Mishpatim 5784 ~ Feb. 9, 2024

Did you know that you have your own personal angel?  That angel is a guardian angel. In our Torah reading for this Shabbat Moses is informed “I am sending an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have made ready.” (Exodus 23:20)

Often, we find ourselves in difficult situations in life, and wonder whether Hashem is watching over us. Our reading for this Shabbat suggests that we must notice that it is not God, but God’s angel that stands over, watching us, and protecting us from harm.

This week I shared with one of our congregants who was going through a difficult moment, that each and every one of us has a role we need to perform in this world. We do not know what that role is or how we will achieve it. It could be something quite simple, or perhaps something quite daunting. It could be as simple as saying hello to someone at a certain point in their life, when they need a kindness; or could be as difficult as performing heart surgery. It could be comforting a family at a time of loss, or preparing a meal for someone who has just returned home from surgery. Whatever we might be going through at that moment, perhaps our guardian angel is watching over us, and protecting us, so that at the right moment we can perform the role we were meant to, in this world.

We might not necessarily sense, with the challenge one is facing, that the guardian angel is there. If that were the case, then why is one going through the challenge? But one should not mistake the challenge as being that the angel is not watching over you, but rather that the angel is protecting from a greater challenge.

There are times, when a friend is experiencing a challenge in life, that we find ourselves rushing over to be a guardian angel to a friend. It’s one of the beautiful parts of human nature to extend ourselves and a helping hand. But is that always what is wanted or needed? Could there already be a plethora of others reaching out in the same fashion?

Believe it or not, you might not have to take any action, but simply let your friend know that you are there if they need you. In that way you are not becoming intrusive, as we know some people can be. Then when the moment comes that they need you, you are able to be there for them.

The action may perhaps be listening, without commenting, or without sharing what you have just heard with another; the role is simply to listen.

The angel purposefully watches over you, guarding you so that you will be able to perform that role, that task, or that mitzvah.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz writes in his famous work The Thirteenth Petalled Rose:

“The nature of the angel is to be, to a degree, as its name in Hebrew signifies, a messenger, to constitute a permanent contact between our world of action and the higher worlds. An angel's missions go in two directions: it may serve as an emissary of God downward… and it may also serve as the one carries things upwards from below... The angel cannot reveal its true form to man, whose being, senses and instruments of perception belong only to the world of action — it continues to belong to a different dimension even when apprehended in one form or another... The angel who is sent to us from another world does not always have a significance or impact beyond the normal laws of physical nature. Indeed it often happens that the angel precisely reveals itself in nature, in the ordinary common-sense world of causality.”

Some may ask, why does God send an angel? Why not God in his own image? Might it be that God serves as an intermediary simply because of God’s omnipotence! God is protecting the individual from the power that God might unleash. Perhaps God is involved in maintaining our world itself, so that it does not destroy itself. The angels, therefore, can fulfill God’s role to protect us and watch over us from what happens in the world. While we offer our mishebeyrachs for individuals in need of our prayers, could it be that we are asking that God’s angel that watches over us, protects us not only from harm’s way so that we can perform the mitzvah that we are brought in this world to achieve, but also from the unleashed power of God (as the Children of Israel experienced when Hashem appeared to them with the wrath of glory at Mt. Sinai and which overtook them in a most frightening of experiences)?

The Or Hachaim suggests that at a certain time, we will understand that the angel and God are one and the same.  “The … angel described here is not an intermediary, one of G'd's ministering angels, but the "great angel," the one who redeemed the patriarchs, a concept familiar to Kabbalists. He says that by definition we do not recognise a force as an intermediary, i.e. an independent power to whom we have to show respect and obeisance. [I believe that the reason for this statement is that reading verses 21 and 22 could lead one to believe that G'd inserted some angel between Himself and us. Ed.] Only at the end of time, will the world recognise that G'd and His name (those speaking in His name, such as angels) are One….”

Jacob, in Genesis, blesses his grandsons Ephraim and Menashe: “The God in whose ways my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, The God who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day—The Messenger who has redeemed me from all harm—Bless the lads.” (Genesis 48:15-16)

It is our hope and prayer that God’s angels watch over us, guard us, and bless us in a similar fashion. In the meantime, may we continue to find the way to be God’s angels ourselves. For who knows which of the actions we perform is the one we were destined to fulfill in our mission here in this world, during our lifetime, so that we may find our way to that place that God “has made ready for us,” in the Promised Land.

Shabbat shalom.