Angelic encounters guide us on every step of life’s climb

Vayishlah

Genesis 32:4-36:43

Hosiah 11:7-12:12

Few Jews believe that a supernatural angelic being will intervene in their lives. This is in spite of the fact that both biblical and rabbinic literature provide an extensive record of incidents involving angels, cherubim, seraphim and other divine creatures.

It was an angel who ordered Abraham to refrain from sacrificing Isaac (Genesis 22:11), who indicated the special character of the burning bush to Moses (Exodus 3:2), who announced the birth of Ishmael (Gen. 16:11), and who escorted the Israelites through the desert (Exodus 23:20-23; 33:2).

Abraham entertained angels in human form (Gen. 18). At Jericho, Joshua saw an angelic being holding a drawn sword (Joshua 5:13-14). Manoah, father of Samson, was visited by an angel who disappeared in the flame of a sacrifice (Judges 13:20-21). The psalmists suggest that angels protect the faithful (Psalm 91:11) and rout enemies in battle (Psalm 35:5-6). Angels possess extraordinary beauty (I Samuel 29:9; II Samuel 14:7; 19:27) and know everything that occurs on earth (II Samuel 14:20). In post-biblical literature, angels are organized in a hierarchy with distinct ranks and activities.

Two memorable scenes depict Jacob's vision and struggle with divine beings. In Vayishlah, this week's Torah portion, Jacob, greatly frightened about the next day's meeting with his brother Esau, struggled with a supernatural creature. Jacob triumphed but not without sustaining a wound and a name change to Israel, a name reported by the text to mean "you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed" (Gen. 32:29).

But there is no more memorable scene of divine beings than the one in Vayetze, last week's Torah portion, where Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching into the heavens "and the angels of God were going up and down on it" (Gen. 28:12). When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he declared, "Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it" (Gen. 28:15).

This past year, Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, the immediate past president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, died. A master of elegant language and fine-tuned metaphor, he was drawn to the legends of Genesis. In his retirement presidential address in 1995, he extracted his message from the dream of Jacob's ladder, a dream tailored to surveying both accomplishments and failures:

"Jacob's dream of the ladder...constitutes an appropriate if humbling metaphor for all leaders -- for the ladder, as you will remember, is populated with angels. In truth, for any leader worthy of his or her mantle, the ladder of leadership will be occupied, at every rung, by angels...angels in the way that Maimonides defined them when he wrote in the Mo're N'vuchim, in his Guide to the Perplexed, that 'everyone who is entrusted with a mission is an angel.'

"...Jewish moments...prayer, study, candle lighting or song, by a magic all their own, enable us to see God's ladder, as clear as day with a rung for every one of us.

"For Jacob, the response of such a revelation was to take the stone that he had used for a pillow and make it an altar -- to anoint the place as Bethel, a holy place, where the reality of God became clear...

"Unbeknownst to him it was the very place where he would return after years of indenture, to be renamed Israel from whom would spring 'an assembly of nations.'

"So it is with our community: We have together built this most dynamic Jewish movement atop the many levels of the Jewish past, and as a gateway into the Jewish future. We have done so by returning from our separate journeys, again and again, to our togetherness, to the place that is God. Together we have made of Jacob's stone a circle of stones ringing the world...

"My sojourn at Bethel is complete. It is my honor, now, to surrender that hard pillow of leadership. Younger heads are ready to dream their dreams upon it."

Jacob struggled just as Jews have always struggled. We struggle and sometimes we, too, prevail. We see ladders set before us that ascend to the very heights. We know that even more important than reaching the heights, is the knowledge that we must climb -- at times, even against our will. And we will discover angels along our way, sometimes not easily recognizable, but other times quite apparent. We will set our stones and build our Bethels -- our sacred places in which we reach for the divine in us.