https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wTqP6xOdHkg
And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod, a staff, a walking stick, a pole. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And Moses cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent. And Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And Moses put forth his hand and caught it, and it once again became a rod in his hand. Well, there’s a lot packed into that, that’s for sure. I’ll just make a couple of comments and then it’ll open up. The staff of Moses and the staff of Aaron, that idea just never goes away after this introduction in the text. So a staff is something, if you have a staff and you’re the owner of a company, the staff does your will, you rely on the staff as well. And so, and that meaning is a derivation from the same root idea. If you’re walking, when you walk with a walking stick, then you can lean on the stick. And so while you’re on the way, you have something to lean on. And so the rod is also a symbol of solidity and stability and tradition. And then the rod, the staff, the tradition can turn into a snake. And that means that what’s solid and reliable and that you can use on your way can also transform itself suddenly into chaos. So there’s yin yang dichotomy there that emerges. And then after all that, and that’s terrifying because when your tradition falls apart and the chaotic serpents emerge instead, then that’s terrifying. And that’s what happens to Moses. But then God tells him, take the serpent by the tail, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to grab a serpent because you grab them by the head. And so if you have enough courage to grasp what’s dangerous, then you will become credible enough to be listened to. And that’s part of the understructure narrative that drives this, in some sense, this magic trick. And we see the motif of being exposed to the serpent as a curative process replicated through itself, through the text. And we also know that the symbol that even modern physicians use to symbolize their healing power is the symbol of the rod and the staff, which I believe in that case is of Greek origin. Right, Ascapius. But there’s a parallel there that’s obviously not. Yeah, well, the pair, well, and is that historical replication? Is it archetypal replication? I think it’s archetypal. Is it derivation from the same source? It has to be archetypal. We’ll see it more when we get to the serpent on the staff itself, that story. We can maybe talk about it then. But it’s definitely a universal story. But it’s also referring to the serpent and the tree, you know, in terms of… It’s interesting because for Moses, as we’re thinking about him as the emergent hero, and we’re talking yesterday a lot about the fact that his ability to engage transformationally is one of the things that’s defining. His ability to see and hear God is what illuminates God to him, though God’s already independent in Genesis, as we discussed. But the ability to transform the snake, right, into a staff again is the transformational ability that means it’s cause to lead, right? Well, that’s the definition of the hero. The hero does both. He casts order into chaos and chaos into order. He’s a mediating factor between the two. That’s right. So I always think with the yin and yang, people forget the eyeballs. And the eyeballs for me are like colossus of roads astride the line. That’s where you want to stand. And so it’s good from evil, per the tree, the Garden of Eden, but it’s also chaos to order. I think chaos to order is actually a better way to understand it. It’s the rod to that which is flexible, right, a snake. That’s why it also says grab by the tail. It’s making you want to understand that it’s a tail. It’s something that moves and is flexible, isn’t solid like a staff. But you can understand it in terms of attention because that’s actually how attention works. It’s like you have something undefined. What do you do? You mentally or physically grasp it. That is what understand means. That’s exactly what he pointed out when he talked about children building their, what do you call those, psychomotor schema to begin with. So the basic preconceptions of perception itself are the gripping element. And so when children are trying to figure out how to see something and therefore how to conceptualize and perceive it, that’s why people say sometimes look with your eyes and not with your hands, right? They’ll say that to their little kids. But their little kids are literally gripping the chaos of the world so that they can transform it into something stable and reliable. It’s worth making the obvious point that both the rod and the snake are symbols of sovereign pharaonic authority. The pharaohs would have had a snake in their headdress. I think that even more than that, not only the snake, but the pharaohs have a rod and a fly swat. And so the fly swat is also that tail. And so there’s a rod and a tail. So the symbolism is that Moses is being invested with a kind of counter authority, a kind of he’s becoming the leader of anti-Egypt. So you have to be the master of the staff and the snake in order to lead. Well, that’s the snake that eats all other snakes. Right, right. So that’s a representation of his ability to… so that’s so interesting that it’s the snake, right? So he’s the master of the chaos that eats all other chaos? It doesn’t say… It’s the rod that eats the snakes. When we get to it, you’ll see. We think that it’s the snakes, but in my memory, it says that Moses’ rod ate the snakes of the… Yeah, because that’s how it works, right? It’s the order that actually contains… it’s actually like grasping the tail. The rod is going to consume the snake. So it’s a superordinate order that can consume all chaos. That’s what Moses is standing for. And that’s why he’s an agent of the highest authority. But you can see it as the law itself. It’s the law and the transgressions. And so it’s like in one move, he’s able to master, like you said, grab it and it comes back. And it’s also the shepherd staff, I guess. There’s a sort of imagery of him becoming the shepherd of his people. And so the rod becomes the shepherd’s crook. You can see that it’s chasing away the shepherds even if he’s not. Absolutely, that’s right. And defeating the pharaohs. What does the shepherd use the rod for? Well, I mean the shepherd’s crook, I guess, as a staff. Right, and it’s to rein in the sheep. Is that also part of it? And to fight off lions, I presume? To rescue the sheep. To rescue the sheep. To lead the sheep to round them up. Well, we should remember that when you were a shepherd in that time, that was actually a real man’s job because there were lions and they liked to eat sheep. And so part of being a shepherd was like fighting off lions. Are you implying that contemporary shepherds aren’t sufficiently family? No, I definitely wouldn’t dare to do that. We have some contemporary shepherds waiting to have a conversation with you, Doctor. By the way, the order chaos thing is, I’m glad you raised it, and I had not thought of it, frankly, in these terms. But it’s, for me, the central teaching of Genesis. I always tell people, I think Genesis 1.1 is the most important verse in the Bible. But I think 1.2 is the second most important. Everything was chaos. And what God does for six days is make order out of chaos. And we are living in the post-God era, and we are living in a chaotic era. And I hope I’m not too contemporary by noting that men menstruate is a statement of chaos. So again, the centrality of the significance of God… Well, that’s an anti-rod movement, because Derrida himself said that his deconstructionism was aimed at phallocentricism. It was phallogocentricism. But that degeneration of those categories, especially with regard to male and female, that’s not an accidental consequence of the system of ideas. That’s a central target of what we use to call focal attack. And it is an attack on the rod, fundamentally. No, no, I…just forgive me. I just want to make one other macro point, because that’s how my mind thinks. I, in many decades of radio and speaking and so on, I have not made the…as much as I believe in God, truly do, I have never found that arguments for God’s existence are nearly as effective or as important as arguments for God’s necessity. And that’s the point that I want to make here, and we’re all making here. No God, chaos. You don’t believe in God, at least understand what the consequences of that non-belief are. Well, what’s interesting about that is we keep having these…and the more that I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my forays into the political or cultural world, this is another consequence of how you align the moral with the strategic. And in some ways what you’re saying is if you make a moral argument, people don’t even know why they think what they think. So to come in and say to them, you need to change your moral outlook, right? What you’re suggesting is, and why I think that’s more fruitful, is it’s a strategic approach. And that’s a way to lead people in, and then they can decide how high up that hierarchy of understanding they want to move. Well, you can look at this purely psychologically, which I like to do as much as possible, because I don’t think you should bring God into the issue unless you have to in some sense. You either are aiming for something unified, which means something at the pinnacle and something that’s the highest and superordinate and most valuable, or you’re not, in which case perhaps you’re aiming down, or you’re aiming at a multiplicity of diverse things which are conflictual. Those are your options. And we know that if your perception is fragmented and if your navigation is fragmented, which is a chaotic state, the consequence of that is anxiety and despair, because that’s actually what anxiety and despair mark, is that you’re confident and secure when you’ve reduced your plethora of potential passwages forward to one path. You know that if you’re in a vehicle. It’s like, well, are you going one place or ten? If you’re going ten, you can’t go anywhere, and you’re confused. You have to be going one place, and then everything snaps together, and then your nervous system is literally regulated. Anxiety is the response to chaos.