Two
Angelic Imagination
WHILE ANGEL-LIKE begins can be found in many religious traditions, angels themselves seem to be a uniquely Western idea. When we think of angels the images that come to mind are those of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it will be from these traditions, though primarily the later three, that we will draw most of our examples.
Of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism is the oldest, and through the Hebrew Bible and its accompanying rabbinic commentary, it is Judaism that provides many of the root myths that find new expression and meaning in Christianity and Islam. Thus we will use early Jewish angel stories as our starting place for exploring angels in general.
To read angel myths and stories with an eye to their deeper psycho-spiritual meaning requires a certain mind-set. In Judaism this mind-set is called midrashic, “investigative,” and the body of work this mind-set creates is called midrash.
The Hebrew word midrash comes from the word drash, “to inquire,” and refers to oral and written teachings that bring out the deeper meanings of scripture. There are two types of midrash, midrash halacha that explicate the Bible’s legal code (halacha), and midrash aggadah, myths and legends (aggadah/aggadot) that deal with theology and ethics. When dealing with angels it is the latter that is of interest to us.
While there is evidence of midrash aggadah in early rabbinic writings, the form explodes in popularity sometime in the third century CE and maintains its popularity for a thousand years. Unlike midrash halacha, which because of its legal nature tends toward tight logic, midrash aggadah invites the free play of the imagination. Biblical tales are retold with details added from the imagination of the teller.
Here we will be guided by the classic midrash aggadah of the rabbis found in the collection called Midrash Rabbah, the Great Midrash. This compilation of rabbinic myths and legends is difficult to date since different myths were composed at different times. Generally speaking, however, the earliest myths are those found in the first volume of the collection, Genesis Rabbah (literally the “Great Genesis,” but better understood as “The Great Collection of Myths Based on Genesis”), which was completed some time in the fifth century CE, and which contains myths that date back at least two centuries. The latest compilations of Midrash Rabbah are from the ninth century CE, but here, too, the myths themselves are much older than the date of their compilation.
The authors of midrash take the original biblical story as a catalyst for their own imaginative play. This is important to remember throughout our book. We are dealing not with the Bible as codified in Judaism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Protestantism, but with the Bible as grist for imaginative rabbinic play. One need not ask of these myths, “Is that in the Bible?” for the answer is always the same—“No.” The proper question is rather, “Where in this myth is the seed of the original Bible tale?”
To see how midrash works, let’s begin with the biblical story of the creation of humanity: “Then God said, ‘Let us fashion humanity in our image in harmony with our likeness’ ... So God created humanity in the divine image, in the image of the divine he created them; masculine and feminine he created them” (Genesis 1:26–27).
The story, if it can even be called a story, is sparse and terse. We know nothing of what was going on in the mind of God, or to whom God was speaking when God said, “Let us fashion.” This is where the rabbinic imagination enters: “When the blessed Holy One desired—when it arose in His will—to create the world, He gazed into Torah [the heavenly version of revelation that comes to earth as the Five Books of Moses] and created it ... As He was about to create adam [‘earthling’ from adamah, ‘earth’], Torah exclaimed: ‘If a human being is created and then proceeds to sin, and You punish him—why should the Work of Your hands be in vain, since he will be unable to endure Your judgment?’ YHVH replied, ‘I have already prepared teshuvah, returning [remorse or conscience] before creating the world.’”1
Torah fears that God is wasting time creating the world if God intends to place humankind in it. Humans will sin, God will be obligated to punish them, and the magnitude of that punishment will obliterate the world—making the act of creation a cosmic waste of time. This would be true if God had not already taken precaution.
Before the creation of humanity and, by extension, sin, God created teshuvah, repentance. Literally teshuvah means “return,” implying that when one sins one turns away from one’s true nature and true path, and that repentance is returning to that true nature and path. The drama that captivates God, the drama God anticipated from before the first moment of humanity’s creation, the drama hinted at in Psalm 8 (see page 9) that brings God back time and again to remember and visit us mortals is this: How will humans turn away—and how will they find their way back? This is the key to all great drama, whether it is played out on a stage, on the pages of a book, on a screen—or on earth. Falling away from truth and returning to it is the very heart of the human adventure, and this drama is as compelling to God as it is to us.
Over two thousand years after the psalmist raised the issue of why God bothers with humans, the rabbis debated the relative greatness of angels and Israelites. While Psalm 8 makes it clear that humanity as a whole is a little lower than the angels, could it be that Israelites, being the chosen few of humanity, have a different standing in the divine hierarchy? Could it be that while most of humanity is lower than the angels, the people Israel is a bit higher? Some rabbis argued in the affirmative, others in the negative. Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin (1749–1821) argued that both arguments were correct.
First Rabbi Volozhin narrowed the definition of Israelite to refer not to Jews in general but those individuals of any group who were disciples of Truth. Second, he affirmed that there are levels of Truth dependent upon levels of consciousness. In making this point he quoted from Zohar Hadash (New Zohar), the fifth volume of the thirteenth-century “Bible” of Jewish mysticism, Sefer Zohar (Book of Illumination), written by the Spanish kabbalist Moses de Leon (1250–1305). Moses de Leon said, “The conception of God of which angels are capable is greater than that of any creature living below the level of angelic consciousness. Below the consciousness of angels is that of the heavens, and this surpasses any conception of God those below the heavens can conceive. Below this is the lowest level of consciousness, the level of the human, those grounded in dust, which despite its low level is still greater than anything below it can imagine.”2
Rabbi Volozhin imagined a hierarchy of consciousness and used that hierarchy to argue for the supremacy of angels over humans. Angels operate at such a high level of consciousness that they are able to imagine God far more accurately than we humans can. In this they are higher than humans. But, he continued, there is something humans have that angels lack, and this is what makes humanity rank higher than angels: “An angel is in essence only one individual power, in which there is no generalization of all the several worlds. Hence it is in no way within the power of angels to elevate, join together, or unify any world with the one spread above their heads, for they have no part in common with them ... Humanity alone elevates, joins and unifies the Worlds and their Light by virtue of human deeds, inasmuch as the human is comprised of all of these worlds.”3
In other words, angels have the capacity to transcend lower levels, but without humans to embody that capacity they are totally ineffective. This makes them lower than humans, for even if humans do not move from ego-centered mind to world-centered soul (let alone God-centered spirit) they can still do good deeds here on earth, something angels cannot do. Humans, even without using their angelic faculties, still have something to offer; angels without humans, however, are nothing at all. As Rabbi Volozhin wrote, “Thus even an angel can feel an elevation and an addition to his sanctity coming from [a person] as a result of human deeds, since the angel is virtually a component part of man [emphasis added]. And even the soul of man is devoid of this exalting and unifying power until it descends into the world of action in the human body. So it is written: ‘He blew the breath of life into his nostrils’—a soul to all the worlds ...”4
Angels are components of human consciousness. They are personifications of human capacities for knowing and achieving higher and more inclusive levels of awareness. The angelic as part of the human is an insight the ancient rabbis found buried in the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder.
Escaping from the murderous rage of his brother, Esau, Jacob races toward Haran, the place where his grandfather Abraham had lived before he journeyed to Canaan, and where Jacob hopes to find safety and shelter with his maternal uncle, Laban, who lives there now. “Jacob departed from Beer-sheba and traveled toward Haran. As the sun set he found a place to camp for the night, and arranging stones as pillows for his head, he lay down to sleep. And he dreamt: And a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching into the heavens, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:10–12).
Before engaging the midrash associated with this dream, it is useful to note that we are dealing with a Jewish version of a universal mythic theme. The ladder appears in many traditions. It is the Siberian shaman’s tent pole that he climbs to draw nearer to heaven. It is the klimax of the mysteries of Mithra, the pre-Zoroastrian religion of Persia, a ladder made of the seven planetary metals that each initiate was given to climb. It is the Babylonian ziggurat climbed to reach the heavens. It is the ladder of Taiwanese Taoists and Japanese Yamabushi ascetics who climb a ladder made of razor-sharp swords. The ladder motif also exists in some understandings of Muhammad’s Night Journey, and it can be found in parts of Africa where it is thought to link spirits and gods with people. A variation on the ladder is told among the native peoples of North America. The Algonquin, for example, speak of a hero, Tchakabech, who climbs to heaven via a giant tree to meet the sun god.
To imagine Jacob’s dream to be unique to the Bible is to miss the power of this myth. The ancient rabbis, of course, knew nothing of Yamabushi monks and Siberian shamans, yet they knew that they were dealing with something beyond a mere material ladder.
The first question the rabbis asked was why are the angels seen ascending and descending rather than descending and ascending? If angels originate in heaven and are sent down to earth to fulfill some mission, one would expect to see them coming down first, and climbing up only after their task is complete. According to the midrash, among the ascending angels were Raphael and Gabriel, the two angels who had destroyed Sodom one hundred and thirty-eight years earlier. Because they had disclosed their mission to Lot and helped him escape, something God had not ordered them to do, they were banished by God to wander the earth for all these years. They had accompanied Jacob on his journey, and having reached Moriah, the site of the near sacrifice of Isaac, and much later of the Jerusalem Temple, they were allowed to return home.
Upon their arrival in heaven, Raphael and Gabriel called out to their fellow angels to behold the face of Jacob, whose image they said appears also on the Throne of God.5
What does it mean that Jacob’s face appears on the Throne of God? It is again a mythic way of pointing to the unity of God and humanity.
Jacob’s dream tells us that angels are a means of moving from earth to heaven and back to earth again. That is to say, angels are symbolic of the human capacity to shift from mind to soul, from I-It to I-Thou consciousness. Lest we doubt the rabbis mean to link angels to humans, the rabbis claim that the lower end of the ladder is connected to the human body.6
The angels in Jacob’s vision both descend into and ascend up from the human body, suggesting that angels are not simply the imaginings of the human mind, but rather the human imagination itself. Angels, at least the way the rabbis viewed them, are not symbols for something else, but the source of symbol making itself. Angels are not figments of the imagination, but the capacity for imagination.
We find a further hint of this in another rabbinic myth about Jacob. In this midrash Jacob meets the angel Uriel (Light of God) who says to him, “I have descended to earth to live among humanity. My name is Jacob.”7 Jacob is meeting the Light of God who reveals himself to be another Jacob. In other words, the angelic Uriel is the human Jacob’s spiritual alter ego.
According to our understanding of angels as internal forces, Uriel is saying to Jacob, “I am Uriel, the Light of Consciousness by which you see God, and through which you come to know yourself as a manifestation of God. If I am to guide you toward God, toward the realization of your own divine nature, you must follow me, and to follow me you must imagine I am not inside you but outside you. To keep you from mistaking me for someone other than your inner soul, I will take on your shape and your name, so that whenever we meet you will know you are meeting yourself.”
We will draw from midrash throughout this book, but these first examples make clear the imaginative play at the heart of the midrashic mind-set.
The question arising from these two midrashim (plural of midrash) is this: What is the ultimate state toward which we are to climb when we dare to climb out of our own heads on our own ladders? Our answer is that we climb from ego-centered mind to world-centered soul to God-centered spirit.
But how did great spiritual masters articulate this same truth in the past?
When Jesus moved from I-It through I-Thou to I-I awareness he exclaimed, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). When the ninth-century Sufi mystic Bayazid al-Bistami did the same he said, “I am truth, I am the true God.”
The following story expands on the experience of al-Bistami:
Being [Allah, God] asked [al-Bistami], “What is the throne of Being?” He answered, “I am the throne of Being.” “What is the table on which the divine decrees are written?” “I am that table.” “What is the pen of God—the word by which God created all things?” “I am the pen.” “What is Abraham, Moses, and Jesus?” “I am Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.” “What are the angels Gabriel, Michael, Israfil?” “I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil, for whatever comes to true being is absorbed into God, and this [al-Bistami said, referring to himself] is God.”8
Similarly, the great Sufi poet and teacher Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273) offered this interpretation of his own:
One knocked at the door of the Beloved, and a voice from within inquired, “Who is there?” Then he answered, “It is I.” And the voice said, “This house will not hold me and thee.” So the door remained shut. Then the Lover sped away into the wilderness, and fasted and prayed in solitude. And after a year he returned, and knocked again at the door, and the voice again demanded, “Who is there?” and the Lover said, “It is Thou.” Then the door was opened.9
Who is this God these great mystics discovered? A first answer might come from the myth of Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush.
When asked by Moses to reveal his name, God replies, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14). As noted earlier most English Bibles translate the Hebrew as the static “I am that I am,” rather than the more accurate and intriguing “I will be whatever I will be.”
God is not a static “I am,” but a flowing “I will be”; not a fixed being but an eternal becoming. God is process not product, and the process is creative, unpredictable, always surprising. To say, “The Father and I are one” ( John 10:30), is not to identify with a static state, but with a creative flow. God is creativity and all expressions of creativity. The nature of God is to forever create new forms, new options, new possibilities.
This too is revealed in the Hebrew Bible. Let us take for example the first of the Ten Commandments revealed to Moses: “I am YHVH your God Who has taken you out of Mitzrayim [the land of Egypt], from the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2).
YHVH, another form of the Hebrew verb “to be,” is the process of liberation. Liberation from what? From Mitzrayim, which is a Hebrew pun meaning “from the narrow places.” Mitzrayim is both a geographical place and a state of mind. On the mythic level the Bible is saying that YHVH is the process whereby humanity is liberated from the narrow places of enslavement.
There are, of course, as many places of enslavement as there are people to imagine them, but the one narrow place in which we are all enslaved is the ego-centered mind itself and its fundamental belief that “I and God are not one.” Angels and the angelic are expressions of human creativity pointing the way out of this (dis-)illusion.