The Snake Within

The Snake Within

Torah Portion Chukkat 2024 (based on prior versions)

How do people heal? I don’t mean in general. If I am injured or sick, I believe in western medicine. Physicians, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceuticals – the whole shebang. I also make use of Eastern, Northern and Southern medicine. Anything that works.

My question, ‘how do people heal?’ refers to that delicate moment in which you’ve already taken the full treatment from whichever geographic part of the globe to which you go, and something lies in the balance. A person is 50/50. Something else happens.

Prayers from others? Divine intervention? One’s own will? Some mysterious mixture of them all? I say “yes.” People ask me if I pray for healing. I say, yes, along with any other treatment that works. There are some moments, perhaps rare, in which the presence of healing energy, from others, from God, from within, is all you have left, and it just barely tips the scale. Don’t rely on miracles, but don’t shun them, either.

Let’s pick a not so random example from our Torah portion, for instance – a snake bite. From what I know, if a person is bitten by a poisonous snake, don’t use a tourniquet, bite, cut or suck the wound, rely on snake stones, give the person alcohol, or do anything except keep the person calm, keep the wounded area below the heart, and get them anti-venom treatment ASAP. Nothing else works on any continent. That’s what I read.

One of the last things that would come to mind for a poisonous snake bite is looking at a copper snake on a staff, unless you were familiar the bizarre little anecdote told in this week’s Torah portion, Chukkat, specifically, Numbers 21:5-9. Here is the story: The new generation of Israelites rediscovered the old-time religion of their parents – being disgruntled, either about something real or sometimes about things completely made up. The new generation, like their doomed parents, took to complaining about the so-called rotten bread, otherwise referred to as manna from heaven.

As is often pointed out, the God-Of-The-Hebrew-Bible (not the God I believe in, but the God the author of the text wrote about) had a very low threshold for tolerating complaints. This time the biblical God sics fiery snakes on the people. Their complaining minds were distracted from their made-up complaints about the quality of the recent batch of manna. People were dying of snake venom.

The Israelites adroitly repented and asked Moses to pray for them. Moses did so, and in response the biblical God tells Moses to craft an image of a “s’raf” (a fiery serpent), proclaiming that when any bitten person looks at it, they will live. Moses takes to making a “n’chash (snake) nechoshet (copper),” a sculpture of a copper snake

A few things here. First, I can imagine Moses whipping out his coppersmith manual and getting to work. I can see anxious snake-bite victims gathering around, maybe throwing out some advice here and there on how to speed up the smelting and Moses saying, “Watching me work won’t make it go any faster.”

Second, something else is going on. “Nachash” means “snake,” and “nechoshet” means “copper.” The two words share the sound of nachash. We are taken back to snake in the garden of Eden, equipoised in the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.  A play on words is lurking about in the mind of the biblical author, like “iron clad irony.”

Third, the “snake on a staff” theme is ancient, very ancient. Sumeria had an image of a god depicted as a snake (representing healing) entwined around an axial rod, symbolizing a tree of life. Wow – a snake and tree of life in ancient Sumerian mythology! What’s with the snake?

Apparently, the capacity of a snake to shed its skin and appear young again mystified the ancients. It was as if the snake could heal itself of aging, and all other ailments, as well. The snake, as it were, knew the secret to eternal life. (Our Garden of Eden story with God, the snake, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life, the sting and two fall guys gets a bit more complex).

One finds this tradition of the snake entwined on the staff representing healing in our present biblical text, and also in more well-known Greek mythology. The ancient Greek image of the Rod of Asclepius (the Greek god of healing) is used all over the world to represent the field of medicine. (The association of healing with the caduceus – two snakes on a rod with wings – is a mistake.)

Our biblical text that tells of the healing snake, then, is rooted in an ancient Near Eastern tradition connecting snakes with healing, a tradition that arrived in Greece, and it reappears today. (It seems very odd to me that the field of Western medicine, perhaps the apex of practical science, has chosen to symbolize itself with an ancient god of healing, Asclepius, who is symbolized by the even more ancient snake and staff imagery.)

After this snake infestation wanes, what happened to the snake on the staff? Apparently, it was kept around until King Hezekiah had the snake and staff of Moses destroyed – see II Kings 18:4.

How did the ancient rabbis understand all of this? The rabbis of the Talmud were incredulous that the staff worked as described. They said, in tractate Rosh HaShanah 29a, that when people looked up at the snake on the staff, it reminded them to pray to their Father in heaven, and that’s why they were healed. I don’t think the ancient rabbis even believed that themselves. No, the people probably did really believe that looking at the staff might heal them. Believing in a placebo can have miraculous effects. Or maybe it wasn’t a placebo. “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

For me, the question, “how do people heal when the matter hangs on a thread?” is the physical version of the question of how people transform at all. How does a false person become a true person? How does an addict become sober? How does a depressed person return to life? How does anger turn to forgiveness? Resentment to understanding? Denial to confession? Willful ignorance to troubled wisdom? In what unconscious realm is the will to truth activated, surging its way into consciousness and life?

Let’s ask it this way. How does that inner, misfiring force arise, that would rather have us complain than solve, that would rather us blame than face ourselves? That snake within does not want us to know that there is a snake within. The snake within envenoms secretly. The venom of the snake within can attack us and everyone around us but relies on our not knowing that we have been poisoned.

The beginning of the anti-venom to the bite of the snake within is to see the snake.