Snakes need Torah. Seek where we please, under the stones of ancient mythology, on the head of Medusa, snakes are loaded up metaphorically with way more than their scales. Forget the donkey. It’s the snake that really carries the burden. As we move through Torah we meet slimy things on the fifth day, before we even face ourselves, man. God says…and the water shall teem with swarms of living creatures…God thus created…every particular species of living thing that crawls and vayaray elohim ki tov. And God saw that it was good ( 1:20- 21). Repeat. And God saw that it was good.
This visual of snakes and slimy things though (here) is wide. A pull-back zoom-camera shot. Soon we zoom-in to the true delicacy of the specific-snake. The snake of snakes leaps out into the scene in Genesis 3:1 without even a transitional phrase. This can only mean one thing. It’s taken for granted that this being, this priest of slithery beasts, has been there all along with Adam and Eve. We read…The man and his wife were both naked but they were not embarrassed by one another…and then immediately…The serpent was the most cunning of all… that God had made. Syntactically therefore, the snake is a given. No introduction needed. No preceding sentence needed. No reason to connect literary perspectives. We do not read (for example)….The man and his wife were unaware of the snake living among them.
Let’s continue. After the Adam and Eve catastrophe…and the loss of Gan Eden… the snake then creeps along through the letters and the white space of Torah, in and out of parshas, between chants and tropes and songs and walls, stamping itself furtively upon each and every boundary, on every single letter and phrase. We can watch it if we squint our eyes a bit. The snake, after all, separates the Shechinah from the other sefirot (according to the Zohar). It represents gevurah, boundaries and words certainly manifest boundaries. We know what is and what isn’t because of words. We use words to discern categories, levels, people, states of being. Letters and words cut through the ephemeral and define the ends and the beginnings, the visual and not so visual reality as we might perceive it. No wonder the staff of Moses might turn into a snake when Moses is proving his prophetic abilities to the Pharoah. The snake is already there. It has been seeking a chance to be seen as a miracle within itself, the vessel necessary to retain the awesome powerful radiance of God. Not to go on a tangent but no wonder it comes back later to drive the Israelites crazy. It’s too much power, too much darkness, too thick and strong for the limited light we humans can reflect.
So a snake would feel comfortable in words, those spoken as well as written, those that fly off our tongue as well as those laboriously crafted in our prayer books. Snakes are comfortable with all language, but the holy language of Hebrew is the dream-house, the dream-space-between the rocks.
But…now we might think…what about at the beginning of Bereshith. God after all, creates the world with words. And there are so many boundaries. The boundary between day and night for example. Between sea and sky. So I ask this: Could this snake of Bereshith have furtively crawled and leaped its way from the wilderness of V’Zot Haberachah…in other words the final parsha of Deuteronomy…and the boundary between life and death ….through the air and right into the very first word of Genesis? Why not, we think, snakes can do that kind of thing.
But there’s more. The snake is not only a character of pre-creation as well as creation, before the beginning and after the end, but in the center as well. The vuv in the Hebrew word for belly…while referring to creatures crawling on their belly… is enlarged in Leviticus 11:42. This vuv is seen by scholars as the very central letter of Torah. There the vuv sits, enlarged like the head of those snakes that swell out to protect themselves, arrogant and obvious. And this occurs in Shemini no less, right after the confounding deaths of the two boys Nadav and Avihu. What nerve! And all along it manages to hook itself between the final lev of Torah (for Torah ends with the lev) and the bet of bershit. The letters lev and bet create the word lev…or heart in Hebrew. And there we have it, as much as we would like to deny it or claim that there is some impermeable boundary between snakes and the rest of reality…between light and darkness…unfortunately our snake is right there pushing its vile head through our hearts. The snake therefore is holy. Not because arrogance is holy. But because it, as well as we, are created by God. In short, if the heart is holy…and it is…then so is the snake.
Isaiah said it in his own words before they were pushed around to create the prayer the Yotzer Or. Baruch atah adonay elohenu melech ha’alom asher yotzer or overah choshech oseh shalom ouverah rah v’hakol. Blessed be God artist of the universe who crafts light, forms darkness, makes peace and creates evil and all.
Does the snake ever go away, we wonder? Does the yetzer harah…our favorite phrase for the snake… ever just dissipate, peter out? How can we make that happen? This is what we do know. If the snake is in Torah then the snake is in us. Because, we are Torah. All of us are gentle and aggressive, logical and dreamy, tough, afraid, lustful, retrained, sloppy, meticulous, open and self-protective. So we can’t get rid of the snake by poking at it, teasing it, wrestling with it, screaming at it, hiding from it, hating it, singing to it, marrying it, divorcing it, re-marrying it, raising ourselves above it, having sex with it, not having sex with it, stomping on it, killing it, voting for it, voting against it, burying it, mourning for it, annihilating it, or pulling it up by its flat or bulbous head and hurling it out the window. Because whatever we are doing to the snake we are doing to ourselves. And we only feed it and make it real fat by myopically acting in response to it.
So then, what do we do? Resh Lakish, a 3rd century amora and great sage, the pupil of Rabbi Judah Nesiah who was the grandson of the great Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi… says that in Genesis the sea keeps expanding until boundaries are created and God rebukes it and causes it to dry up. I am He who said to the world Enough! In this case, limitations are a positive thing. And as a reminder, the snake is the prince of limitations. What about the words we speak? Before the Amidah we request that they be holy, that we create inner boundaries in our expressions to God and to the God-in each other. Two whole parshas in fact (Metzorah and Tazria) according to Talmudic rabbis, are dedicated to lashon harah. So we need the guile, and the harsh discernment of the snake to keep ourselves bound to God and aware of our behavior and words. To continue, in Exodus, it is the visual snake that heals the Israelites from the bite of the snake. The snake, in other words, leads the world in healing and homeopathy. Still, however, in the Zohar we find this: Then the three (Adam Eve and the snake) were brought to justice and the lower world was cursed and could not firmly endure due to the slime of the serpent until Israel stood at Mt Sinai. So, we now realize, there’s a way for us to survive beyond Snake-dom. It’s called Mt Sinai.
I now want to relate a personal story. I teach. I write fiction and I get all kinds of aspiring novelists in my community college classroom. Novelists, in general, aren’t known for their deep humility. And my rabbinic studies are not a part of what I teach. So it is really not my job to teach students how to behave….though I am often tempted. Well recently I’ve been faced with one of the biggest personality challenges in my twelve year tenure. Try as I might, for weeks a certain student wouldn’t calm down. How was I to handle him? Finally, just a few days ago, he was talking on and on. And finally in a very motherly tone… I said…now now, that’s enough, there are other people here who want a chance as well. It was extremely motherly. And he stopped. He relented. Other students sighed in relief and I saw what I had done. I had calmed the arrogance with the reflection of love.
The only way to deal with the snake therefore is by loving the snake. As hard as it might be. When arrogance and fear are being served your way…when thoughts are sharp and words deadly….when the bite is poison and the jungle is filled with morphing beasts and prickly shadows…all we can do is fill ourselves with enough faith and radiance and shine it with a blow torch if we must. This is what I think. We just shine it. And the snake no longer eats through our heart but curls up next to it, asleep and dreaming. The Mt Sinai fire rains down on us and we have the ability to know God face to face. This is when the snake becomes the staff and the staff becomes the snake. This is when we can return to Gan Eden… because the angels and their fiery swords become simple apparitions of a time and a cycle through which we have evolved and transformed. It is love that brings us to God. It’s love that we harvest and in-gather to raise to God. It’s love that brings us to a consciousness that is beyond human, beyond snake and beyond beast in a pure white space between beginning and end, in the one exquisite pre-moment of creation, always in the now catch of the breath. Love. Just love.
The Sfas Emet says this: The world was created by 10 divine utterances so that the very life of the world would also derive from Torah. The task of humans is to...show how every deed takes place through the life energy of God. A person who acts in accordance with this Torah-power, fulfilling the creator’s will, renews the light that lies hidden within the natural world.
The poet Kabir says this: Rain can be destructive, wiping out boundary marks. But the soil needs care. Ecstatic love has sprouts now and renunciation. Let the rain feed both. Only the farmer with intelligence actually brings his harvest back to his farmyard. He will fill his granary bins and feed both the wise men and the saints.
How do we apply this to today? I think this: When we see the snake sneaking up...into us…into others…we can just imagine that swollen head…that tiny being within all that puffed up glory. If we can see this…really see it…we can transform the dialogue or the behavior patterns…rather than react. We can calm the snake and even love it. When we say things we wish we hadn’t…we can still love ourselves and not judge too harshly. When we meditate we can embrace our shadow rather than push it away. We can see the light moving through our minds and hearts and hands and allow the snake tightening our hearts to relax and even melt away. We can become friends with the snake and laugh at its tenacity. We can bless each other openly.
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