The Secret of the Primordial Serpent: The Struggle for the Holiness of the Body and the Education of Children

Lesson No. 65 | (Continued for about a minute from No. 64) Wednesday morning, Parashas Eikev, 15th of Av 5756 - At the Yeshiva

A profound discourse on the origin of the physical body from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge and the Primordial Serpent. The Rav explains, based on the holy Zohar, the secret of \

The body is not you. The true "I" is something else entirely—the "I" is only the soul. The body is like a garment, and sometimes it is a garment smeared with tar. A person who wears such a garment will begin to smear his hands with the tar of the body as well, and he is only looking for the moment he can take off this dirty garment.

A person must know that after the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, all souls must pass through a body created from the serpent. This body swallows the soul when it descends to the world during conception. Everything that develops in the mother's womb for nine months is essentially a body whose origin is in the serpent.

The Danger in Education: Raising a Little Serpent

When a child is born, people say, "What a sweet child, what a cute child." But the truth is, if we do not educate him properly, a little serpent has been born here. You do not know what will happen with him at age three, what will happen at age seven, and when he reaches the age of thirteen—he will completely fly away from you. He will turn into a winged serpent that you will no longer even see.

Every child is born with this nature, and who knows if the parents will even succeed in raising him in holiness. The Rambam rules that this is the very first thing that prevents teshuvah (repentance):

"One who sees his son falling into an evil culture and does not protest against him."

The Obligation of the Parents: Moving to an Environment of Holiness

A person can stand and give sermons and speeches for ten hours, but if he does not know how to educate his son, he is in a severe problem. A parent must ensure to bring his son to a good place, to move to Jerusalem, to a holy place. People worry: "What will be with the apartment? How will there be parnassah (livelihood)?" But if, Heaven forbid, they need to fly a sick child abroad for medical treatment, they immediately raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you truly want to save your child—move to a holy environment, let him go to the Western Wall every day, so that the body of the serpent will be transformed into the body of a human being.

One cannot live in all sorts of remote holes, where the child sees no spiritual strengthening and hears no words of Torah, but only sees immodesty day and night, and expect that he will emerge as a tzaddik. The first thing, the "Aleph-Beis" of any return in teshuvah (repentance), is to leave the bad society and come to a good society. It is impossible to do teshuvah in places that are far from Torah.

The Secret of the Zohar: "In Sorrow You Shall Bear Children"

The holy Zohar in Parashas Vayakhel explains the verse:

"Sin crouches at the door."

The very moment a woman begins to conceive, a body of a serpent is already created that swallows the soul. This serpent crouches at the opening of the womb, and it is a mighty and massive serpent, much larger than we are capable of comprehending.

Regarding this, Hashem said to Eve after the sin:

"In sorrow you shall bear children."

The Zohar says that the secret of the sorrow here is the secret of the serpent ("raza da nachash"). There are righteous women who give birth without any physical suffering at all, just as it was in Egypt when women gave birth under the apple trees without pain. If so, what is the "sorrow"? The true suffering of childbirth is that the new, pure soul that comes into the world is forced to enter into the body of a serpent. This is the greatest sorrow, and parents must immediately begin to cry and pray for this child, that he should grow up to be holy and God-fearing.

Moshe Rabbeinu and the Secret of the Serpent's Skin

The only one who was an exception to this rule was Moshe Rabbeinu. Amram and Yocheved clung to the holy Shechinah (Divine Presence), and Moshe was born entirely as light, shining like the sun. However, since they did not flee with him to the desert, but rather he entered the house of Pharaoh, this shining body was shed from him, and he received the "mashka d'chivya" (the skin of the serpent). Only at the age of eighty, at the revelation of the Burning Bush, did Moshe merit to rectify this when Hashem said to him:

"Remove your shoes from your feet"

If Miriam had fled with him immediately to the desert, to a cave, he would have brought the Geulah (Redemption) immediately. Angels would have raised him, as it is stated:

"And He made him suck honey from a rock, and oil from a flinty rock"

However, since he grew up in the house of Pharaoh, it took him eighty years to become purified and to shed this physicality.

The Disintegration of the Primordial Serpent and the Resurrection of the Dead

One must know that our world before the sin was a vast, spiritual world, a Garden of Eden that stretched from one end of the world to the other. The Primordial Serpent was also a gigantic creation, the lowest point that Hashem created, from which Adam and Chava (Eve) were supposed to completely divert their attention.

After the sin, that giant serpent disintegrated over the course of six thousand years into trillions of bodies. Every soul that descends into the world takes hold of a small part of that serpent. Our role in this world is to purify ourselves. If a person decides to ascend, he can ascend infinitely and without limit; there is no stopping. At the end of the process, at the Resurrection of the Dead, after the body is buried in the earth and the worms consume all the filth, the lusts, and the pride—we will all merit a pure body that will shine exactly like the sun.

Part 3 of 5 — Lesson No. 65

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