Genesis Cycle 5 Bereshith

Bereshith

Catching the Snake

Snakes love humanity.  Forget the donkey. It’s the snake that lovingly carries the burden. In Torah we meet them on the fifth day.  God thus created…every particular species of living thing that crawls. And God saw that it was good (Genesis 1:20- 21). Repeat. And God saw that it was good.

Soon the snake-of-snakes leaps into the scene in Genesis 3:1 without even a transitional phrase. We read…The man and his wife were both naked but not embarrassed…then immediately…The serpent was the most cunning of all… that God had made. Syntactically therefore, the snake is a given.  The snake has been there all along. No introduction needed. We do not read (for example)….The man and his wife were unaware of the snake near them. 

Let’s continue. After the loss of Gan Eden the snake then creeps through the letters and white space of Torah, in and out of parshot, between verses. We can watch it if we squint a bit. The snake, after all, separates the Shechinah from the other sefirot (Zohar). It represents gevurah, boundaries and therefore clings to our words. The snake discerns categories, levels, states of mind. No wonder the staff of Moses turns into a snake when he’s proving his prophecy to the Pharoah. The snake is already there. It has been seeking a chance to be seen as a miracle, the vessel necessary to retain the awesome radiance of God. No wonder it later drives the Israelites crazy. It’s too much power, too strong for the limited light we humans can reflect.

So a snake feels comfortable in words, those that fly off our tongue and those in our prayer books, those that echo in our minds to the third generation, to the third manifestation of one soul on earth.  The Hebrew of Torah  is the snake-dream-home, the dream-space-between the rocks. The closer to God (we are) the closer the snake wants to get as well.

But now I ask this: Could this snake of Bereshith have furtively crawled and leaped its way from the wilderness of V’zot Haberachah…the final parshah of Deuteronomy…and the boundary between life and death ….through the air and into Genesis? Why not, we think, snakes can do that kind of thing.

There’s more. The snake is not only at pre-creation and creation, but in the center as well. The enlarged vuv  in Leviticus 11:42 is seen by scholars as the central letter of Torah. This vuv is in the word gahon, the belly of the snake. There the vuv sits, arrogant and obvious. And in Shemini no less, right after the confounding deaths of the two boys Nadav and Avihu! What nerve! And there we have it, as much as we would like to claim that there is some impermeable boundary between snakes and the rest of us unfortunately our snake is right there pushing its vile head through the center of our hearts. The snake therefore is holy. In short, if Torah is holy…and it is…then so is the snake.

Does the snake ever go away, we wonder?

 This is what we know. If the snake is in Torah then it is in us. Because, we are Torah. All of us are gentle, aggressive, dreamy, logical, tough, afraid, lustful, retrained, sloppy, meticulous, open and self-protective. We can’t manipulate the snake by poking at it, teasing it, wrestling with it, screaming at it,  hating it, singing to it, marrying it, divorcing it,  concealing it, having sex with it, not having sex with it, stomping on it, voting for it, burying it, mourning for it, obliterating it, or pulling it up by its head and hurling it out the window. Because whatever we do to the snake we do to ourselves. And we only feed it by myopically acting in response to it.

So then, what do we do?  Resh Lakish, a 3^rd century amora (from Judaea) the pupil of Rabbi Judah Nesiah the grandson of  Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi… says this:  In Genesis the sea keeps expanding until boundaries are created and God causes it to dry up…. I am He who said to the world: Enough!

In this case, limitations (and snakes) are a positive thing. We need the harsh discernment of the snake. To continue, in Exodus, it is the visual snake that heals the Israelites from the snake- bite. The snake 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…until Israel stood at Mt Sinai.  We now realize, there’s a way for us to survive beyond Snake-dom. It’s called Mt Sinai.

The way to deal with the snake therefore is through revelation. When the bite is poison and the jungle is filled with morphing beasts we are to fill ourselves with faith. The snake no longer eats through our heart but merges with it. The Mt Sinai fire rains down on us and we know God face to face.

 It is love that brings us to God…. that we harvest and in-gather to raise to God… that brings us to a consciousness beyond both human and snake between beginning and end in the now catch of the breath. If snakes love humanity then it is the burden of humanity to greet the snake with love. 

The Sfas Emet says: 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.

How do we apply this to today? When we see the snake sneaking up we can transform our patterns rather than react. We can embrace our shadow rather than push it away. We can 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.