QUICK THOUGHT: How To Pray — The Snake Story (Parashat Chukat)

The people complain yet again, and God sends snakes to bite them.  The people beg Moshe to pray to God for them and, when he does, God responds by telling Moshe to construct a snake and place it up on a pole so that anyone who has been afflicted, can look up and be healed (Numbers 21:4-9)

What God is saying to Moshe here is – teach the people how to pray.   They came to you to pray for them; teach them how to do it themselves, and here is how you do it, here is how you pray: you have to take whatever is bothering you – the snake of the matter – you have to take it and put it up on a pole to look at and turn your heart towards heaven with reference to this specific thing, turn this specific thing over to God.  

It’s important that it is the snake that’s up on that pole.  The key here is to be able to recognize exactly what it is that is bothering us right now, to see it clearly and to name it – name it to tame it – to say: it is this snake bite that hurts me, this particular way that my head aches, that my heart aches, this problem that I am struggling with.  Dear God, this is what I need help with right now.  

And after we name it, we hand it over to God.  We put it up on a pole – we get a little distance from it so we can see it more clearly and have some space around it, some perspective, and now, looking up at that pole, we learn to look up to heaven, to turn our eyes and hearts up instead of down where the snakes and the problems fester.   We turn our problems – these specific problems – over to God, and we trust that we will be helped.  We are not alone.

We trust that we are helped, and we begin to believe, in placing the problem in front of us in this way and praying about it, we begin to believe in the possibility of healing; we begin to believe in the miracle of healing.  The Torah says Moshe put the snake up on a nes, a banner, a sign; it was a signpost that a nes, a miracle, can occur.  When we turn our problems over to God, when we ask for help, something shifts inside us and we begin to believe in miracles, and in the most profound miracle of all,  the miracle of healing, of not remaining stuck in our pain and our wounds and our snake bites, the possibility that real change and true healing can occur inside us.  

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