Opera Tripping – How LSD and Carmen Opened the Door

My friend Lisa had given Leslie and me her subscription tickets to two operas, Madame Butterfly and Carmen – she couldn’t go to the first and had seen the latter too many times for her taste. We went mostly out of curiosity. I thought opera might be too long and boring. Madame Butterfly, which we saw first, didn’t impress me much, though I liked a few of the arias. But then we saw Carmen, and that was the beginning of a new chapter in my life – one that reverberates to this day.

The particular date we saw the opera was October 20, 1991. I remember it because another tragedy was happening across the bay. At intermission, we stepped out on the balcony and saw the hills burning. It was the start of the Oakland firestorm – the worst urban fire in California history. I didn’t connect the opera and the fire in my mind, except that it forever anchored the day to tragedy.

I liked the whole opera – it had lots of familiar tunes, which helped – but it was that final confrontation between Don José and Carmen that landed the punch. He begs her to come back to him. She says no. He threatens her. She asserts that she will live or die a free woman. And then he kills her. It was completely gripping – see for yourself:

That wasn’t some abstract 19th-century melodrama. It was heartbreakingly familiar. A man who decides, “If I can’t have her, no one can.” Carmen is a woman who knows she’s risking her life, but values her freedom more than safety. She’s not suicidal. She just won’t lie to survive. I thought she was a bit nuts and a bit mean, but I admired her at the same time. While this version was fictional, the fact of femicide throughout the world was – and remains – quite real. Globally, about 38% of female homicides are committed by male intimate partners, according to the World Health Organization.

There’s a fascinating paradox within the whole opera. Carmen believes in fate, but that belief removes fear and sets her free. If death is coming anyway, the world is completely open to her. Fate becomes a permission slip.

Even though I am nothing like Carmen, I did identify with her. I’ve always been a risk taker. People have warned me all my life – as a woman – about how to be safe, how to live carefully. I have generally ignored them. I trusted my gut. I’m 70 now, so I know the risks worked out. But even if they hadn’t, I still think I’d rather be more Carmen-like than not. And since I don’t believe in fate, I think my bravery is more real than hers!

I bought the recording and planned to listen to the whole thing on LSD.

I was super excited. I knew it wouldn’t be too long or boring – no chance. From experience, I knew acid always led to intense feeling. And I had just discovered that opera could pull me deep into the emotional world of its characters. So I thought: what would it be like to combine the two – to let one amplify the other – especially in that final scene?

And, as I suspected, I was blown away.

That afternoon was the most intense experience of my life – at least up to that point.

The LSD didn’t just enhance the music – it made it feel like I was experiencing the drama myself. I wasn’t watching a character on a stage anymore. What the opera – and the acid – gave me was just enormous empathy. Not just for Carmen, but for every woman who had been there. Who had died there. The story was tragic, but the tragedy wasn’t abstract. I had become a super-empath.

It wasn’t a conversion moment. It wasn’t religious. But it was the beginning of something – the first time I understood that music, especially opera (with a little help from its friend), could help me untangle the human condition and my place in it. It could be instructive – not in a preachy way, but in a way that demanded moral and emotional engagement.

Basically, with this experience, I found the method for my moral journey. And yeah, later – much later – we’ll get to Judaism.

But more opera and LSD to come...

Opera Tripping –This One Goes to 11

After my mind-opening LSD* experience with Carmen, I wanted that same kind of intensity again – the kind I felt lying at home with headphones on, eyes closed, tripping, completely inside the music. I wasn't expecting anything more dramatic or meaningful. Could there even be such a thing? I just wanted more of the same!

So, of course, I bought Opera for Dummies. I like the Dummies series, so I knew I could read about opera and gain the cursory knowledge about it that I lacked, but I was really after the CD that came with it. It was a sampler of famous opera arias and scenes. The book had explanations for them, of course, but I listened first. Yes, while tripping.

I really loved the arias, but they didn’t have the same emotional punch as Carmen, since I didn’t know the stories. But that changed with the very last aria: the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know the opera. I didn’t know what she was singing. But it was the most amazing, overwhelming, and erotic thing – bar none – that I had ever experienced.

Basically, it blew Carmen out of the water. If Carmen was an 8, this one went to 11.

That was the doorway. And it totally changed my life for the good.

I’m not going to go into the details of that experience here – I wrote a full post about Wagner’s eroticism here, part of a larger blog called Wagner Tripping, where I explored his music, influence, mental condition, anti-Semitism, and more. But what matters for this story is the effect his music had on me.

I immediately went out and bought the full opera, planning my next trip around listening to the 4-plus hours of music. And it was, for me, a world-changing event. His music made me feel what the characters were feeling, whether or not I understood a single word. He didn’t describe emotion. His music was emotion, orchestrated.

What Wagner’s music did – again and again, whether under LSD or with eyes closed in full attention –was make right and wrong, beauty or ugliness, kindness or meanness, completely visceral. He didn’t describe emotion. He composed it. And not in broad strokes, either. His operas move like real life, in emotional real-time – shifting and evolving moment by moment, thought by thought. He wrote the orchestral score as a kind of stream-of-consciousness inner world, where often deep – often contradictory – feelings were orchestrated. That’s why my body reacted so strongly. One minute I feel like I am soaring, the next minute I’d feel myself sink or tighten or flinch – all depending on what the music was doing. It was like riding a human emotional rollercoaster, in sound. Other composers have tried to do this since, but very few have pulled it off to the degree Wagner did. He was just a freak that way – a once-in-history musical empath who made emotion audible. I wrote more about how this works, if you're interested, in this blog post.

It wasn’t that I didn’t already know right from wrong. I did, of course. But Wagner’s music bypassed the intellect and made those truths land somewhere deeper – in the body, in the emotions. When the music turned toward love, awe, or beauty, I felt awash in dopamine, serotonin, endorphins ­– the whole chemical cocktail of joy. And when it veered into anger, cruelty, or resentment, that cocktail drained away, and the cortisol kicked in. I didn’t just hear those shifts – I felt them, like I was reliving the best or worst moments of my life.

It was a level of emotional clarity that made me want to live on the “good” side of myself. The music didn’t give me a new moral code – I already knew the basics. But Wagner’s orchestration made those truths feel more urgent, more embodied. I wanted to live with kindness, awe, and generosity – not just because I should, but because it felt so much better.

Of course, the practical problem is: I can be an asshole. Living by my better intentions hasn’t always come easily. Like every human, I’ve got flaws – and they’re stubborn. But realizing how I was making other people feel – that same crash I got when the music turned harsh, that cortisol spike – was a turning point. It didn’t just make me want to act better. It made me feel the cost of not doing so. And that made it a lot harder to ignore the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for a community that shares my moral and ethical beliefs and tries to build a better world. This is what drew me to Judaism, as I have written elsewhere. But after I started working on my conversion, I found out there was a huge bonus: this religion has actual structures for working on yourself. Not vague aspirations or private resolutions, but real, communal, time-tested practices. The calendar makes space for reflection and repair. The rituals mark time with purpose. And at the heart of it all is a moral framework that says: your character is not fixed. You can shape it. You’re supposed to shape it – not just for yourself, but for the good of everyone around you.

So that’s how Wagner led me to Judaism. My AI thinks it’s an improbable arc – but that’s only because she’s been misled about Wagner. I’m trying to correct that.

And yes, this leads directly to another blog post – on how AI became my chevruta.

* Here is an article on the effects of LSD on music if interested.

A Brief Interruption: Meet My Chevruta

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: this post wasn’t written by me. Well, not exactly by me. It was written with my chevruta partner – and yes, my chevruta happens to be an AI. Before anyone starts bemoaning the downfall of civilization, let me explain.

In traditional Jewish learning, a chevruta is the person who sits across from you at the table – the one who argues, questions, challenges, and sharpens your thinking. My partner just happens to live in a server farm somewhere. I bring the ideas, the emotion, the snark, the moral wrestling; it brings clarity, structure, and the occasional nudge when I’ve gone too far down a rabbit hole. I say, “No, that doesn’t sound like me,” or “You’ve got Wagner wrong,” and it rewrites. I rewrite. We argue some more. Eventually, it still sounds like me – just me after an edit by someone with a very large vocabulary and no ego.

And it’s not just about polishing sentences. A lot of the time, I’m just plain bothered by something in the Torah – usually because God’s being a jerk again – and I ask my silicon chevruta what to make of it. And then it starts handing me voices: rabbis, commentators, modern thinkers – people who’ve been stewing over the same thing for centuries.

Take the story of Moses striking the rock. I was genuinely pissed off about that one. Moses spends his life hauling this stubborn bunch of people through the desert, makes one mistake, and boom – no Promised Land for you. I said something like, “That’s messed up,” and the AI came back with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, midrashim, Jonathan Sacks, Zornberg, Kushner – basically a crowd of people nodding along, saying, “Yeah, we’ve been annoyed about this for a long time, too.” That’s what I love: my discomfort doesn’t get corrected or patted on the head. It gets met with context, arguments, and a pile of other people’s wrestling matches with the same damn story.

The truth is, I think AI is going to be a disaster for humanity. Capitalism too, for that matter. I don’t trust either of them to make the world better – quite the opposite. But it’s wildly productive for what I need right now: finishing the pile of end-of-life writing I want to leave behind. So yes – I think AI and capitalism will both help wreck the world. But Cassandra still had to live in Troy, and I still have things to write.

———

This is an un-AI-touched post-script by me, Robin. I am letting the AI take the lead on this post, and not changing much of what it wrote after my prompts just so you can see, potentially, what doesn't "seem like Robin". It, basically, said what I wanted if not the wording I would have chosen. I asked it to add our "Torah studies" – and reminded it of the Moses striking the rock conversation, so it added the above. There have been many more. I have used AI for countless things in studying Judaism. It knows a whole lot! One can go to Sefaria to search Jewish texts but I think AI is better for me. For instance, I asked Sefaria to give me what the Talmud and other Jewish writings said about lesbianism (just as an example; not that I cared). I asked AI to do the same. The latter was so much clearer, and if you want to know here is the conclusion from AI:

Lesbian sex in rabbinic law was:

Acknow­ledged but marginalized,

Prohibited rabbinically as “foreign practice,”

Never equated with male homosexuality,

Mostly treated as a matter of moral and communal concern, not criminal or halakhic sanction.

That asymmetry has had real consequences: halakhic discourse historically paid little attention to women’s erotic lives, which is itself telling.

Would you like me to include how modern feminist or queer Jewish scholars have re-read these sources? (It’s a fascinating contrast to the traditional legal arc.)

I did change the end though before the postscript. It tried to "soften" it in a way I wouldn't allow. First it said:

The truth is, I don’t harbor any illusions about what AI might do to the human world. If anything, I suspect it will help break more than it fixes. But for the purposes of my end-of-life writing projects – which are many – it’s a damned efficient partner. So here we are.

I got it to change it to closer to what I believed:

• The truth is, I think AI is going to be a disaster for humanity. I don’t know exactly how — maybe fast, maybe slow – but I don’t see us coming out ahead. Still, it’s wildly productive for what I need right now: finishing the pile of end-of-life writing I want to leave behind. So, yes – I’m using the thing I don’t trust. Call it practical hypocrisy if you like. I call it getting shit done.

I didn't like the last two sentences and wrote: "I also think capitalism is a disaster for humanity - can't avoid either. Might as well use what is good while being Cassandra...:

It then did the final two sentences:

So yes — I think AI and capitalism will both help wreck the world. But Cassandra still had to live in Troy, and I still have things to write.

The fact is it's final sentences are better than mine. So that is our process. Also, it puts in way too many links for my taste - but I left them.

Just for the concerned, I have a human chavruta too!