The Ambiguity of Evil
An Existential Reading of Numbers 21:8-9
“Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole; anyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live" (Numbers 21:8).”
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. (2 Kings 18:4)
Rabbi Nahman said in Rabbi Samuel's name: 'Behold, it was good' refers to the Good Desire; 'And behold, it was very good' refers to the Evil Desire. (It only says 'very good' after man was created with both the good and bad inclinations, in all other cases it only says 'and God saw that it was good') Can then the Evil Desire be very good? That would be extraordinary! But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children; and thus said Solomon: 'Again, I considered all labour and all excelling in work, that it is a man's rivalry with his neighbour.' (Ecclesiastes 4:4). (Bereishit Rabbah 9:7)
If everything is from God, then what is evil? This profound theological question is the subject of a strange episode in this week’s parasha, Chukat.
After God punishes the people for complaining with serpents, God then grants a remedy; anyone who looks at a representation of the serpent will be healed and live.
But this same serpent, we learn centuries later, becomes Nehushtan—a name that transforms the sculpture from instrument of healing into object of scorn and idolatry. King Hezekiah “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it” (2 Kings 18:4). The very object that served to reconnect God and the people after error became the very obstacle to their relationship and mechanism of continued waywardness.
The bronze serpent’s trajectory suggests that monotheism and idolatry exist not as fixed categories but as dynamic tendencies, modes of relating that can shift even while the object remains materially unchanged, that good and bad, deviance and integrity, are more entwined than we might think.
Carl Jung writes about the shadow as that part of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge, not necessarily evil, but certainly unwanted, incompatible with our conscious self-image. What makes shadow work so difficult is that we cannot simply eliminate these rejected aspects of ourselves; we must learn to integrate them consciously, lest they operate destructively from the unconscious.
The bronze serpent episode presents us with a kind of collective shadow work. The people are afflicted by serpents, creatures that, since Eden, have represented the most primal forms of temptation and rebellion. But healing comes not through destroying the serpents or fleeing from them, but through looking at a serpent, making conscious what has been operating unconsciously. Ironically, their ability to stare at this serpent and make the implicit the explicit is not sustained.
The Zohar teaches that the serpent reminded the people of why they deserved punishment, making repentance possible. But clearly they forgot how to look at it. In one Midrash, it was not the serpent’s image that offered healing, but rather its height. By looking up, the people looked towards God. In a way they were intended to look beyond the serpent, but over time became distracted by it. In philosophical terms, we might say that God is not a Being, and yet it is so difficult to maintain this abstract awareness that we continuously revert to imagining God as a being.
Nietzsche’S notion of going “beyond good and evil” is often misunderstood as a rejection of moral categories altogether. But Nietzsche is more subtle than that. He seeks to understand the interdependence of good and evil, the way they define each other. As he writes, “The great periods of our life occur when we gain the courage to rechristen what is bad about us as what is best.”
The bronze serpent embodies this spiritual alchemy perfectly. The same object serves as medicine and poison, depending not on its essential nature but on how it’s approached. When it mediates healing, it’s sacred; when it becomes an end in itself, it’s idolatrous. When it is regarded with sincere remorse, it provides opportunity for self-reflection; when it becomes a routine or a spectacle, it no loses its ability to challenge.
Pirkei Avot teaches “Everything that the Holy One created in His world, He created only for His glory” (Avot 6:11). This includes the serpent, the evil inclination, evil itself. As the Baal Shem Tov taught, evil has no independent existence; it’s simply divine energy that has become concealed from its source. Evil is good that does not know itself as such. The bronze serpent represents evil in the process of being unveiled, returned to its divine origin.
But this process is inherently unstable. The moment the serpent becomes an object of worship rather than a medium of recognition, it falls back into concealment. The very success of its healing function creates the conditions for its spiritual failure.
This psychological ambivalence extends beyond objects to character traits themselves. The Mishnah tells us that the evil inclination is necessary. “Were it not for the yetzer hara, no man would build a house, take a wife, or beget children” (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). Desire, ambition, even anger and jealousy serve essential functions in human life. The question is not whether we have these impulses, but how we relate to them. How do we turn the snakes that bite us—our worse moments of judgment—into statues we can look at with circumspection. Not to worship, but to understand, integrate, and work through.
The same aggressive energy that leads to sin can, when redirected, become the force that breaks through spiritual complacency. The same pride that separates us from others can become the self-respect necessary for genuine relationships. But the flip is also true.
Jung called this process “enantiodromia”—the tendency of psychological attitudes to transform into their opposites when taken to extremes.
The recogntion that evil is from God is the teaching of the bronze serpent, but the separation of the bronze servant and the hypostatization of the demonic into its own force represents is never far away.
The moment the bronze serpent becomes an object in its own right rather than a symbol pointing beyond itself, it falls back into separation. This is why Hezekiah’s destruction of it is necessary. The people cannot practice nondual awareness, and so require monotheistic and iconoclastic guard-rails
From a Jungian perspective, the entire bronze serpent episode can be read as a process of collective projection and integration. The people are initially unconscious of their rebellious, destructive impulses—these operate autonomously, appearing as external threats (the serpents).
Moses’s creation of the bronze serpent externalizes these impulses in a form that can be consciously engaged. By looking at the serpent on the pole, the people acknowledge the serpentine element within themselves without being overwhelmed by it. The healing comes through this conscious acknowledgment.
But projection has a way of reasserting itself. Over time, the bronze serpent ceases to function as a mirror for inner work and becomes instead a repository for projected divine power. What began as an aid to self-knowledge becomes an obstacle to direct relationship with the divine.
In our therapeutic age, we might recognize the bronze serpent as anticipating what we now call exposure therapy—healing through controlled confrontation with what we fear. But the Torah’s version contains something our secular therapies often lack: an understanding that the source of healing is not technique but recognition of the divine creativity that underlies all existence, including its most problematic manifestations.
The bronze serpent teaches us that healing requires neither the denial of difficulty nor surrender to it, but rather a form of sacred attention that can see divine creativity even in destruction, divine purpose even in rebellion. This attention is inherently unstable. It must be constantly renewed, never allowed to crystallize into fixed forms or final answers.
The serpent on the pole points beyond itself to a more fundamental truth: that divine creativity underlies all existence, that nothing falls outside the scope of potential redemption, and that the difference between medicine and poison often lies not in the substance itself but in the quality of attention we bring to it. The practical question of how to attend to what is most difficult remains an open one. Moses takes a higher-risk, higher-reward path. Hezekiah take a more conservative one.
Each of us must decide whether we should be courageous enough to face our own serpents directly, or wise enough to destroy the pedestals we build beneath them.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
It seems to me this relates to Goodhart's Law, so well known in management. In order to improve at any complex constructive endeavor, we need metrics to guide and goad us-- looking at these metrics is like looking at the serpent on the pole. But when the metric becomes the end in itself, when we "game the system" in pursuit of the metric and forget the thing it is supposed to help us get to, that is the corruption of idolatry.