SNAKES ON A PLAIN: PARASHAT CHUKKAT, 5770

I remember it so clearly.  This was when my wife, Jennifer and I were first getting to know each other, falling in love.  It’s an amazing time in any relationship. There we were, driving around Canton, Ohio in the August evening, enjoying the company, each of us, of someone we surely knew even then would be a major part of our lives from that point on.  

It was then, at the height of our initial courtship that my future wife, and mother of our children turned to me and said these unforgettable words.

“You complain a LOT. You know that?”

Yeah, well, I come by it honestly.  I grew up in New York where kvetching is a cultural right.  You may know the old story:  two old Jews are eating lunch at at deli.  The first one says “The food here is terrible!”  and the second replies, ‘Yes--and such small portions!”.

Well, it should come as no surprise that the Israelites are complaining--again.  This time, they are particularly obnoxious.  Again and again, they complain.  The food is terrible--and such small portions!

Finally, God has heard enough.  And he sends fire-serpents to bite them.  Many Israelites die.  Lots of Israelites getting killed is nothing unusual for the book of Numbers.  But Fire-Serpents? When people talk about the Old Testament God, this is what they have in mind.

Naturally, the people come to Moses, beg for forgiveness and help, and God instructs Moses to make a copper snake statue and put it on a standard--a flagpole thingy.  

This Copper Serpent--Nachash Nechoshet--had amazing powers.  If you were bitten by a fire-serpent all you had to do was gaze upon the copper idol and you were cured. 

Wait a minute. Did I just say copper idol?  

What is Moses doing with a copper serpent?  And one with magical divine healing powers?  

At least one biblical commentator suggests the Israelites were not worshipping the copper serpent, but rather submitting and looking up to God for help.  Yeah. Right.  I’m sure. 

So here’s today’s mystery, friends.  How do we make sense of this story?  How can we justify Moses making a magic snake pole, aside from the explanation that God told him to do it.  Of course, it’s good enough to just say “God said so”.  But if we accepted that argument we wouldn’t be sitting here.  Well, the men would be sitting here.  The women would be sitting there. (Pointing to the balcony).

Certainly, God has the ability, right and power to make exceptions to any rule he gives us.  And absent any other explanation, that would suffice.  But there is another explanation that is, in my opinion, almost as cool as the fact that God sends fire-snakes to bite people who complain too much. And I’ll come back to that.

But first, I want you to consider this text from another part of the bible, that covers material that happens much later in time.  During the reign of king Hezekiah.

IIk18.3 [Hezekiah] did what was pleasing to the LORD, just as his father David had done. He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan. He trusted only in the LORD the God of Israel; there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those before him. 

Aha! So the copper snake on a pole has a name!  Nehushtan.  And it turns out that the Israelites were offering sacrifices to it all that time, for hundreds of years! It became an item of worship.

Hezekiah is considered among the few good Kings the Jews ever had.  He is remembered for helping bring the Judeans back to the worship of God alone and for getting rid of idols and other forbidden practices that had crept into our society over the years. 

But the fact that it became an object of idolatry makes it that much harder to believe that God or Moses would support making such a thing in the first place.

And so I offer this explanation.   The story of Moses making the copper serpent may in fact be a much later story that was edited into the text of the Torah as a way of explaining how people came to worship the copper serpent.  

You see, archaeologists find figures of snakes all over the place.  We know from our own day that snakes are seen as a symbol of healing--think about the staff of Asclepius--the symbol of the American Medical Association.  A snake wrapped around a staff.  Sound familiar?

The Greeks, like the Egyptians, and the Canannites, and the Hebrews all saw snakes as symbols of healing.  They can shed their skin and be renewed!  Their venom can kill, but also has healing properties.  Even today, Antivenin is made from the venom itself.  

So, it makes sense that the ancient Jews would also see the snake as a powerful symbol.   The Nehushtan--the copper serpent seems to be a distinctly Jewish version of a common pagan practice.   The legend probably existed for a long time that Moses himself made the Snake at God’s command, which makes venerating it acceptable.  Along with complaining, we Jews are very, very good at justification. King Hezekiah does away with it. Good for him.

Why should this matter?  It matters because if, in fact, the story of the snakes and the statue and the magic were in fact edited in to the Torah along with other stories and events, it makes the text more relevant, more wonderous, more interesting.  For, on top of the obvious traditions and history it contains and the ethical and moral lessons it imparts, it provides unending challenges and puzzles.  What an amazing treasure we have!  The Torah of Moses contains more than we ever imagined, including hints at how earlier and yet still ancient generations of our people dealt with making Torah relevant and meaninful in their day.  The interpolation (fancy word) of the Nachash Nechoshet story as an origin of Nehushtan worship by Jews in the days of King Hezekiah is but one of many examples of this kind of internal midrash. 

This is a very difficult thing to understand, to be sure. and I would like to leave it at that for now.  And so we return to the simpler and perhaps more relevant question.  What is the moral of the story?

“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is , says Shakespeare’s King Lear,
To have a thankless child!”

A reference, perhaps unintentional--to the plague of vipers that God sends to smite the Israelites when once again they turn ungrateful.

As though to demonstrate how painful it is for Moses and God to hear these complaints again and again.  As though the poison of the serpents that burned those they bit from the inside was a metaphor for the ingratitude poisoning the souls of those who could not appreciate the blessings they had.

What profound wisdom.  We so often take our blessings for granted.  We so rarely appreciate all we do have.  We are those Israelites.  

I recently came across a wonderful illustration of this and I’d like to share it with you. 

If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world.  If you have money in the bank, your wallet and some spare change, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.  IF you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million people who will not survive this week. If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the agony of imprisonment or the horrible pangs of starvation, you are luckier than 500 million people alive and suffering.

And if you can pick up that prayerbook and understand it at all,  you are more fortunate than 3 billion people in the world who cannot read.  

So let us be grateful, indeed.  Shabbat Shalom.