The Talmud recounts that the serpent in the Garden of Eden not only enticed Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge but also “implanted impurity” within her—injected her with a poisonous venom that has been simmering in the blood of humanity ever since.
There are many opinions as to which desire the serpent represents: Is it sexual desire? The urge for idolatry? The craving for food? One of the greatest Chasidic masters of all time, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, offers a new, surprising interpretation that is particularly relevant to our generation: the serpent corrupted the imaginative faculty (ko’ach hamedameh) of the soul.
It muddled and tainted our world of images, filling us with coarse and distorted images. Indeed, the first thing the serpent did was to instill within us an inflated self-image with his promise that, “you will be like God”.
This interpretation clarifies the continuation of the Talmudic midrash, which describes that there was a single moment in the history of the Jewish people when their blood was cleansed from the serpent’s impurity: when they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and received the Torah. Somehow, the revelation of the Torah purified the muddled world of imagery in its recipients, even if only momentarily.
The explanation for this is that the Torah presented, for the first time, an alternative to the prevailing religious practices of the time, which had revolved entirely around idols—meaning around tangible figures with defined facial features. The creation of an idol is an act of denial of the wonder that lies at the core of existence, an attempt to confine in form what cannot be grasped. This is the root of the corruption of the imaginative faculty.
In contrast, the Torah was the first to proclaim the existence of a single, hidden Creator behind all natural phenomena, and it forbade the making of “any graven image or any likeness.”
The purification of the imaginative faculty lasted only a short time. Forty days after the Giving of the Torah, when it seemed that Moses was delayed in returning from the mountain, the Israelites fell back into the trap of idolatry and built the Golden Calf. Indeed, according to the midrash, the idea that Moses was delayed was nothing but the product of a false image: Satan came to the people of Israel and showed them “an image of darkness, confusion, and disorder, saying, ‘Moses has surely died, and that is why confusion has come into the world.’”
Moreover, the numerical value of the Hebrew term for “Golden Calf,” Egel HaZahav (עגל הזהב) is precisely equal to that of “the imaginative faculty,” koach hamedameh (כח המדמה). The Golden Calf embodies, more than anything else, the corrupted imagination clothed in idolatrous form.
Although the purification of the imaginative faculty wrought by the Torah was temporary, the very fact that it occurred teaches us that the Torah is the means by which we can renew and clarify our world of imagery. Indeed, an entire layer within the Torah, the aggadah or lore layer, is dedicated to constructing a holy and rectified world of imagery. The aggadot form a rich tapestry of stories, legends, and metaphors whose initial seeds are planted in the stories of the Bible, but from which has since blossomed a vast orchard of stories, expansions, completions, and interpretations.
The aggadah section of the Torah must be studied just like any other Torah or Talmud topic, with depth and diligence. In addition, the Jewish tradition of interpreting aggadah does not stop at finding the general moral or message behind the legends; it also examines every detail of the story’s imagery. In non-Jewish parables like Aesop’s Fables and the like, the choice of symbols—say, fox and stork, etc.—is of no real significance. They are mere trappings hiding the moral of the story. Not so in Jewish lore, where the image, symbol, and even exact wording is essential to decoding the story at hand. Details that may seem marginal at first glance are revealed, upon deeper examination, to contain a wealth of inner meanings.
The aggadah tradition offers a perspective that rests outside the whirlwind of contemporary culture’s images, including those in films, and it enables us to understand, organize, and clarify them. It provides a reference point against which any image can be measured—whether it be the image of a hero, a monster, romantic love, tragedy, or anything else you can imagine—and it allows us to grasp its nature, cleanse it of its distortions, and seek its pure heart. Afterward, we can weave new stories using the same images but reorganizing them so that their meaning is clarified and corrected.
(Here, once again, we must mention Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who was the only individual in his generation to take the imagery of European folklore and craft entirely new stories from them, connecting them to the service of God in his book Sippurei Ma’asiot MeShanim Kadmoniyot, “Tales of Ancient Times”).
By cleansing ourselves of the serpent’s venom we rectify the sin of Adam. We restore our original form, true to the calling of what humanity was meant to be. Indeed, the word “Adam” (אדם) is built from the letters of d-m (דם), “blood,” with the letter aleph (א) preceding them. This suggests that the full stature of the complete human is made up of a “flesh-and-blood” level over which should reside an aleph—the recognition of the single divine source from which the multitude of images flow and to which they must return and relate.
