On this the beautiful birthday of the world, I wonder if you’ll stay with me in the Garden of Eden, won’t you? Just created fresh, today on the birthday of the world, let’s linger in paradise.
Not hard, now that the “storm clouds” have cleared. If you’re here in Pearlstone, look at how the hills slope, the ground is hunkering down for the winter. Hear the animals and children and peace of growing things. If you are home, jump into your imagination, see the trees in the garden, the beauty, hear running water, imagine all the living creatures thriving. A snake walks past–still walking at this point, crucial to the functioning of this garden. Eating rodents, generally snaking around.
Are you like me, that if someone says “don’t touch that” it becomes the only thing you can think about doing? Because I have had the deep joy of studying Torah with you and knowing so many of you for a little bit now (and I look forward to meeting more of you! Hello!) I know the answer. We can spend many years trying to understand why a tree would be planted in the garden that the human beings were told explicitly to stay away from (what is more human than to touch the forbidden thing?) Regardless, in the garden, in all this gorgeous green and changing colors, is embedded a self destruct button of a kind.
Here in Eden, the snake trips up humans. Torah teaches: “Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that God יהוה had made. It said to the woman, “Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” “You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know* good and bad” (Genesis 3:4-5). And from there, perhaps, you know how the story goes. Humans with such reasonable logic go for it, eat the fruit. Become ashamed. Hide from Gd. Are swiftly kicked out of this beautiful garden, and left to feel the pain of bringing food and life into the world. Eden in its perfection was destroyed, sentenced to a new way of living.
See, Tishrei is a season of destruction and rebirth. The cycle began with Tisha b’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the temple and violent Exile, and we journey from that observance in the middle of summer up to the highest heights of this month, the new year, into Yom Kippur, then a celebration of our harvest at Sukkot, celebration of our cycles of wisdom at Simchat Torah. Later today we will cast off the weight of the last year at tashlich–guilt we still carry, anger we want to release, the blocked up stuff that does not serve us. Like the snake who sheds the skin it has outgrown, we cast off the old remnants of ourselves to enter into the new year.
Time travel with me, won’t you? To the echoing halls of Pharaoh's palace in Mitzrayim–Egypt. Built on the backs of enslaved people from around the world. Watch with me, as 80 year old Moses and his 83 year old brother Aaron sidle up to the seat of the king, robes dusty from their travels, Moses rolling his tongue around in his mouth, Aaron’s jaw clenched with certainty. See how a threatened Pharoah demands proof of Hashem’s power, and Aaron throws his staff on the ground, transforming into a snake. Oh dear, look how Pharoah’s magicians do the same. But then, Aaron’s snake swallows the magicians’ snake! What a gorgeous image, of the people’s snake rising up and overtaking their oppressors? Of Hashem’s power over empty slight of hand?
When snakes outgrow their skin, they shed it. It is, apparently, an incredibly vulnerable time and doesn’t just happen immediately. At one point their shedding skin even covers their eyes so that in the last stage of shedding they actually can’t see, so they need to be in a safe place while they shed. My dear friend and teacher Rabbi Julia Watts-Belser lives with a snake, Cornelius. She said, “It’s really a beautiful teaching for the way we need such nurture and care from our community while we’re in periods of transition and transformation.” This transforming business is deeply vulnerable–what an incredible counter to the images of the snake as trickster and attacker we see in the Garden and in the Palace. What an incredible model of how transformation happens, when we outgrow the old version of ourselves. And when this transformation is painful, frightening, unexpected, don’t confuse shedding your skin with falling apart.
Have you seen the ouroboros? It is an image of a snake arcing around in a circle, swallowing its own tail. This is an ancient symbol found first in Mitzrayim, on a shrine to Tutankhamen’s. Scholar Jan Assmann teaches that here the symbol “refers to the mystery of cyclical time, which flows back into itself.” The ouroboros teaches that time flows in a cycle around itself. It also appears in Norse mythology, Zurvanite Zoroastrianism, as well as in Mesoamerican tradition, and in Hinduism, and Gnosticism.
The Zohar (our foundation of mysticism) describes the Leviathan itself, the giant sea creature created on the fifth day (Genesis 1:21) as an ouroboros, its tail clasped in its mouth. Rashi describes the Leviathan as "twisting around and encompassing the entire world” (Baba Batra 74b). Imagine with me a third kind of snake, the Leviathan-Ouroborous, head to tail, surrounding the world. The ouroboros teaches us that destruction, like what was lost in the garden, and liberation, what was fought for in Mitzrayim, are intertwined in a delicate balance.
When sharing about this Snake Sermon last night with my family, I learned that snakes can actually swallow their own tails. What?!!! Incredibly disturbing to watch, no wonder traditions around the world seek to make meaning of this. And the solution, we learned from Grey’s Anatomy, is to put hand sanitizer on the snake to get them to spit it out! This deeply base image that is used to discuss the balance of time and forces of the world is based off of an animal self-destructing, eating itself whole.
Comrades, we receive an incredible gift in this season. We are held by a tradition that invites us, begs us, demands of us to reflect on the year that was as we move into the year that is becoming. Each year there is a fixed point on the calendar that we get to consider where we have thrived and where we have struggled, and find a chance to shed what we have outgrown.
I want us to call in the gifts of the ouroboros this year as a protection against self destruction, against consuming ourselves. If the guilt of that which you have already made a complete teshuvah for threatens to consume you, lay it down. If cynicism, or addiction, a pattern of cruelty, or selfishness continue to cycle through you, I wish for you the profound fortitude to lay it down. If the story of how you are, how you were told you always are, hangs heavy, keeps you from transforming, lay it down.
And truly, I want us to call in the protection of the ouroboros this year as a charm against consuming one another, and destroying ourselves in the process. The snake eating its own tail forgets that it is a part of itself until it is too late. It sees its tail as enemy, as prey, as something to conquer. Dear ones, we cannot continue to eat our own. I see this so often in our families and in our progressive spaces alike. We tear down our allies and comrades, trapped in a loop, while the violence we seek to dismantle rages on. I have also seen this in our own community, a sacred convening of people seeking healing and connection and inspiration forgetting that the people before us are deeply beloved holy people, instead treating one another like the opposition, like the people who have hurt us before, like people who cannot transform, like people whose time and hearts are disposable. We cannot consume ourselves whole and live to tell the tale. We cannot destroy ourselves and each other trying to get free.
One of the gifts of this season is the opportunity to reflect on patterns and choose to act in a different way, to tell a different story. Perhaps the image of the ouroboros with its tail clasped in its mouth is so incredible because it holds its tail in its mouth, but does not consume it. We balance at all times between creation and destruction, the Garden or Tisha b’Av. It is human to fall out of balance, it is holy to re-calibrate. I pray that this season gives us the strength to release any grasps on that self-destruct instinct, and any permission we’ve given ourselves to treat one another with cruelty.
We do not need the snake to trick us into learning more about ourselves. And we do not need the snake that battles a fictitious and empty conjured opponent. We need protection from self destruction. So I offer this drasha as an incantation for us all. May we find strength to honor balance, not let all fall apart to be destroyed. May we shed that which constricts us. May we honor our growth, and the constant work in which we are blessed to engage. And may we care for one another when we fall out of this balance.
Shanah tovah u’metukah, may it be a sweet and liberatory new year.