Look Up and Wake Up: The Snake, the Soul, and the Gaze That Heals
In one of the more surprising episodes in the Torah, G-d instructs Moses to craft a copper snake and place it on a pole. When the Jewish people, suffering from deadly snake bites after complaining about the manna, looked at it—they were healed (Bamidbar 21:8–9). The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 29a) concludes that it wasn’t the snake that healed them. When Israel would look upward and subjugate their hearts to their Father in Heaven—they were healed. If not, they would perish.
This raises an obvious question: Why the middleman? Why not just tell the people to look upward and pray? Why a copper snake? Rabbeinu Bachya notes that the Torah introduces the snakes as “haNechashim”—the snakes—with the definite article. He explains that these weren’t random snakes. These were the ever-present desert serpents described elsewhere (Deut. 8:15), always there, slithering beneath the surface of daily life. The miracle wasn’t just that they were now biting—it was that they hadn’t been biting all along.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch takes it further. The copper snake was a visual wake-up call. It made the people see what had been there all along—but had been invisible thanks to Divine protection. Sometimes we don’t appreciate what we’ve been spared until we see what could have been, and that’s the essence of emunah: not just seeing Hashem in the miracle, but in the non-miracle—the moments where things quietly go right.
Sfas Emes offers a thoughtful insight: The healing wasn’t just physical—it was spiritual. The snake, which brought the original sin in Gan Eden, represents the yetzer hara (evil inclination), the part of us that drags our eyes downward, but when we’re forced to “look up” and lift our gaze beyond the physical, we reconnect to our true identity as neshamos (souls), not just bodies.
One of prayers we recite on Shabbat is Nishmat, in which the line All my bones shall declare: G-d, who is like You? ” (כָּל־עַצְמוֹתַי תֹּאמַרְנָה יְהוָה מִי כָמוֹךָ). Rabbi Avi Shafran notes that Our bones—not just our mouths—praise Hashem. How? Through the hidden miracles of the human body. Our immune system, the white blood cells that battle thousands of invaders, the antibodies that are born in the marrow of our bones—they function like the copper snake: invisible protectors, gifts we rarely notice.
We live in a generation of distractions—screens, headlines, FOMO, and much anxiety. Like the copper snake, sometimes Hashem places something unexpected in our path not to punish us, but to redirect our gaze. When some people are in pain or going through a challenging situation in life, they think, what did I do wrong to deserve this? But that type of thinking is mistaken and there’s no reason to assume that your pain is punishment. Sometimes it’s a prompt to lift our eyes higher.
The real question isn’t Why a copper snake, rather it’s where are we looking. When we train ourselves to see G-d not just in crisis but in the constancy of a beating heart, a clear and sane mind, or a safe walk home, we stop surviving—and start living as we are meant to, with gratitude.
This message is timeless and applicable to all Jews. If you are new to Torah and getting your feet wet with timeless Jewish wisdom or grew up with it, the lesson is the same; look up and wake up—and see how much goodness and even miracles surround you daily.
Good Shabbos