Friday, February 22, 2008

Ki Tissa 5768: When an Angel Points To the Demons

After two weeks with not much action, there's a lot of story this time. Moses receives the last of the commandments on Sinai, then proceeds down the mountain, where he meets up with Joshua, who thinks there's fighting in the camp. It turns out the people are worshipping a golden calf. Both Moses and God get upset, then Moses tries to save the people by telling God he'd look pretty bad in the eyes of the Egyptians if he kills everyone. The people repent. Moses goes back up to get another set of ten tablets since he broke the first set. Moses asks to sees God's face, but only gets to see his back, sort of. God inscribes another set of tablets, and reiterates several commandments. After this second time, Moses keeps his face covered, unless he was in the Mishkan.

This week we have the bookends to the readings of a few weeks ago. Those portions were the preparation for Sinai and the beginning of revelation there. Then Moses went up the mountain. This week portion is Moses coming down the mountain and the aftermath. On opposite ends of Moses’ time on Sinai there is an interesting repeated passage. In this week’s portion we read:

2. And I will send an angel before you; and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; 3. To a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in the midst of you; for you are a stiff-necked people; lest I consume you in the way.[Exodus 33:1-3]

Before Moses ascends Sinai we have the following:

20. Behold, I send an Angel before you, to keep you in the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. 21. Take heed of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions; for my name is in him. 22. But if you shall indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy to your enemies, and an adversary to your adversaries. 23. For my Angel shall go before you, and bring you in to the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off. [Exodus 23:20-23]

A few weeks ago I gave a D’var Torah at a friend’s house after Shabbat and asked a question about these two portions. Exodus 33 gives a function to this angel, to lead the people to the land. But what happens when the angel finishes this function? Does the angel leave? In Exodus 33 from this week’s portion we read next of what happens when they hear about this angel guiding them:

4. And when the people heard these bad tidings, they mourned; and no man put on him his ornaments.

Apparently, this was bad news. There is a Midrash which explains their mourning:

Raba again said to Rabbah b. Mari: Whence can be derived the popular Saying: ‘When we were young we were treated as men, whereas now that we have grown old we are looked upon as babies’? — He replied: It is first written: And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light but subsequently it is written: Behold I send an angel before thee to keep thee by the way. [Baba Kama 93a]

The people’s lament was that God, who was in the pillar of fire from Egypt to Sinai, would no longer be in the lead. They get a flunky instead. Yet in Exodus 23, shortly after the giving of the Ten Commandments and prior to Moses’ ascent up the mountain we are told this was exactly what was going to happen. To further confuse things, the cloud and fire was still there, as we read in the last three verses of Exodus:

36. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys; 37. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. 38. For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys. [Exodus 40:36-38]

Not only are we confused about whether the angel stayed around after the entering of the land but whether it was the angel or God doing the leading. I believe there is a way out of this tangle. First I think it is important to understand the Hebrew word for angel, malach. It can mean both angel and it can mean messenger. Adding a little Marshall McLuhan to that translation, the media and the message are often indistinguishable if not integral to each other. As we read in Ki Tissa, man cannot be face to face with God and live. There is always some message system conveying meaning from God to Israel, and to the rest of humanity. That message system, the angels, may take human form, but often, as exemplified by the book of Esther, they are a lot more subtle. There is no direct divine intervention in the story. I’ve referred to this idea before as “Everyday Torah” that there is spiritual learning and guidance from the most mundane things if we only look.

Secondly the difference between the sender of a message and the message itself is often a blurred distinction. God and the angels are often the same thing. Compare this to e-mail: If I were to send you an e-mail, I’m sending electronic data quite a distance. Your reaction to that e-mail however would be the same as if I was in the room. Someone wouldn’t say “the e-mail I got from Shlomo said” when quoting the e-mail. Instead that person might say “Shlomo said” as though I was in the room when I said it. If I said something offensive in the e-mail, you’d react as if I said something offensive to your face.

This is also true of a wondrous sight like the cloud over the Mishkan. The cloud is the message, the messenger and the sender of the message. All of the distinctions are blurred. The people’s mourning over they were only getting a secondary agent was wrong because they made a distinction between the message and the sender of the message. In idolatrous thinking we make such distinctions, in Jewish thinking we do not.

Yet that leaves the original question, did the angel stop at the border of Israel, never to lead the way again? One source begins to suggest an interesting pattern:

1. And an angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you go out of Egypt, and have brought you to the land which I swore to your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you. 2. And you shall make no pact with the inhabitants of this land; you shall pull down their altars; but you have not obeyed my voice; Why have you done this? [Judges 2:1-2]

This is not the only angel after the people settle in the land. There are several showing up in the book of Judges. Yet unlike the Cloud of the Lord over the Mishkan we see a new pattern. Instead of an angel leading a nation, it is an angel directed at an individual, a pattern which will continue throughout Tanach, to Ezekiel and Daniel. Often their directions are more than a little strange and a bit indirect, as in the ones to Samson’s parents (Judges 13) or to Gideon (Judges 6).

I’ve thought about this all for the last month or so due what I’ve been going through. I had expected my life to head in one direction after finishing grad school only to see it take a sharp right turn, one I hadn’t completely expected and one which looks like I was going in the wrong direction. Instead of Jewish scholar, I was heading into Microbiology product development. Since all this started I’ve been meditating and thinking about the phrase “I will send an angel before you.” If there was an angel still here, I’ve had a hard time seeing the angel lately. I’ve wondered why am I shooting so far off the obvious path. It seemed so strange, as though the last five years of my life in Jewish studies were wasted. Nonetheless I’ve tried to adjust to new paths. I’ve been learning a lot of new things, none of which seem to have anything to do with Jewish studies. Yet while trying to find some Talmud last weekend about the manufacturing ethics of R. Huna, I ran across the following passage,

It has been taught: Abba Benjamin says, If the eye had the power to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge round a field. R. Huna says: Every one among us has a thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his right hand. [Brachot 6a]

I remembered an incident from the early days of Microbiology. Often on the first few glances of protozoans under the microscope early scientists would cringe in terror at the monsters under the microscope. I’ve heard the Alfred Hitchcock’s movie the Birds was inspired by the thought of microbial life being visible to the naked eye. That is not the only horror movie of course. The Blob and even an episode of Star Trek were based on a very visible Entamoeba Histolytica, though as a microbe it is far more difficult to stop its destructive power. As Abaye mentions demons are everywhere. They live in multitudes covering every surface, and as R. Huna mentions, who happens to be a food manufacturer [Brachot 5b] they are all over your hands.

The passage continued on how to see demons using magic potions. While it’s some seriously odd magic potions involving black cats and things the ASPCA would not be happy with, I realized it’s no stranger than the staining procedures I was learning in my Microbiology books. Since 2004, when I took a course in the history of Jewish magic, I been stating one thing over and over again, twice as a speaker to national conferences of public health officials. The rabbis of the Talmud, when referring to demons, in Aramaic Mazikin, may have been referring to microbial pathogens. My angel had struck, and shown me that, yes, I was on the path and the angel was still there before me. Ironically, the angel before me was pointing at the demons.

As much as Abaye and R. Huna talk about the multitude of demons, there are multitudes of angels as well. The Midrash Exodus Rabbah LXVIII, 18 uses the same proof text R. Huna used, a thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his right hand [Psalm 91:7] to talk of multitudes of angels in commenting about angels in front of us. They are always around giving us messages, and always being the message from God. The messages are everywhere, if we only look. It might be a passage of Tanach or Talmud that catches our eye. Yet it can also be a song on the radio or an advertisement on a bus. It could be an e-mail with a friend you haven’t heard from in a while, or an odd conversation with a stranger. Angels take many forms, surrounding us, so that they are always in front of us.

The lesson of the last few weeks for me has been about possibility. We can see our angels if we are open to possibility. If we put limits on our thinking, as did those in this week’s portion believing one of God’s flunkies was guiding the way, we miss the message and get less. If we only think angels are some guys with wings we may go our entire lives without seeing an angel. But if we open up to more possibilities, we see God’s messengers in many everyday things, events and circumstances around us, and can read and listen to the voice of God in all of creation.

When you run across your angels, say “hi” for me.

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