PSYCHEDELIC SHABBAT
At the Universal Temple of Higher Consciousness, Judaism is Groovy, Man
by Judd Handler

The drive out to the Universal Temple of Higher Consciousness (UTHC) from San Diego takes an hour. It’s at the UTHC where for the last year a weekly psychedelic, operatic, cinematic and ecstatic Shabbat has taken place, hosted and performed by three creative, liberal and expressive Jews.

Prior to my first visit to the UTHC for a New Year’s Eve party, I had heard rumors that it was a licentious den of Tantric orgies and copious hard-drug usage. While those claims turned out to be unsubstantiated, the 8.5-acre communal living area near Escondido is a bastion of liberal, artistic living.

The drive through North County to the UTHC meanders through some of the most bucolic areas of San Diego County: The palatial estates of Rancho Santa Fe; the rustic village of Del Dios, where desert landscape meets postcard-blue Lake Hodges; then once past Escondido, the little-known nirvana called Hidden Valley.

Boulder-strewn mountains lead the way up the incline past the also little-known, quaint and countrified Lake Wohlford. The Self-Realization Fellowship, a non-denominational organization teaching the science of meditation, has a retreat campus next door to the UTHC.

At any given time near the UTHC, there are dozens of people meditating simultaneously. This area is a spiritual vortex, definitely on another wavelength.

“Baba” Stu Schreiber, Jor-El (Ed Elkin) and TES (Time-Energy-Space; née Teresa Bayla Kempner) are the three Jewish stewards of the UTHC who have forsworn 8-to-5 jobs and soul-depleting commutes.

Instead the trio lives with two other adults in a converted Quonset hut that’s now more like a domicile of modern art. The open-air, custom-built architecture functions as an acoustic music chamber and an adult playground.

A 30-foot-tall tee-pee-shaped fireplace is the main focal point of UTHC's grounds, as well as a “Peace Pole,” one of an estimated 200,000 around the world, all part of the Peace Pole Project, all bearing the inscription “May Peace Prevail on Earth.”

Inside, there is only one bedroom with a door but there are several sacred altars paying homage to all religions and deities.

One hour before candles are lit for Shabbat, TES arrives with new patio furniture. I help Stu and Kennedy, a sacred-music event promoter and another UTHC resident, with the hauling.

A donation box is placed on a check-in table. Two nationally touring musicians from L.A. are doing sound-check, preparing for the post-Shabbat entertainment. Many post-Shabbats here are often in the form of music or expressive arts and performance theater, either arranged or spontaneous.

But do the residents pay rent when not a single one among them has a conventional job?

“The truth is that there have been a couple times where we’ve been behind on the rent,” says Schreiber, helping TES set challah bread on the expansive vegetarian pot-luck-friendly kitchen table.

Lately, though, the forever-young trio who has a common view of God as “sexy and loving and fun” has been blessed by the universe with abundance.

Rent is paid in part by savings and donations from people who attend performances here. A recent inheritance from TES’s aunt will go towards renting an additional 22 acres of land. Part of the inheritance has been spent on a DVD projector and broadband technology for beaming performances all over the world via the Internet.

Both of TES’s parents are Holocaust survivors. Taking a break from ceremonious preparations, TES sits by the Peace Pole and recalls that since a very early age, the Holocaust has had a deep impact on her psyche.

Three years old and already showing natural singing talent, TES would have nightmares about cattle-cars and Nazi troops.

“There was a palpable feeling of sadness and grief among my parents,” says TES, who is married to Schreiber. “My mother had no access to counseling, so I became my mom’s soundboard.”

If miracles and gifts emanated from the ashes of Auschwitz, one of them is TES’s singing.

“Singing is the highest form of prayer,” she says.

One of the many original songs, “Peace in the Middle East,” was performed live for 6,000 Israeli and Palestinian women at Independence Park in Jerusalem (to listen: yes2tes.com).

“I sing to raise my vibration,” says TES, who for the last seven years fruitlessly tried to produce the Six Million Candles Project, a 24-hour musical peace concert at the site of the notorious Nazi death camp.

“The idea would be to shine light from a former place of utter darkness,” she says.

Her vision may not have completely paned out, but TES is positive. “It’s been an amazing healing process. Just the desire to put this together has blessed me with an outpouring of songwriting inspiration,” she says.

TES and Schreiber started dating in Hollywood, 10 months into a two-year long acting workshop.

“I was a substitute teacher in L.A.,” Schreiber reminisces, taking TES’s chair at the Peace Pole. “TES encouraged me to abandon fear and my rigid programming.”

After six months of existential reprogramming in Baja, Schreiber, who resembles the actor Steve Guttenberg in his prime, encouraged TES to return north of the border to pursue a singing career.

“And now we live in an unconditional love and world peace incubator,” says Schreiber, who also calls the UTHC an “irreverent interfaith musical ministry.”

The eldest member of this communal conscious-living experiment is the Bronx-born, 71-year-old Elkin. Having spent 18 years of his life on Maui, Elkin has the vitality of someone half his age.

Elkin created something called “transpersonal Gestalt,” spiritual psychotherapy which expands on the tenets formulated by Gestalt founder Fritz Perls, who referred to traditional Gestalt as “Zen Judaism.”

“My background is in humanistic psychology,” explains Elkin. “Transpersonal Gestalt shifts the emphasis from ‘I am I and you are you’ to ‘I am you and you are me.’

John Lennon would certainly appreciate Elkin’s psychological riddle.

Elkin claims to be a faculty member of the School of Tantra and to have been given a dose of LSD by the U.S. Army.

A Fulbright Scholar who spent a year in Paris and performed musical theater in Maui, Elkin was also once a lecturer at the Polyamory conference, where he met TES and Schreiber for the first time.

“I fell in love with TES and the God Squad (a collective of musicians and performance artists), but unfortunately TES had already met Stu,” Elkin laughs.

“I followed TES out here to the Temple,” admits Elkin, who also was the vice-president of the Quest Center for Human Growth in Washington, D.C., where he lived for 15 years.

The mission of this intentional community is to catalyze spiritual evolution, through self-love and creative freedom through art, music, expressive therapy and different modes of healing and other new-age philosophies and practices.

But the UTHC's ethereal and lofty vision sometimes crashes straight back down to an Ego-driven earthly-plane as the permanent residents find that reality bites when grown adults share a living space with only one bedroom (which doubles as a treatment/counseling room).

“It’s hard to live with anybody,” says Elkin, who has one daughter (TES and Schreiber have no children). “We are all passionate, expressive and emotional people. We’re musicians and healers; feelings do not get stuffed down here.”

Weekly meetings are held to air out differences. Bones are picked, even in sing-song operatic form during Shabbat prayers.

As the Kiddush cup is being passed around, a psychedelic purple swirl is projected on the ceiling above. Ancient Shabbat songs are sung in a highly spiritualized tone by the Jewish trio.

On this particular summer Friday night there are about 20 people watching. Elkin sings, “Why has the kiddush cup stopped coming around?”

“I don’t know,” responds Schreiber holding on to the last syllable as if he were performing Carmen, “Why are you being so anal-retentive tonight?” Schreiber responds to Elkin, ostensibly annoyed.

But hearing this eclectic trio “get their Shabbat on” brings goosebumps to the flesh, with their emotive and soulful singing of traditional Hebrew prayers. This spirit-raising experience is certainly worth the hour-long drive. Just get there before sunset on Shabbat with a vegetarian offering.

For more information and a schedule of events at the UTHC, visit: uthc.tv.

For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.