At the burning bush, the Holy One asks Moses to do something that violates every shepherd's instinct. The staff he has carried through decades in Midian has just become a serpent. The obvious move is to flee. Instead, God says: Stretch forth thy hand and seize it by its tail.
No one grabs a snake by the tail. You grab it just behind the head, where it cannot strike. The tail is the place of maximum vulnerability — the end where the snake has full mobility to whip back and bite. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the command exactly because it is an instruction in the logic of faith: reach for the thing you are most afraid of, from the angle you are most afraid of.
The Rod That Returns
And then the quiet miracle: he stretched forth his hand and grasped it, and it became the rod in his hand. Not a rod. The rod — the same one he had been leaning on moments before. The transformation is total, and the return is total.
The later Targumic tradition will reveal that this rod was carved from the sapphire Throne of Glory and inscribed with the Divine Name (see the Targum on Exodus 4:20). The serpent-test was its christening. The takeaway: Moses had to prove he could grasp terror from the wrong end before he could be trusted to carry the staff that would split a sea.