Looking for Angels Vayerah 5767 Shmuel Herzfeld
A man died and was brought to heaven. All of his sins were placed on one side of the scale and his good deeds were on the other side. The sins outweighed the good deeds. Suddenly an angel placed a fur-coat on the scale with the good deeds. The scales tilted to the good side and the man went to Paradise. As the angel is escorting him to Paradise, he said, ―Explain the fur-coat to me.‖ The angel answered: ―One cold winter night you traveled in a carriage and picked up a poor man on the way. You noticed he was shivering so you took off your fur-coat and had him put it on. That fur-coat weighed more than you thought….‖ (Cited by Margolies, A Gathering of Angels, 189.) What is an Angel? Who are Angels? Can we really see them? On June 25, 1914, Franz Kafka made an entry into his diary. The entry is typical Kafka—very hard to understand, but once you ponder it, it contains deep truths. Kafka wrote: ―In the dim light…an angel in bluish-violet robes girt with gold chords sank slowly down on the great white silken-shining wings, the sword in its arm thrust out horizontally. ‗An angel, then,‘ I thought, ‗it has been flying towards me all day and in my disbelief I did not know it. Now it will speak to me.‖ I lowered my eyes. When I raised them again the angel was still there, it is true hanging rather far under the ceiling…but it was no living angel, only a painted wooden figurehead off the prow of some ship, one of the kind that hangs from the ceiling in sailors‘ taverns, nothing more.‖ (Cited in Margolies, A Gathering of Angels.) Kafka is describing his own very uplifting and then deflating religious experience. At first he believes that he is literally flying with angels—winged creatures who come from heaven. He is soaring with God‘s highest helpers. But when he awakens from his mystical slumber he realizes that what he thought was a heavenly being was really just a cheap design in a bar. How disappointing! How deflating! How many of us are like Kafka? How many of us grow up picturing angels the way Kafka pictures angels—winged creatures who fly in to help us? And how many of us ultimately end up being disappointed when our ―more sophisticated‖ reasoning steps in and convinces us that there are no such things as angels. Well…angels really do exist. It says so in this week‘s parshah. It talks about angels on multiple occasions. Moe than any other parshah in the Torah, this is the parshah of Angels.
First, Abraham is visited by ―three men,‖ shloshah anashim. These are not ordinary men. They tell Abraham that Sarah will miraculously have a child. And so, most rabbinic commentators teach us that these are not men, but angels. Then Sodom is destroyed and Lot and his daughters are saved. Who does this? The angels—va-yavo-u shenei hamalachim sedomah, and the two angels came to Sodom. Again, they appear when Hagar and Yishmael are banished from the home of Abraham. Hagar is crying in the desert, when an angel of God (malakh elokim) calls to her from heaven and tells her not to be afraid, ―Because God has heard the cry of [her] boy/‖ And finally, in the Akedah story as Avraham is about to slaughter Isaac an angel (malakh hashem) calls out from heaven and says, ―Do not lift your hand upon that boy.‖ Who are these angels that keep appearing in this story? Are they the same winged angels which Kafka saw and which are commonly seen in popular culture? Let us look at three different rabbinic approaches to these angels. These approaches debate the correct understanding of the passage that discusses the ―shloshah anashim, three men‖ who came to visit Abraham. Rashi understands that these three angels are really angels who appeared in the form of men—malachim bedmut anashim. Angels have very specific responsibilities. That is why three angels were needed. They each could only perform only one task. One came to tell the news about Sarah, one came to heal Abraham, and one came to destroy Sodom. According to Rashi, angels seem to be a type of celestial robot; they have a heavenly task which they perform in the shape of a human being. They look like humans, but are not humans. Doesn‘t the text say that they ate? Rashi explains that they only appeared to be eating in order to not to stand out. They are like science fiction aliens adapting themselves to look human. A complete opposite approach is taken by Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed. Maimonides argues that the entire episode of the three men is actually a prophetic vision that Abraham had. The verse says: ―va-yera elav‖ and God appeared to Abraham in a vision. And from then on the entire story is a vision. No angels actually appeared to Abraham. It was all a prophecy. But this presents a problem. For if seeing angels is a really a prophetic experience, how did Hagar see an angel. She wasn‘t a prophet. And how did the people of Sodom see angels? They certainly weren‘t prophets. And so, Nachmanides offers a third approach which stands somewhere between the other two approaches.
Nachmanides suggests that one who sees an angel is not a prophet and is not having a prophecy; rather they are having an experience called gilui einayim, the opening of the eyes. Let us expand on Nachmanides. The opening of the eyes allows people who aren‘t prophets to see what they normally can‘t see. The most famous example of this is Hagar. After the angel calls to her, she opens her eyes and sees the well of water. The well was there the whole time, but her eyes weren‘t seeing it. In this sense, we can understand the angel as being inside of us. It is a way for God to touch us by allowing us to see what is right in front of our eyes. There is so much we see with our eyes, but there is even more that we don‘t see. Angels allow us to see what we can‘t see. Sometimes we need new eyes for that. There is a well known idea that explains how we get the mark right above our lips. While we sit in our mother‘s womb an angel comes and teaches us the entire Torah. Just before we leave the womb another angel pats us right there on the mouth and causes us to forget everything. This mark is the physical reminder of that incident. The Baal Shem Tov‘s grandson, Reb Baruch of Medzibozh asked, ―What is the point of all this? Why teach the unborn child in the first place if he is made to forget?‖ Reb Baruch explained that the teaching of the entire Torah, i.e. all the knowledge of the world remains in the child‘s mind. It then becomes the challenge of every life to bring that teaching out into the open, allowing the teaching angel the last word. (Cited in Margolies, p. 195.) The teaching of Reb Boruch is that all the knowledge is inside of us. It is our job to see it – to really, really see what is already there. Sometimes we need a little help seeing. That‘s what angels are for. They remind us how to see. And of course, if we really see, then there is no telling what the angels can do for us! I think we could all use the help of angels when we look at other people. We often are very skilled at seeing people‘s faults – we can use the help of an angel to see their strengths. And significantly, we can use an angel‘s help to see our own strengths; we can use an angel‘s help to allow us to overcome our challenges. Lo rechokah hi—as the Torah says, it is not distant. We just need to know how to see.