Fiery Serpents and False Gods: Parashat Hukkat 5785

"Perhaps you'd like to see how sss-snake-like I can be!"

This Fourth of July weekend, I’ve been thinking about Carl Schurz, a nineteenth-century U.S. senator from Missouri.  Schurz was born and raised in Germany, where as a young man he became active in the pro-democracy movement that led to the Revolution of 1848. When the Prussian authorities cracked down, Schurz was forced to flee his homeland. He eventually settled in the United States, where he became an active abolitionist. 

He later joined the Union Army and served as a general in the Battle of Gettysburg and other major engagements. After the war, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he continued to speak out against corruption and injustice. In 1871, responding to a colleague who had invoked the slogan “My country, right or wrong” as a defense of national policy, Schurz famously reframed it: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Schurz understood that genuine patriotism sometimes demands dissent. That real love of country means not mistaking it for a god. As he said even more explicitly in an 1858 speech decrying the powers that preserved slavery, and the silent public resigned to it: “We have come to a point where it is loyalty to resist, and treason to submit.” That distinction — between devotion and deification — is as urgent now as ever. And it’s a distinction at the heart of this week’s Torah portion.

Tucked into the latter part of Parashat Ḥukkat is a brief but deeply unsettling episode: 

The people are on the move again, taking a roundabout route through the wilderness on their way to Canaan. And, as happens time and again in the book of Numbers, they complain: “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread and no water, and we loathe this cursed bread” — alluding, presumably, to the manna.

What follows is strange and swift: God sends seraphim — typically translated as “fiery serpents,” whatever that’s supposed to mean — to attack the people. The snakes begin to bite, and many people die. In response, the people return to Moses in remorse, begging him to intercede. God instructs Moses to take one of these seraphim and mount it on a pole. Anyone who is bitten should look at the serpent and live. Moses does as he is told, fashioning a bronze serpent and placing it atop a pole. And sure enough, when the bitten gaze upon the bronze serpent, they are healed.

The story is startling, even disturbing. For starters, why is God so incensed by the people’s complaint? Their concern seems reasonable enough — hunger, thirst, despair. Why does it provoke such a harsh, punitive response? And whatever the sin was, the method of punishment is striking and unusual, even by biblical standards. Why serpents, specifically?

And perhaps most puzzling of all: why is healing mediated through the very image of harm? Why doesn’t God simply remove the danger? Why must the people look up at a representation of the very thing that is killing them in order to be saved? In fact, why is Moses instructed to make a graven image at all? Didn’t God already forbid such things — quite explicitly — in the Ten Commandments? Why would God now seemingly command Moses to violate one of the Torah’s most foundational prohibitions?

To begin making sense of this episode, we have to start with the snakes. The Torah uses a strange word to describe these creatures — seraphim. The Hebrew word saraph literally means “to burn.” It’s not a typical word for snake, and more literally translates to “fiery” or “burning things.” Commentators from antiquity to modernity have endeavored different answers. 

For those of us who are familiar with the Shabbat morning liturgy, however, the term likely rings a bell. Earlier in our service this morning, we sang:

שֶׁבַח נוֹתְנִים לוֹ כָּל צְבָא מָרוֹם. תִּפְאֶרֶת וּגְדֻלָּה שְׂרָפִים וְאופַנִּים וְחַיּות הַקֹּדֶשׁ:

Praise, glory, and grandeur the whole host of heaven give unto God – seraphim, ophanim, and the hayyot ha-kodesh.

There it is: seraphim — not serpents, but one of the angelic beings that populate the heavenly realm. 

The Bible is replete with references to these different creatures. Perhaps the most famous reference to the seraphim outside this week’s parashah occurs in the Book of Isaiah. The prophet describes a “vision of God seated on his throne, surrounded by winged seraphim” who call out kadosh, kadosh, kadosh Adonai tzeva’ot, melo kol ha-aretz kevodo / Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is filled with his presence!” We are accustomed to recalling these words as the glorious exaltations of a serene angelic choir. But that’s not how Isaiah describes the scene: the sound of these seraphim is deafening, and Isaiah is terrified. Rightly so. As contemporary biblical scholar Esther Hamori puts it in her recent book, God’s Monsters, “One of the seraphim flies over to him…In its hand is a glowing coal that it’s taken from the altar with tongs. The seraph reaches out toward Isaiah’s face – oh God – and burns his mouth with the glowing coal.” Eventually, this “alarming drumroll of the monstrous seraphim” culminates in God pronouncing Israel’s doom – as a result of their waywardness, God will annihilate the people, reducing their cities and even the land itself to desolate ruins (Hamori, 32-33).

The message God sends to Isaiah was likely unsurprising; he knew where the vision was headed the moment he saw the horrifying sight of the seraphim. It turns out that throughout the Bible, “seraphim are always associated with death and divine violence…” (Hamori, 33). In fact, “Every mention of the seraphim” – and there are in fact several such instances – “is tied to frightening people into obedience…warding off challenges to cultural norms, to ‘call horrid attention to the borders that cannot – must  not – be crossed.” In the Bible, the seraphim police the boundary between faithfulness and heresy, obedience and waywardness. “To transgress those behavioral boundaries is ‘to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol.’ In the case of the seraphim, this is their primary function in God’s entourage, and he employs them flagrantly for it,” monsters that “serve to intimidate people into submission to God” (Hamori, 36-37).

Importantly for the story in our parashah, whenever seraphim appear in the Bible, they are serpentine creatures — sometimes winged serpents, as in Isaiah’s vision — and always associated with burning. In some cases, they burn through venomous bites. In other cases, they spit fire at their enemies, or like in Isaiah’s vision, they press a live coal against the prophet’s lips. Whether slithering on the ground or flying through the heavens, the seraph is a terrifying figure of divine enforcement. It’s not exactly a snake, but rather a serpent-like monster – sent to sear, defending the divine against disobedience.

The concept has clear parallels beyond ancient Israel. As Hamori writes, well before the Bible, “regional gods had a long history of keeping company with poisonous snakes that were part protector, part avenger” (Hamori, 20). For example, In Egyptian mythology, the uraeus — a winged serpent — was a royal emblem, symbolizing the godlike authority of the pharaoh and warning against dissent.

So when our parashah specifically notes that God unleashes seraphim to attack the people in the wilderness, the implication is that God is once again employing the serpentine monsters of the divine border patrol to enforce a boundary. But what boundary are the people being accused of violating? After all, their complaint appears perfectly understandable. But if we look closely at the language of the people’s protest, we’ll notice something unusual. As Nehama Leibowitz points out, in previous episodes the Israelites grumble against Moses — “Why did you bring us here?” But here, for the first time, their protest is directed at both Moses and God. “Lama he’elitunu mi-mitzrayim la-mut ba-midbar / Why have you [plural] brought us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness?” Rashi explains the significance of this shift: they have equated Moses with God. They’ve collapsed the distinction between the prophet and the Power he represents, as if Moses and God were on equal footing (260-261). And that, in the biblical imagination, is no small mistake. 

Because when we conflate human authority with divine will — when we treat political leaders or nation-states as if they are synonymous with God — we render them immune to critique. We treat them as sacrosanct, irrespective of how they behave or how they treat those under their dominion. That’s the danger the Torah is flagging. And, of course, it’s not just ancient history; it’s present reality.

This is the logic of “my country, right or wrong,” the slogan that Carl Schurz so powerfully and memorably challenged back in the 19th century. But too often, the instinct to defend or sanctify one’s nation overrides the moral duty to challenge or even protest against it — as if to question the policies of a human government is to betray something sacred. But our tradition doesn’t sanctify kings or states. On the contrary: it views power with profound suspicion. It insists that states and their human rulers are inherently flawed and fallible, and are accountable to a higher authority. Because history, and Torah, teach us that unchecked power invites abuse.

This is, after all, precisely the worldview of the land from which the Israelites were only just liberated – a society that regarded the state and its sovereign as sacrosanct. The Israelites knew all too well the danger of a world where divine and human authority are one and the same.

But hidden within the text of our parashah this week is a blink-and-you’ll miss it fact: By now, a new generation — born in freedom, unshaped by slavery — has taken the stage. For them, the memory of totalitarian power is secondhand at best. And so it’s not hard to see how they could begin to confuse human leadership with divine will — how they might blur the line between Moses and God. Their parents and grandparents, shaped by the trauma of forced servitude, may have understood the importance of keeping that boundary intact. But this generation, unburdened by memory, doesn’t appreciate the distinction — or the danger.

So it is no coincidence that God sends seraphim, which the Israelites — just like Isaiah generations later — would have instantly recognized not just as terrifying, but as politically and ideologically charged. The people begin to collapse the distinction between Moses and God, regressing into the very ideology of the oppressive place from which their parents and grandparents were liberated. And God responds by unleashing against them the emblem of that regime — the monster believed to preserve, protect, and defend the absolute power of Pharaoh and the divine authority of the state — not to vindicate their confusion, but to confront it. “The serpent monsters,” God is effectively saying to the people, “don’t work for Pharaoh, or for Moses for that matter. They work for Me.”

But the people don’t yet get the point. They repent — but in the same breath, they ask Moses to pray for the danger to be taken away, as if Moses himself has the power to command life and death. So rather than simply removing the serpents — which might have inadvertently affirmed the people’s belief in Moses’s godlike power — God instead instructs Moses to fashion a serpent, place it high on a pole, and tell the people to look toward it in order to be healed.

Note that they are told to look up at the bronze serpent — not to worship it. As the Rabbis put it in the Mishnah, the bronze serpent was not an idol, but a teaching tool: “Was it the serpent that killed, or the serpent that gave life? Of course not. Rather, when Israel looked upward and directed their hearts to their Heavenly Parent, they were healed.” The people are told to seek healing by gazing upon an image of the very thing that’s harming them — not because the image holds power, but because it reminds them who does.

Only God can heal. Only God can give life or take it away. As Ramban teaches, the whole purpose of this ritual was to remind the people that “it is God [alone] who sends death and brings life.”

The people had begun to ascribe divine power to human leadership, to mistake a ruler for a god, to revert to the oppressive logic of an arrogant empire. And God responds by systematically stripping the symbol of human pretense of all its agency and power – demonstrating that healing and wholeness, repair and redemption, come not from venerating human sovereignty, but from realigning ourselves with divine purpose.

The Torah is not telling us that human leadership is illegitimate, or that states have no role to play in our collective life. Moses is not discarded. The people are not left without a leader or a path forward. But what the Torah insists — and what God’s dramatic response makes painfully clear — is the danger of confusing state power with divine authority. When we invest human rulers with godlike infallibility; when we treat nation-states as inherently and absolutely good, as moral ends to themselves, no matter how they behave; when we look to our leaders with excessive reverence instead of healthy skepticism, we cannot hold them accountable when they inevitably fall short – when they lie, when they inflict harm, when they perpetuate injustice.

That confusion is not just ancient history. It’s painfully present in our own time. We continue to see its terrible consequences in American public life, when large swaths of elected officials and fellow citizens capitulate to the callous and cruel agenda of a would-be authoritarian, greeting unconscionable policy with rapturous applause. And we see it, too, even in the way some religious spaces are adorned — sanctuaries lined with flags, worship services infused with patriotic music and liturgy, as if fidelity to the state were a form of holiness.

The parashah points us toward a different path: Moses, believed by the people to be God’s equal, is proven to have no power independent of the divine, just a man subservient and accountable to God’s purposes. The serpent, once a symbol of absolute and infallible human authority is turned into a tool that points the people back toward God. The message is clear: human institutions can serve sacred ends — but they are not themselves sacred. 

Perhaps this is why, each and every day, our tradition has us emulate the seraphim — those fiery messengers once unleashed to enforce the boundary between human arrogance and divine authority. In the Kedushah, we rise on tiptoe, and call out like the seraphim witnessed by the prophet Isaiah — Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh — Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is filled with God’s presence. This is not a pageant of praise. It is a ritual of resistance. The seraphim cry out to one another, urging each other to bear witness to a world suffused with the presence – and subservient to the purposes – of the Divine.

And by mimicking them — singing their song while standing serpentine on one leg — we take up their task. We become the guardians of a sacred line, sentinels of a truth our ancestors forgot in the wilderness: that no ruler, no regime, no state or sovereign is like unto God. That no leader, no matter how righteous, may claim infallibility. That no human authority, individual or national, is beyond reproach or moral critique.

To emulate the seraphim is to remember who we serve and before whom we stand.

We live in a time when power demands reverence, when protest is painted as betrayal, when people are punished not for being wrong, but for daring to speak. But our tradition insists: silence is not loyalty. Critique is not heresy. On the contrary — to speak uncomfortable truths, to stand in the breach, to lift our eyes toward justice and demand that our institutions reflect the values they claim to represent — that is the very essence of faithfulness.

God does not call us to blind allegiance. God calls us to covenant — to be faithful not to flags or leaders, but to the infinite and equal dignity of every human being created in God’s image. 

So may we rise like the seraphim,not in defense of power,but in service of holiness.

May we guard the line between Creator and created,between sacred and secular.

And may we lift our voices — with love and with courage —to call this world and one another to something better.

So may it be God’s will.

Amen.