The Torah, “Numbers,” 21:7 – 21:9: And the people came to Moses, and said:”We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee; pray unto the LORD, that He take away the serpents from us.” And Moses prayed for the people.
And the LORD said unto Moses: “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live.”
And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the pole; and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived.
A brass serpent is a symbol of what is depicted to a person by his egoistic idol. The Torah seems to tell us to realize, “look, it is simply made of brass, why do you bow to it?” Therefore, if you “see the serpent” now, which means if you feel it inside you on that level, it heals you.
From his height, from the height of Bina [1], Moses makes a serpent on the level of the still nature as it actually is and not the way it is depicted to a person. We think that this serpent provides the infinite pleasure one can feel on earth, in our world and in the spiritual world, everywhere. This means that instead of the Creator [2], we see a serpent.
Moses’ serpent seems to say that the ego [3] is merely an idol. And so whoever sees it as still nature that is on a pole immediately heals since he realizes that there is no reason to pray to an idol.
Question: What does it mean to “set it upon a pole?”
Answer: It means that even in the form of still nature the serpent is held only thanks to the pole that symbolizes faith. The serpent is basically a person’s force of motion. We advance with it because if the ego disappeared, we would remain on level zero.
Comment: But until now Moses advanced with a rod without a serpent…
Answer: It is because a rod on the level of Moses is Bina. If the serpent sits on Bina, we see that it is a piece of brass from which a person can make an idol, which means nothing! In other words, if we look at our ego through the point in the heart, we begin to realize that it isn’t worth spending our whole life on it.
You can write whole novels about the serpent because it is our sophisticated ego, a cunning beast that is close to man. It always appears as an evil, cunning figure and a cause of alert in all the folk tales. Man has an instinctive fear of serpents and isn’t afraid of anything in the same way that stems from the spiritual roots of the ego.
We can use the ego in two ways: on the one hand, the serpent’s venom is a medicine, that a person’s health depends on, and on the other hand, it is death. Not every venom is a medicine.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/1/15
Related Material:
Zigzags Along The Spiritual Path [4]
The Rebellion Of The Internal Canaanites [5]
“Do Not Trust Yourself Until You Die” [6]