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Moses is leading the Israelites through the desert I’m very compelled by that story, you know, so for example, one of the things that’s really interesting about it is that the story begins with a tyrannical state and Then it’s the spirit of God that leads the Hebrews Maybe it’s the spirit of God that Characterizes the Hebrew Longing for freedom and that’s kind of an interesting idea, you know Psychologically you think that what’s the spirit of God? The spirit of God is that which manifests itself within you in opposition to tyranny Could be you know, that’s That’s not a bad Idea, it’s quite an idea. It’s a remarkable idea And maybe it’s true. It’s certainly the case that that’s how God is presented in that story And in many other ways, but but that being paramount Above all and You know, there’s a there’s another corollary to that which is Well, we shouldn’t be subjects of tyranny if we’re children of God and for Israel and Israel means we who struggle with God it’s not Appropriate for us to be Subject to tyranny That’s interesting too because I think we we We sort of accept that idea at face value in the West is that yeah slavery is wrong Obviously, it’s like it’s not so bloody obvious these things You know one of the things that I’m really curious about in relationship to the postmodern types who make group membership the sine Quan on of existence is why is slavery wrong? Exactly. It’s like it’s just one for all groups and one group lords it over another. It’s like that’s not wrong It’s just tough luck for the For the oppressed group. It’s there’s no wrong there because it’s only wrong if we’re sovereign individuals Right with some intrinsic worth who are not to be subject to arbitrary tyranny That’s when it’s wrong and you have to accept all those other Axioms before you get to say anything about slavery being wrong at all. Otherwise, it’s just hey Like Marx pointed out. It’s just brute economics. And so you can make a moral judgment about that if you want, but What’s your criteria for saying that it’s wrong, you know And of course that would upset people on the radical left who want to presume that it’s intrinsically wrong Without having to presume all the things that you have to presume to make it intrinsically wrong and without even noticing that that’s just a slight Of hand in any case so that’s part of that biblical narrative, too We’re not the sorts of creatures who should be subject to tyranny and then the tyranny might be well Is it the tyranny of a state or is that the tyranny we impose on ourselves? And I would say probably both why not both the story could be referring to both we tyrannize ourselves with our own presuppositions all the time and then you might ask yourself Why why don’t we just give up our tyrannical presuppositions? You know because they’re not worthy and they’re oppressive But we don’t give them up and we often celebrate them and I think the story has an answer for that too because it’s out of the tyranny into the desert It’s like is that better or worse? How about worse and so what if it’s the case that even to escape from the tyranny of your own? Presuppositions that you don’t go from the tyranny to the promised land you go from the tyranny to the desert and Who the hell excuse me wants to do that and The answer is no one with any sense. It’s like hey, I’ll just keep the tyranny. Thank you very much at least I know where everything belongs there and Fair enough. I mean this is a very serious question and it’s it’s an open question in the Exodus narrative whether the desert is worse or better than the tyranny and so and you know you see this in in the real world lots of people in the Soviet Union pined for the days of Stalin so I read a book once that was a reminiscences of a Extermination camp written by the guards the good old days You know so I don’t think there’s a tyranny that’s so brute that we can’t long for it if it’s being shattered And so that’s quite something all that packed up in that story anyways, so the Israelites are out in the desert and They’re there for 40 years, and you might think well what kind of leadership do they have it’s not that big a desert And the answer is yeah, but you know the desert after a tyranny That’s no bloody joke and maybe it takes three generations to get through it, and that’s possible and so There’s all that and then the Israelites are wandering around in the desert What happens well the same thing happened to them is it’s happening to us They’re worshipping false idols, and they’re tempted and it’s no wonder they’re tempted because While they’re in the desert. It’s like it’s not going so well. It’s no wonder they’re having a crisis of confidence you know and and maybe they’re pining for the old days, and they’re not so sure that the God who informed them that being the subjects of tyranny was wrong because now here we are in the desert and so they lack faith and It’s understandable But despite it being understandable, and this is one of the harsh things about the story What does God do when he hears their complaints? He sends poisonous snakes in there to bite them think that’s pretty brutal You know and that’s the sort of thing that make it makes the technical atheist type sort of recoil about the conceptions of God in the Old Testament like it’s not exactly what you’d expect In some sense from an all-merciful being it’s like you got these poor Israelites First of all they were in the tyranny then they had to part go across the Red Sea now They’ve been wandering around in the desert, and that’s not Good and so your best solution is to send a bunch of snakes in to bite them But you think well you know even if you’re in the desert after a tyranny, and you lose faith Then the snakes are going to bite you Right because that’s what happens because if you’re in you know a little analog of hell And you lose your faith Is that going to make it worse or better and the answer is well? I have reason to lose my faith It’s like fair enough that isn’t the question the question is what happens if you lose it Or you start looking for faith in the wrong directions and the answer is Hell gets a little deeper That’s one of the things that really frightened me I spent a lot of time studying atrocity and when I realized on a Metaphorical level that the reason hell is a bottomless pit is because no matter how bad it is there is some bloody stupid thing You can do that will make it worse And that’s right. You know and that’s terror. That’s a terrifying realization to really understand that and so Okay poisonous snakes and so now the Israelites are not only lost but they’re being Bitten by venomous creatures and you know there’s an echo of the snake in the Garden of Eden in that story and And so finally the Israelites they get kind of tired of being bitten by the snakes and They go to Moses and say you want to have a chat with God because you seem to be in there fairly tight with him How about you get him to call off the snakes and maybe we’ll behave a little better. How’s that for a deal? And Moses says okay, I’ll see what I can do and he goes and has a chat with God Which is no trivial matter and God doesn’t do what you’d expect because what you’d expect like and this would even work In terms of making it a comprehensible narrative you’d think okay All right guys You’ve been bitten off no more snakes But that isn’t what happens And I think the reason that it doesn’t happen is because it’s a very very very very very very very very very very very And I think the reason that it doesn’t happen is because there’s no getting rid of the snakes I think that’s that’s also why there’s a snake in the Garden of Eden is there’s just no getting rid of the snakes You have to learn to contend with them. It’s more like it’s more that or maybe it’s better to learn to contend with snakes Than it is to inhabit a world where there’s no danger. Maybe it’s something like that. I don’t know anyways God says something extremely Surprising and very interesting from the perspective of a clinical psychologist. He tells Moses to cast snake in bronze and to raise it up on a staff and the staff seems to me to be Reference to the staff of Moses and that staff of Moses is something like the thing you put in the ground to orient yourself with It’s the staff of God to and it’s sort of like an axiom and maybe it’s like the tree of life It’s it’s it’s it’s like here. I stand it’s a center point It’s all of that and in any case you put the snake up on the staff That’s also the symbol of healing right the physician symbol of healing the staff with the snakes And so it is a symbol of transformation and partly that’s because snakes shed their skin and are reborn And so they’re viewed as agents of transformation And so that’s all lurking in that symbol And then God says get the Israelites to go look at the snake on the staff and then the poison won’t poison them anymore and I read that as a clinician I thought that’s really interesting because one of the things that we learned all schools of psychotherapy learned in the last hundred years is that if you get people to voluntarily confront what makes them afraid and what Makes them want to avoid then they get better. It’s curative and so that’s the message there It’s like well if if something is terrifying you Pay more attention to it And that’s actually what you teach people in psychotherapy. I mean there’s a variety of psychotherapeutic techniques, but exposure is probably The Cardinal technique it’s like if I can find out what you’re avoiding and get you to confront it voluntarily You’ll get better and the reason seems to be is that if you get people to confront what they’re afraid of and sometimes what? Disgusts them, but what they’d like to avoid that say if you get them to confront it voluntarily that could be the future even you know indeterminate future They don’t get less afraid They get braver and that’s different It’s not like they get accustomed to what they’re looking at and they’re no longer afraid that kind of happens But it isn’t really what happens what really happens is they discover there’s a lot more to them than they thought and so they’re not as easily Intimidated then and so if you run a clinical client through a session of exposure therapy Maybe they’re afraid of an elevator or something like that you get them So they’ll go in the elevator and sometimes they’re often women because women have anxiety disorders more often than men One of the unintended consequences of that often is they’ll go home and have the fight with their husband That’s been brewing for 30 years Because they’re now braver they see themselves in a different light because they’ve confronted this thing that terrifies them And so it’s so interesting in that story that God’s cure for this for the venomous serpent is Voluntary exposure to the source of terror. It’s so interesting that that’s the case but that and this is relevant to the issue of suffering right to confronting suffering dead-on to actually Focus your attention on that which you would like to avoid What one of the remarkable parts of that story is also that One of the scariest words ever is if I was God there wouldn’t have been bitten in the first place, right? So they put the they’ve got the serpent the serpents on the pole But they’re still gonna get bit and I think that that’s what’s essential about that is just because the serpent is there It doesn’t mean that everything is fixed It now looks snakes are still there it because but the the transformation that takes place is the focus of the suffering Becomes a symbol of faith for them and that’s obviously in the cross Well, and part of the faith is the faith that enables them to go look at the serpent to begin with Okay, so that leads us to the next part which is in John because Christ says Thousands of years later that he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness. It’s like, okay What in the world is going on there? Because that’s hell of a thing for anyone to say about anything ever and it’s right because what does that mean? why would the Son of God compare himself to a serpent and why that particular serpent and that serpent in the wilderness and I knew this old idea that lurks in all sorts of stories in this corpus of stories that I talked about You know, there’s an idea that the hero rescues his father from the belly of the beast That’s a very very old idea and what that seems to mean to some degree is that if you if you look into the abyss then that What reacquaint it reacquaints you with the wisdom and possibility of your tradition it’s something like that it forces that It forces a maturation and a recognition of what’s fundamentally important that confrontation with what’s terrifying well So Christ says he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness thought What does that mean? I thought a lot about the relationship between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the idea of Satan because there’s an Association there between those two ideas and that’s a very strange association too because there’s nothing in that in the Bible story in Genesis that indicates that the serpent is Satan and that’s that’s an idea that aggregates across Hundreds of years or thousands of years that equation and I tried to think that through I thought well The snake is the thing that threatens us and that’s true biologically We’re wired to be afraid of serpents, especially poisonous ones and they’ve been in an antagonistic relationship with mammals for like 60 million years very long time but in some sense the idea of Satan is He’s the ultimate in serpents and so that’s why that equation is drawn across time It’s like well what threatens you well snakes. Yeah, they’re pretty nasty well There are snakes and then there’s well the origin of Snakes so maybe you conquer a snake and that’s one thing and maybe the next thing is you go out and you find nests of snakes And you root them out, but then there’s the snakes that are in the hearts of your enemies That’s a harder snake to deal with and then there’s the snake that’s in your heart And that’s the hardest snake to deal with right and that’s where the equation between the serpent and Satan comes because the worst of all snakes Is the serpent in your own heart and so there’s a there’s a? Psychologization of the idea of the predator and it becomes something that’s more spiritual is that you’re most Vulnerable to the worst impulses within you right that’s the worst predator Okay, so there’s the idea of the concretization of the idea of the serpent becoming Psychologized up into this figure of the adversary himself and that abides within you Analogously perhaps is This reference that Christ makes to himself in relationship to the snake As I thought well, what’s the passion? If the snake is what you’re afraid of in this concretized sense Then the passion is the sum total of all possible fears I Think that’s right you know Carl Jung he thought about the story of the passion as an archetypal tragedy and Here’s what he meant by that so imagine that you took all the tragedies that were ever written and you sort of you Distilled them so that you got the ultimate tragedy Because the fact that you can identify a bunch of different stories as tragic means they have something in common right and so you could Imagine you could pull out the central pattern of tragedy and we can flesh out some of what that might be like It’s tragic when something bad happens to someone Well, what if they deserve it? Okay, well, then it’s not so tragic it still might have an element of tragedy But it’s really tragic if something really terrible happens to someone who clearly doesn’t deserve it So what’s the most tragic story? Well, it’s the worst possible thing happening to the person who least deserves it well That’s core to the passion story. That’s for sure right because not only is Christ innocent He’s not merely innocent. He’s also good and not just good He’s as good as it gets and yet his life is this tragic the tragedy of the passion is the worst of all possible punishments Visited upon the least deserving person, but it’s meant much way worse than that That just barely begins to scrape the surface because it’s torture and a terrible torture because the Romans designed crucifixion to be a terrible torture like consciously and so it’s tragedy at the hands of your fellow man and Your fellow men motivated by the spirit of Cain in the most fundamental sense How can I inflict the most misery possible in the shortest period of time? Let’s say subject to that at a young age with foreknowledge as a consequence of betrayal by your best friend at the hands of a mob of your own people Who are simultaneously under the thumb of a tyranny? That’s part and parcel of what’s persecuting you who persecute you knowing you’re innocent Not just innocent, but also good and who? Choose to punish you instead of punishing someone they know to be criminal It’s all of that. It’s like the sum total of all possible fears, and I think that’s right, and it’s so interesting to me that psychologically that not speaking religiously to the degree that that’s possible and speaking about such things is that our culture has put at its center an Archetypal tragedy it’s as if we’re attempting to inoculate ourselves against the catastrophe of life and but what’s also so fascinating about the story of the passion is that The crucifixion is not the end of the story the end of the story is the resurrection and so the implication there is the same as the implication of Going into the abyss to rescue your father from the belly of the beast It’s like the tragedy isn’t the end of the story the resurrection is the end of the story And so then you wonder what that means psychologically because what you see in psychotherapeutic session in the think psychotherapeutic Milieu is that if you get people to expose themselves to what they’re terrified of Being terrified isn’t the end of the story Recovering is the end of the story and so that begs the question is like well to what degree are we capable of? bearing suffering and prevailing and the answer might be To the degree that we’re capable of confronting it forthrightly and that might actually just be true and You know you think well How could it be otherwise in some sense like what’s going to call the best out of you if it isn’t the most? What’s most challenging because it’s not that easy to get the best called out of you It’s not going to just happen because someone rings your doorbell right you have to be shook to the core before you’re going to undertake What’s necessary to make the sacrifices that are required to put you in? alignment that’s That doesn’t happen with no reason