An Angel Made Only For You
On Living in a Time of Spiritual Twilight
A man found him [Joseph] wandering in the fields. The man asked him, “What are you looking for?” He answered, “I am looking for my brothers. Could you tell me where they are pasturing?” (Genesis 37:15-16)
“A man found him”—this was the angel Gabriel. (Rashi)
“A man found him”—the plain sense is this was an ordinary passerby. (Ibn Ezra)
The first part [of the magic trick] is called “The Pledge.” The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course…it probably isn’t.” (Christopher Nolan, The Prestige)
One of the heartbreaking ironies of the Torah’s Joseph saga—which we begin reading this week in parashat Vayeshev (Gen. 37:1-40:23)—is that Joseph’s brothers would not have sold Joseph into slavery had he not gone out to look for them. It is precisely Joseph’s search for his brothers that occasions their unique act of cruelty towards him. A similarly tragic pattern occurs in the story of Oedipus, in which the ruler’s very quest to discover the cause of the Theban plague leads him to discover it is himself.
Jacob sends Joseph to Shechem to look after his “brothers’ peace” (37:14)—but Joseph receives anything but peace in return. The place—Shechem—where Joseph is sold into slavery (and where, in the previous Torah reading, his sister Dina was kidnapped) and the word Shalom are separated by only one letter (a kaf vs. a lamed). Only one letter makes the difference between coexistence and violence. The text has a foreboding quality, as if Joseph knows he’s walking into a trap. Joseph uses the same word, Hineini (“here I am”) in response to his father’s request that Abraham uses when God asks him to sacrifice his son. Is Joseph’s trek to Shechem a similar act of faith as Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah?
The literary parallel between the two tales leads to a shocking contrast at their apparent conclusions: where Isaac is saved by a ram as his substitute, Joseph is “saved” from death by becoming a slave. The brothers then dip Joseph’s coat in animal blood to hide their calumny. The animal blood is reminiscent of the ancient idea—introduced in the Binding of Isaac story—that animal sacrifice is a replacement for human sacrifice. On one level, Joseph survives because of this moral progress, on another level, the brothers miss the moral entirely, demonstrating that the switch from human to animal sacrifice doesn’t make us fundamentally less violent, just more crafty in our barbarism. Perhaps the cynics out there will say that this is precisely what civilization means: barbarism that is well-crafted, well disguised, well dressed up in rational discourse and legal documents (the Talmud in Bava Metzia notes that the brothers used a legal loophole to justify their behavior towards to Joseph).
There is no angelic voice to cry out to the brothers not to kill Joseph. Instead, the decision not to sacrifice him is provided by Reuben, whose motivations are ambiguous. The world in which Joseph and his brothers operates is less directly providential than that of their forefathers and foremothers. Joseph’s mode of divination is dream interpretation, which is less direct than hearing God’s voice as Abraham did. God doesn’t tell Joseph or the brothers directly what to do. Joseph’s Hineini declaration is thus all the more strange in that he says it not to God, but to his father. The Joseph story takes place in an epoch of spiritual twilight and is about living in that twilight.
One of the stranger details in the Joseph story is a seemingly extraneous moment in which Joseph gets lost in a field and is found by an unnamed man. Rashi says the man is an angel. Ibn Ezra says he’s just a regular guy. And in that debate we experience the twilight, the uncanniness of the Joseph story which is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious.
A common interpretation of the unnamed man is that he is there as a kind of sign—either for Joseph or for us, or both, that everything will be OK, that Joseph’s descent into slavery is simply Act II in a three part magic trick. As Michael Caine’s character says in the film The Prestige, “Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call The Prestige.” Anyone can make Joseph disappear; the virtuosity is in making him re-appear—this we experience only towards the end of Genesis when Joseph removes his Egyptian disguise and says to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?”
If we follow this line of thinking and see the Joseph story as a three part magic trick, then it is a kind of long drawn-out “Binding of Isaac” story, retold. Just as Isaac is nearly sacrificed, so is Joseph. But whereas in the Isaac tale, the boy is saved right away, in the Joseph story we as readers have to spend longer under the knife wondering if and how Joseph will be saved. In the Isaac tale the angel appears to reveal the ram in the thicket, in the Joseph tale the angel is not even called an angel; we have to infer it. And the angel doesn’t come to save Joseph, but instead to send him off to his demise.
The literary differences between the original Akeida and our “sequel” highlight a core difference in their respective morals. The Akeida’s “happy ending” requires Isaac to be spared. The Joseph tale, by contrast, makes Joseph’s plight not incidental but instrumental to his success. Had he been spared his hardship, he also would have been stunted in his growth.
Isaac’s journey to the altar teaches that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (he’s arguably traumatized by the experience, and per the Midrashim, blinded by it). Joseph’s journey into slavery, by contrast, strengthens him. In the first tale, the angel has to intervene to save Isaac. In the other, the angel stays on the sidelines giving only indirect moral support, but trusting that Joseph can handle his fate himself. As with so much in the Torah, the multiplicity of morals and narrative mash-ups should make us humble about placing all of our bets on one single worldview, one single self-help-maxim. What works in one setting doesn’t work in others; and we usually can’t know in advance whether we’re in an Isaac paradigm or a Joseph one (or some other one).
Besides the symbolic interpretation of the man in the field as a kind of omen, winking at us across the fourth wall, there is a psychological read: Joseph can’t find his brothers in the sense that he can’t connect with them, he can’t understand them or be understood by them, but he finds someone else. On this read, his encounter with the man is hopeful: what Joseph can’t find in his brothers he finds in a brief intimate moment with a stranger. Joseph is granted a tonic for his tough and lonesome journey ahead—the tonic of individuation. Perhaps the stranger helps Joseph realize that he will never “find” his brothers in the sense that he had hoped for, but that this is OK. He can be their brother and find points of connection with them even as he must affirm that he is the black sheep (or the multi-colored coat) in the family.
Joseph’s search for his brothers is his attempt to fit in, to assimilate. The response he gets shows the futility of trying, but, in its own way, is a gift. While we would never wish persecution upon someone, the experience of being an outsider and an outcast can help a person embrace their individuality. Leo Strauss redefined a “Baal Teshuva” (literally, a master of repentance) not as a religious marker, but as a psychological one. The Baal Teshuva is not the person who becomes more observant of Torah but the person who, upon realizing the West will never fully embrace him, is forced to accept his heritage and find a home in it.
Joseph is a Baal Teshuva in Strauss’s sense. Originally, he wants to have it both ways, telling his brothers his dreams of superiority and being one of the gang. By the time he is thrown into the pit, he understands the price of being who he is. Even if he wants to blend in, he’ll stand out. The assimilated Jew, for Strauss, is hiding in a glass closet. But the point is not simply about Jews or Joseph—it’s a universal point for all of us: it is impossible to hide who we fundamentally are.
On a simple level, Joseph is seeking his brothers; on a deeper level, he is seeking self-knowledge by means of the other. He needs to figure out who he is by experiencing how he is seen, and by experiencing what he is not. But the gaze and judgments of his family members are limited and limiting, and so Joseph will end up learning more about himself in Exile, amongst the Egyptians, and in the fields of Shechem where other “boundary crossers” pass. The word used to describe Joseph is toeh, meaning to to wander, to blunder, to err. The man/angel in the field is the first person Joseph meets who isn’t part of his family, and thus the first person who isn’t biased by self-interest. Erring allows Joseph to meet the stranger and then to see himself from an outsider’s vantage point. This, in turn, allows him to realize that both his brothers’ envy and his father’s love do not exhaust who he is, formative as they are.
In a time of spiritual twilight, we cannot know who in our lives are angels and who mortals—but perhaps we need not distinguish. The message of the ambiguous angel-man is that we can all be angels for each other, helping one another encounter ourselves from a more divine perspective. When we hold up a mirror to others in authentic encounters, we become angels even as we remain mortals; we channel higher consciousness even as—and precisely because—we remain flawed. For me, Rashi and Ibn Ezra don’t contradict each other. Both interpretations are simultaneously true. The ordinary person we encounter at the check-out line, sitting next to us on a bus, or at an intersection asking for directions, can be an angel.
One way to think about Chanukka, the holiday we have just entered, is that it’s a celebration of “making the best of what we have”—it’s a story of finding small victories and small reasons to celebrate even in times of difficulty and forlornness. While the Maccabees may have won a military victory in their time, this did not, in the long-run, prevent the Jews from being exiled and eventually having their Temple destroyed. The small canister of oil that lasted for 8 days, like the man-angel Joseph meets in the field, are small miracles. They do not rescue us from dark times or save us from having to descend into the hard parts of life. Rather, they give us strength and solace as we confront them.
In a time of spiritual twilight, the angels in our life mostly come to speak, not act. But hearing their voices just may be enough to help us discover our own agency and independence, embrace who we are, and accept the ineradicable solitude of the journey only we can take. Let us listen out for those voices, and let us give thanks in knowing that, whether we intend to or not, we provide those voices for others.
Shabbat Shalom and Chanukka Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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