Lost in Thought
The Promise of Paradox in Chukat
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.” Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover. (Numbers 21:8-9)
[King Hezekiah] removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah; and he broke in pieces the copper serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did offer to it; and it was called Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18:4)
Zeuxis, a skilled painter, completes an image of a boy carrying grapes. He then leaves it outside and hides in the bushes to observe how the birds might treat it. Three birds approach. The first pecks at the fruit, but the second spies the boy, is frightened, and flies off. Zeuxis happily determines that with this painting he had finally achieved true verisimilitude. A third bird, however, stops in front of the painting and assumes a pose of contemplation, seemingly lost in thought. (Apocryphal story as told by Graham Burnett and Sal Randolph)
Parashat Chukat is replete with paradoxes: The ashes of the red heifer simultaneously purify the people and impurify the priest who sprinkles them. The people despair of their journey precisely when they are most proximate to the Promised Land. The burning serpent whose presence terrorizes and destroys becomes an image of healing and forgiveness. Notably, this parasha is also the one in which Miriam and Aaron both die, and the one in which Moses is sentenced to death. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “What is and what is not create each other.”
It strikes me as non-coincidental that the very parasha in which the Israelite leaders all die (two, in fact, and one, in premonition) is also one that features a strange plague of serpents. For the serpent in the Garden of Eden was the original harbinger of death, but also of discovery (another paradox), of life beyond death. The snake of Genesis combines knowledge and mortality, the ambivalent entwinement of loss and growth. Moreover, that original snake uses language—and rhetorical manipulation—to bring about our displacement. The desert is the place of abandonment, the wasteland that is the foil of paradise. The desert is language and all language is a desert (he said, in a post-war French accent). That is why all the rebellion in the desert is a rebellion primarily of speech. Most of the drama is dialogical—little happens. We move and we grumble.
Throughout Numbers, the people sin with speech, with complaint, as if continuing to play out the legacy of the serpent, recapitulating its twisted logic, its clever thought. Commentaries emphasize that Miriam, Moses, and Aaron also fail in their speech, Miriam by slandering Moses, and Moses and Aaron by slandering the people—the leaders are victims of the serpent as well as its unwitting perpetrators. Serpents represent the way in which all language is a kind of slander—a mis-representation of Being, a hearsay about what is.
Persuasion and education are not the same. Gorgias says persuasion is a kind of coercion, like seduction—it takes away the agency of the other, uses the other. The snake knows how to persuade, and so do we. We are usually at our most self-deceived when we are persuading ourselves. (I’m doing it now.) Language has a way of moving us when perhaps it shouldn’t. The Talmud likens evil speech to murder. (I wrote more about the meaning of gossip here.) But that itself is hyperbole. To equate the slanderer and the murderer is itself a form of slander. Mispeaking is contagious. One snake leads to many. One kvetch multiplies. The word is a virus, each serpent a variant.
Where does the snake come from? Shouldn’t he be satisfied now that we’ve eaten from the tree of knowledge? Weren’t we done with him? Perhaps not—since our entry into the Promised Land is a kind of re-entry into the Garden. We know the serpent was a figure of healing in the ancient world; the Greeks worshipped in the cult of Asclepius, whose image still affixes on the sides of many ambulances.
The shocking part isn’t the reappearance of the snake, but the fact that we are told to stare at his image—as a way of healing from his bites. Rabeinu Bachya and Ramban note not just the oddity, but the miraculousness, of such a thing: normally looking at the image of something that hurt you can bring up trauma. In this case, staring at the worst brings the best. And Bachya adds the extra detail that the snake-image Moses constructed looked even more deadly and vicious than the original. Both call the healing by image a “miracle within a miracle.” In fact, the technique of visualizing the worst head-on is now common in CBT—things are fearsome when we run from them yet manageable when we confront them.
A lot of commentaries focus on a slight difference between God’s command—to make a seraph or burning serpent—and Moses’s response, which is to make a copper serpent. Perhaps it’s that Moses takes matters into his own artistic hands; perhaps he’s engaged in word-play, making a visual pun on the fact that nachash means snake and n’choshet means copper (and/or that copper looks like it’s on fire). Regardless, the slippage between God’s command and Moses’s response suggests—at a meta-level—the impossibility of staying true to an original command. Moses evinces the problem of language—even good, faithful language—as beholden to the fragility of translation. God tells man not to eat from the tree of knowledge; the woman tells the snake she’s not allowed to touch the tree. We can’t but mistake our own voice for the voice of the other.
Oral Law often involves adding extra protections and stringencies to prevent us from committing a core Biblical infraction. Thus, “don’t eat” becomes “don’t touch” and “don’t touch” becomes “don’t look.” Vision is the first step down the slippery slope to consumption. Yet the response to the snake isn’t “don’t look.” On the contrary, it’s “Look!” Granted, the snake we’re looking at is an image, not the real thing. But here’s my speculative-poetic guess as to why that is: in looking at a representation of a snake we grasp the snake as a being that represents. In so doing, we deprive the snake of its power, because we realize that his words—and our own—are only representations of what is, but not full accounts. When we grasp the limits of language we become humble. How can we possibly hope to explicate our situation in words? Would we bring bad (and/or misleading) reports about the land, or about others, if we considered our language was only language?
Humility about language is the essence of faith. When the people rebel against God it is because they are rebelling with language; they are taking their words as knowledge, instead of as incomplete commentary on a reality that eludes them.
So that’s it? Meditate on an image of a snake and be healed?! Sounds pretty primitive, and also kind of pagan, no? Well, the Torah acknowledges that it was or became a problem, because eventually the healing-snake had to be destroyed. The people were worshipping it, missing the entire point. The Torah is refreshingly cynical, here, showing how anything can be gamed, weaponized, manipulated—pure ideas don’t guarantee pure actors. Moses’s spontaneous creation eventually calcifies into an idol. Great words, when institutionalized, lose their pulse and become dead letters. Avant garde art eventually becomes canonical and de-fanged. Even “make it new” becomes a tiresome injunction. The problem isn’t just language, then; all representation suffers from incompleteness. Life is singular, yet codification aims at repetition and standardization. The image of the snake is placed on a flagpole—it scales. But for that reason it eventually becomes a harm again. Harm becomes help becomes harm becomes help. The paradox moves in both directions, and often both at once.
There is a story told about the painter Zeuxis that he painted grapes so true to life that he fooled others into wanting to reach out and touch them. Yet contemplation comes to those who see the paint, not the grapes, or who see both at once. The snake on the flag is and is not an actual snake, is and is not the original snake of the Garden, is and is not the problem of communication. When the people in the Book of Kings turn the snake-image into a utility, make the Mosaic miracle into a drug, a technology, they become absorbed. Perhaps they are like art collectors who treat paintings primarily as commodities. But the healing doesn’t come from the snake or its image; the healing comes from contemplation, from our ability to notice a gap between how we think things are and how things are. Contemplation is the realization that our thoughts are not the be-all and end-all.
The desert is the perfect place to be contemplative, but also the worst place. It’s perfect because we’re in formation, lost, untethered to territory and routine. The desert is a natural retreat. But it’s the worst because the anxiety about getting somewhere else, the uncertainty about the future, and the sheer discomfort of the journey, make it painful. Why would we want to notice our thoughts when our thoughts are so noisily telling us how scared or angry we are? Speech can be a form of externalization, a way of avoiding difficult silence.
Rebellion is the people’s response to their discomfort with themselves. Ironically, this means that being with God and being with ourselves require the same patience, the same awe. If we can cultivate that patience and awe when contemplating the things that most threaten our sense of security, we will be healed.
Then, we will be able to say “I will fear no bad thing, because You are with me.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—For more on language and paradox, check out my new mega thread on Heraclitus.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
If you appreciate this work and feel moved to support it, you can make a tax deductible donation here.
You may also enjoy my daily question newsletter, What is Called Thinking?