and moral. He says that all that is good and decent and moral has been lost and forgotten. The book is an impassioned plea that speaks to all who think they are happy and free and makes 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.

Hedges sets up a neat little case for why Americans have descended into the pits of hell: Ten Commandments, ten chapters, ten true stories of American immorality. 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 those women, “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 Jon, Mike, Page 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?

Phish plays music that speaks to my heart and, in this conception, I, like other Jews who have also fallen into the perceived trap, am part of the Phish cult, too. Jenny Hazan, writing for Aish.com, an Orthodox Jewish website, 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, an author, activist and academic who is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University, doesn’t mind a little transitory happiness. In a column about Jewish meditation for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, for which he was founding editor, 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 continued. “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 arrives, sooner or later, at the 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. 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 may even be 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 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 as 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-told story from the Talmud (Hagiga 14b), with additional details from the Zohar (I, 26b): Four people entered pardes — 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 Avuyah 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 Daniel C. 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, the Divine Chariot — variously known as the Hekhalot texts or accounts 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. 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:

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.

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.

“Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition—these, too,” Matt writes, “would engender heresy.”

Definition is the plight of language. So why define Phish as that which is worshiped—an idol? Instead, why not define Phish as that which serves only to facilitate worship—a vessel?

In an interview conducted by Jess Minnen for the Central Plains Jamband Society, Trey reflects on his personal struggles keeping clear of idolatry’s downward slope. At the time, August of 2005, Phish was broken up and the guitar player was slipping. Had already slipped. He was still more than a year away from the rock-bottom DUI arrest that would set him on a path toward recovery and sobriety and ultimately lead to a situation where Phish could turn to a clean white page and mount an epic comeback that continues peaking to this day. Their conversation turned Israel and Matisyahu, who sat in with the Trey Anastasio Band at Bonnaroo in 2005, and Trey reflected:

I had an interesting moment because I was thinking about this concept of worshiping false idols. You know, “Thou shalt not worship false idols.” For a long time I thought it meant, “There is only one God. Your God is wrong. My God is right,” which I think is completely off the mark. Then I started really getting it during the last couple years of Phish. I started to find myself really flirting with unhappiness as everything got bigger and bigger and not really understanding why. Like this is all so great, why am I… And then I realized that one God being Truth, Right, Love, the Real Deal. Call it what you will. You’re supposed to worship only that. Don’t worship the messenger.

Minnen, a Phish fan, then challenges her (l’havdil) idol, saying that people look up to him on the stage and engage in a sort of worship, to which Anastasio, even then, staring through the fog and haze of alcoholism and substance abuse, points to a Hasidic Jew as his model for avoiding this trap:

It’s the first commandment… There’s something essentially wrong if you buy into it. You’re headed for unhappiness. With Phish, we were talking so much about trying to be a conduit. That’s very healthy. A wonderful thing. It was about listening and communication and hopefully some music starts happening. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels like you’re actually channeling something, like it’s not about you. But it’s so easy to get caught up in the fact that you’re standing up there on a pedestal. And you start to miss the boat, right? So what I saw at that Bonnaroo show was so interesting. I had two people on stage with me. One was this guy who is very religious. Matisyahu. He was singing the most beautiful… His voice… He’s singing and it’s not about him. It’s about God. He’s very straight up. He’s a Hassidic Jew. The look in his eyes… they were kind of glistening. I was playing and looking right into his eyes, and it was so moving for a couple of reasons. One was that he used to follow the band… He told me he’d been to like, every Phish show for ten years. And then he went and became a Hassidic Jew and sings reggae because of the spiritual purity of a lot of reggae. He’s singing about God. So was Bob Marley. So was Bach, for that matter. Bach wrote at the top of everything he ever wrote “For the Glory of God.” And then I had Bo Bice with me, who just went through what to me must have been the most torturous experience… Being on American Idol—the ultimate example of worshipping false idols. … It was just weird how the whole core issue was right before my eyes up on stage that night. It was a very cool experience.

It’s a perfect circle, of sorts. Matisyahu showed Trey the way to play righteously, but who showed Matisyahu? Well, Trey, of course. And Phish.

“We hadn’t had any conversations at that point. He didn’t necessarily know who I was, but I guess he knew what I stood for,” Matisyahu told me in February 2013 about that experience at Bonnaroo. “And for me it was all about letting go of myself in order to receive the blessings in my life. I felt I was desiring to make music. It all happened around Phish.”

In the story told about Matisyahu’s rise prominence as perhaps today’s best-known Jewish musician, the story he tells and the one others tell about him, Phish plays a central role, and there’s no knowing how many secular kids in America and around the world were inspired to reconnect to their Jewish history after hearing his music. But besides Phish, Matisyahu tells another story, reprinted in Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum’s Jewish Tales of Mystic Joy, about being so energized and inspired by Reb Shlomo Carlebach, the rabbi to earlier generations of hippies, that he turned a minyan of sheepish yidden into a frenzied crowd of hundreds at an early show of his in New York.

In Jerusalem, “Shlomo stories” are everywhere and the ripples of inspiration he started are felt on a daily basis. In the weeks leading up to Purim this year, Shlomo’s teachings were ubiquitous, and for him, Purim is all about stories.

“Where do stories originate? The truth is is that stories come from beyond — beyond my consciousness. And then, it flows into my consciousness. But the story itself is really beyond my consciousness,” Reb Shlomo taught. “The whole of Purim is the story. But you know something? It’s not enough to read it. You have to listen to the story.”

The creation of the world was a story. The Torah is a story. Every life of every person, plant and animal on this earth is a story. Look around. G!d is telling so many stories. On Purim, we read the Scroll of Esther. At night, we read it together as a community and we don’t pause during the reading. We read it all the way through. Then, during the day, we read it again. Besides giving gifts to friends, giving charity to the poor and getting intoxicated to the point of not knowing the difference between Good and Evil, telling the story of Esther and Mordechai and the salvation of the Jews — telling it and listening to it — is the whole point of the day. Says Reb Shlomo Katz, a prominent purveyor of Carlebachian Torah:

The avodah [spiritual work] of Purim is not how high you get on Purim, it’s to what world do you wake up the morning after Purim. Or let’s give each other another day ‘cause of hangovers — two days after Purim, let’s say, with a clear mind. To what world am I waking up? What eyes are looking at the world? How real is it now? How real is my life after I reach these places?

Purim is about the total elimination of idolatry. So is Phish. It’s about connecting to a place that’s beyond everything we think and know. It’s about connecting to the Divine unfolding of the unending story of creation. At the height of intoxication on Purim, just like at the peak of an improvisational jam at a Phish concert, we get a glimpse of that sacred flow.

But what happens the next day? In the afterglow, do we still see the light? Or do we mistake stone for water, water for stone?

Do not say “idol, idol.” The stream of holy stories flows—through statues and holy vessels and everything else that exists. Denying or acknowledging that it flows does not change the fact that it flows.

The trick is to…

The author is currently completing a book about Judaism and Phish. Connect on Twitter: @PhishTalmud.