Snake

When the snake bit Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa while he was praying the snake died. (Each day is attended by surprises or it is nothing.) Question: was the bare-footed, smelly Rabbi more poisonous than the snake or so God-adulterated he’d become immune to serpent poison? Oh great-great-great-uncles, your palms weighing air, why are you arguing? Listen, the snake thought (being old and unwell and bad-tempered as hell) Death, where’s thy sting? In short, was just testing: a snake’s last fling. Yes, the so-called snake was dying anyway, its heart calcified and as old as Eden. No, that snake was A1 fit but while hissing for fun it clumsily bit its own tongue. No, Hanina invented that snake; not for his own sake but for first- class, religious publicity. No no, here’s the key to it. Ask: did the Rabbi, later on, become a jumpy, timid man? Remember, he who has been bitten by a snake thereafter becomes frightened of a rope … Bearded men in darkening rooms sipping lemon tea and arguing about the serpent till the moon of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, rose above the alien steeples—centuries of sleep. Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi who once studied in Vienna says snake-venom contains haemolysins, haemo- coagulants, protolysins, cytolysins and neurotoxins and that even in Hanina ben Dosa’s day a snake was a snake—unless, of course, it was a penis, an unruly penis, making a noise like one pissing on a mound of fresh hot ashes. Oh great-great-great-uncles did you hear him? And are your handbones weighing moonshine?