Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] So there is this strange story in the Torah that when Jews were traveling through the desert, there was a time when they were attacked by snakes and snakes were biting them. And when snakes were biting them, their sting, their bite was deadly. People who would be bit by snakes would die.
[00:00:23] And Moishe Rabbeinu, Moses turns to God and God tells them, make a snake and put it on a big tall staff, on a big tall stick and put it in the middle of the Jewish camp. And Jews, when they will look up onto this snake, they will get healed.
[00:00:42] And that's what happened.
[00:00:44] So Moshe on his own figures to make it out of copper. The snake was made out of copper.
[00:00:51] Why?
[00:00:52] It is because, as our commentaries say, Moishe knew that God, whenever God gives him some instructions, God gives him complete information that he needs to know. And if God did not say explicitly what the snake should be made out of. So in Hebrew word snake is nachash and copper in Hebrew is nechoshet, which is the same root, the same shoresh of three letters, Nun, chet and shin.
[00:01:22] So Moshe figured that if God tell him to make nachash and did not tell him what to make it out of, it has to be something that has the same wording, which is nechoshet. So he makes a snake out of copper and he puts it, and the Jews that look at it are healed.
[00:01:41] What does this whole story mean? It's a very strange story. First of all, why would suddenly Jews start dying because of bite of a snake? And then why would they be healed from looking at a snake? Doesn't make any sense.
[00:01:53] The answer is that what is a snake in the Torah, the first mention of the snake and the main mention of the snake that we have in the five books of Moses is the very beginning of the book of Bereshi Genesis, when it's speaking about the sin of tree of knowledge. When Adam and Eve, Adam and Chava were in the Garden of Eden, the one who convinced them to eat the fruit of knowledge was a snake and snake. Therefore, who was at fault for the first original sin. And this is why they were kicked out of Garden of Eden. To the extent that also besides being kicked out of Garden of Eden, what does it mean they were kicked out? God told Adam that when you will eat from this fruit, you will die.
[00:02:39] Adam didn't die immediately, but he became capable of dying.
[00:02:44] So death was brought into this world by the snake.
[00:02:48] If not for the snake and if not for this fruit of tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve would live forever. They would not die Adam and Eve and people subsequently started dying because of that sin, to the point that it says that whenever people would sin, anytime afterwards, there is at least a little bit of that original sin of the fruit of knowledge was mixed into whatever they were doing. In other words, whenever we do something wrong, it is in part because we are pushed by, propelled by this original sin. And whenever people die today, it is because of this original sin.
[00:03:26] So we see the role of the snake here. Now, what happened historically, that when people were living in this world, from the time when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Garden of Eden till when the Torah was given, people were living and dying like they were supposed to after the sin.
[00:03:45] But then when the Torah was given, really they were supposed to redeem everything that was done wrong by this sin. In other words, when the Torah was given, the idea was the Torah was given, the Mashiach would come, and the way it was meant to be originally, when Adam and Eve were in Garden of Eden, and the plan was that Moishe Rabbeinu, Moses, would take the Jews into the land of Israel, and they would live there forever, like they were meant to originally.
[00:04:13] And the world would be without any problems that we are encountering today.
[00:04:19] So that also means that people would be living forever.
[00:04:22] Death would be nullified, death would be abolished with the giving of the Torah. And it happened, but it didn't last.
[00:04:30] Death was abolished for 39 days.
[00:04:33] Because then Jews had another problem that they created. Jews committed the sin of the golden calf. And that's when Moshe Rabbeinu broke the tablets. And the second tablets were already not as of a high spiritual level, not as holy as the first ones. And the second tablets already gave us the world that we live in right now. So now Moshe Rabbeinu would not be able to bring Jews into the land of Israel. Yeshua, his successor, would do it. And Jews would come to land of Israel, and they would not live there forever. They would not stay there forever because they would have a Babylonian exile. They would be kicked out from land of Israel, and then they would come back, and then they would be kicked out of land of Israel again, and we would have exile that we are living in right now still.
[00:05:19] So we see this is the trajectory of our life after our misdeeds that we have committed.
[00:05:27] And we see that the original concept of death came because of the snake.
[00:05:33] So Jews were dying because they were bitten by the snake, because their desire to commit transgressions was biting them. And that's what was bringing death into the world.
[00:05:45] How do you fix it? First of all, you need to recognize that transgression is a transgression. You need to face the snake.
[00:05:55] We know that road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody wakes up in the morning and saying, I'm going to do a lot of bad things today.
[00:06:04] Anyone who does the worst things in the world is doing it, thinking that he's doing something good.
[00:06:10] No Nazi was telling to himself, look in the mirror, oh, I'm such a bad person. I'm a terrible individual. I'm despicable. No, they thought that they are freeing the world from the evil Jews.
[00:06:25] So the first step to get rid of your wrongdoings is by facing them, by looking them, but recognizing them as such. It is an interesting thing. Jewish philosophy asks, was there evil in the Garden of Eden?
[00:06:40] Well, it says that Adam was supposed to guard the Garden of Eden.
[00:06:45] And guard from what? Obviously, there was something bad over there. Then Adam was told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.
[00:06:53] Well, obviously tree of knowledge was there, so evil had to be there. But it was Garden of Eden, so how could there be evil there? So they answer that evil was there, but it was recognized as such. That's why it was not harmful. If you have a bottle with poison in your house and everybody knows that it's a poison, then it's not harmful because nobody's going to drink it. It's sitting there. But if you recognize your poison as a poison and nobody will ever mix it up for anything else, then it's not harmful. So evil was there. It was not dangerous, though.
[00:07:28] So once evil is recognized as such, it's not bad anymore.
[00:07:32] It's theoretically bad. It's not practically bad.
[00:07:35] So the first step of getting rid of your misdeeds is by identifying them, by looking at them, by recognizing them.
[00:07:42] And then the question is, why was it? This is why Jews had to look at the snake. They had to look at the snake. They had to recognize that this is the snake. This is the source of their misdeeds. But then there's another question. Why did it have to be made out of copper?
[00:07:59] Copper is a very cheap material. Gold, silver, bronze, much more expensive, much more beautiful. But why is copper so cheap? Copper is so cheap because, first of all, there's a lot of it. But then also it doesn't look good over the time.
[00:08:16] In the beginning, when you take your copper and if you polish it really, really well, it looks even nicer than gold. It shines better than gold and silver and every other precious material, it has to be shined all the time. It's impossible to keep shining things all the time. That's why you don't have your wife's jewelry made out of copper. Otherwise, you'll make best jewelry, most expensive jewelry, out of copper.
[00:08:39] So items which are made out of copper really could be shining even better than gold. Just you need to keep polishing them, which is hard, which is an effort.
[00:08:48] So this is the idea about us confronting our transgressions.
[00:08:55] People think that you could be made out of gold.
[00:08:58] And gold is always shiny. Silver is always shiny. We are not. We are made out of copper. Copper is even nicer than gold when it's polished, but needs to be always polished. Fighting our desire to do things which are wrong is an ongoing process. It's not something which you could set it and forget it. It's not something that you could figure out once and then just go on autopilot. It's a constant effort. But if we keep polishing our copper, it looks even better than gold.
[00:09:27] So that's why we need to understand that we are not made out of gold. Unfortunately, we are made out of copper. There's a lot of copper and there's a lot of us here.
[00:09:35] But this copper is something which could be even more beautiful if you put enough effort into it.
