Updated 3 weeks ago
August 16, 1968 – November 7, 2024
Baruch Thaler was a beloved and dedicated Lubavitcher whose least of many accomplishments as it pertains to this website (I can totally imagine he and I discussing this at length) was often attending psytrance parties in New York in the 2000s.
The name “Baruch” is the amanuensis and friend of Jeremiah and nominal author of the book of Baruch in the Apocrypha.
From Yoseph Needelman:
I had a dear friend and teacher pass away today: “BJ” Baruch Jean Thaler. The videographer for my first wedding, who drove to my daughter Noemi’s naming in Santa Maria, then driving me for hours after to the next place, who I’d shlepped with before and after from Burning Man Decompression to Rainbow Gathering in the forest.
I thought of Baruch as the actual Lubavitcher Rebbe for this generation. Giving it over in songs so that it suddenly couldn’t be clearer why and how real this always, the holy sad and desperate in all our hearts, but joyful. He was a young man when the Rebbe died, and saw the active, screaming denial from the destabilized street and held its hand, carrying the body to feel its weight, and be liberated by a truer experience of it.
He grew up one of the kids “under the rebbe’s table” playing and listening and then fundamental to the movement, as the kids have always been in Chabad, also the cue and clue for which way Moshiach is going and how and what G-d is trying to tell us.
It’s mostly to have a good time, the best time ever, with truer and more whole clarities.
Baruch’s mysticism was all-encompassing, and deeply integrated into the physical and incarnated. From Shlomo we all took how much this meant caring for and with people, from Leibel Groner he learned how much this was just encouraging people. And himself.
Baruch was and is singular amongst the post-frum chevra [society] around early Footsteps in that seeing through the religion did not mean the end of the religion, but rather, a heightened appreciation for its already accessible frameworks and social opportunities. Parlaying that into the new and better world already in progress, he would ferry so many of us from one side to the other, showing up with joy and presence while listening appreciatively and hopefully for as much real and good as a person had to share.
I can’t begin to describe what a presence and influence he was on my life, modeling the human within the divine, dancing as much as a person could, as late and as far in as a person could, and somehow always be fine. His faith in drugs, specifically cannabis, and entheogens, but also vodka in its way, along with his skepticism and neo-rationalism that always came back into a radical humanism epitomized and wisdom with warmth. I love him so much, and it’s hard to believe he’s ever any less in the world. בנשמה ובגוף גשמי
From Mac Hinelf:
I knew Baruch in the mid 2000s, possibly through Yoseph. This was right around the time of when the Devotional Ministry of Trance was transitioning from public open air events to a “drinking club for Christians, Jews, and Muslims,” taking inspiration from the Isaac & Ishmael restaurant in Tom Robbins‘ Skinny Legs and All. Robbins was a good friend of Terence McKenna.
Baruch would often come to Goa Trash at the Karma lounge after New York Burning Man had its Wednesday nights nearby. Baruch brought me out to a lot of Chabad activities on St Marks in Manhattan and Kensington in south Brooklyn, hanging around eating turkey dogs, laughing at wonderfully bad jokes by a certain Jay Moskowitz, and occasionally bumping into Daniel Pinchbeck in his Kabbalah phase. After I left NYC I lost this precious personal contact with Baruch over the years, what Terrence McKenna called the felt presence of immediate experience, but I will always look back on him fondly as a gateway drug into Jewish mysticism.
You welcomed me in.
Zichrono Livracha my friend.
https://collive.com/baruch-thaler-56-obm/ “The levaya will take place tomorrow, Friday, 9:30 am at 770.”
https://opensiddur.org/profile/baruch-jean-thaler
https://www.theameninstitute.org/baruch-thaler
https://www.neohasid.org/audio/pastakh/
He loved poker!
Baruch Thaler Takes Down the Six Max Event – earns his first gold ring in the six max event at the Horseshoe Baltimore.
Facebook (Baruch was the kind of person who allowed friends to post on his feed)
Youtube
IMDB
