Tonight we’re going to look at the anatomy of an angelic encounter. It is one that comes up in this week’s Torah portion, Lekh Lekha. This is the portion in which we first meet Avraham, then called Avram. He is typically understood to be this portion’s star, and is told by God that his descendants would be like stars also. Not in the camera-hogging celebrity way, but in the sense of being numerous – too numerous to count. And here we are, those descendants, too numerous to count. Although I would prefer our legacy as stars to be that of being givers of light. May it be so.
After Avram makes a covenant with God, we meet Sarah, then called Sarai, and learn that despite her advanced age, she has not been able to bear children. Discouraged, frustrated, she gives her servant, Hagar, to Avram as a wife and Hagar becomes pregnant and hostility and jealousy breaks out between Sarai and Hagar. Sarai treats Hagar harshly and Hagar flees.
And there, in the wilderness, next to a fountain, on the road to Shur, Hagar has her angelic encounter. One of the many angelic encounters that are riddled throughout Torah, that happen at pivotal, life-changing moments; encounters that announce and pave the way for a new destiny.
Here’s what happens in this case:
The angel of Adonai finds her at this fountain in the wilderness. It asks her where she is coming from and where she will go. Hagar replies that she is fleeing her mistress. The angel says, “Return to her and submit yourself to her treatment” – maybe not the words Hagar wanted to hear. But the angel goes on to offer prophecy, that her descendants will be uncountable, and that her son will be named Ishmael, and that he will live in tension with others but surrounded by family.
Hagar hears this prophecy, and we all wait in anticipation to see what her reaction will be. She says, “You are El Roi” – meaning “you are God who sees me.” She then adds words that are difficult to parse – very strange Hebrew – but which could mean something like “For do I not see after God sees me?”
“Do I not see after God sees me?”
And that’s the end of the encounter.
It has all the features that frequently appear in anglic encounters. There’s a prophecy. A destiny. A renaming of a person or a place or here, of Godself by Hagar. It has everything we could wish except for an obviously happy ending. Sending Hagar back to Sarah and Avraham might be right for history but cannot be what Hagar wanted to hear.
On the other hand, she doesn’t express disappointment at the angel’s instruction. She says, “You are El Roi, the God who sees me.” Hagar, who perhaps has never felt seen, is now seen. She doesn’t get the outcome she wanted from running away. She doesn’t get that freedom. But she is seen and somehow that is transformative.
Maybe being seen is what she most needed. To be witnessed. My colleague Jericho Vincent posted this idea this week. That Hagar was witnessed. That maybe all prayer, all petition, is really about witnessing. We pray without certainty that our prayers will be granted, at least not in the short term. But in praying we lay out our hearts and we are witnessed. In being witnessed, even imagining being witnessed, we witness ourselves, and that can shift something in us.
I often wonder why in Torah sometimes God speaks directly to a character and sometimes there’s an angel in between. Is it for the convenience of the human being? So as not to scare the bejeezes out of them by meeting God directly? And so instead it is a chance to present the Divine in a way that is more human-scaled.
Or is it the human being who creates the angel in a vision, perhaps for a similar reason – easier to look at an angel face to face.
Maybe both can be true. An angel is a portal that can swing both in and out. Maybe Hagar conjured the angel in a vision because in her suffering her thoughts were stuck in her head, and her fear caught tight in her gut, and she needed to be drawn out of herself; she needed to be witnessed from the outside, to witness herself from the outside, in order to make sense of her next steps. And she did.
What a good recipe for getting out of your head! Just stumble upon, or invite, invoke, create an angel to look at you and ask you the questions you know somewhere deep down you need to be asked. “Where are you coming from?” “Where are you going to?” And even to say the sometimes-hard truths: “Go back. You’re not ready. The moment isn’t yet ripe. There is more suffering ahead. And still, go back.”
Our sages of old believed that angels came into existence for one function only and then disappeared when their mission was complete. In this story, some of our sages believed there to be four angels engaging with Hagar: each time the word malakh, or “angel,” is used in this passage, it is referring to a different angel. Rabbi Yossi bar Chanina tops that: he believed that there were five angels in this encounter. Each sentence uttered by an angel is spoken by a different angel. (Bereishit Rabbah 45:7)
These rabbis were thinking that each angel had a distinct mission: to raise a particular question or offer a particular insight. Each of those a separate mission. If these were not angels sent by God but dreamed up by Hagar, generated from her imagination out of her need to be witnessed, then these are not five angels but five angles. Five angles she needed to consider. What brought her to this moment? What did she see ahead? What of the child she will bear? How will she ensure this future legacy? She knows these questions. But she needs to hear them in her ears. Spoken by witnesses. Angelic witnesses. She needs to hear that being hungry, penniless and pregnant in the wilderness is not a plan to bring about the destiny she dreams of.
This is, I suspect, deep knowing that Hagar already has. Deep knowing that emerges when you are witnessed, emerges sounding like prophecy! Avraham suddenly seeing himself holding a knife over his son. Moshe witnessing himself shepherding sheep when his people were in bondage in Mitzrayim. These angels, these witnesses: a mechanism for witnessing yourself. All it takes is imagining enough witnessing to get us out of the trap of our minds, our egos, our worries, and see ourselves with some remove and some breath. El Roi, the God who sees me, becomes El R’i: God, my mirror.
Like Hagar – like Avraham and Moshe too – we all have plenty of deep knowing that we often can’t get to. So stuck in our lives and its details. But a quintet of angels asking just the right things at the right moment, can unearth our knowing. Being witnessed – by angels or by our own selves in loving angelic form – can unearth that knowing. Even if the information that arises is not exactly what we hope to hear: that the time isn’t quite right, destiny lies ahead, the right time will come.
And the right time does come for Hagar. She returns to Avraham and Sarah’s household. She bears a son. She is exiled after Sarah bears Isaac. And, again in the wilderness, she encounters an angel. But this time, she isn’t sent back. She is re-introduced to her strength and opens her eyes to her resources, and is able to journey onward now into her own story and her own destiny.
Before we say goodbye to this piece of Torah, let’s take a moment to do our own imagining. Close your eyes and breathe.
What is it that is turning in you that needs to be witnessed?
Imagine, conjure, create an angel or a quintet of them, and let them do this witnessing. Or imagine a landscape or a tree that knows you well, has known you for a long time, or the sun or the moon, that have seen your entire life unfold. Angel, tree, sun, moon – let it witness you. Lay out whatever needs witnessing. Hear in your ear the question: how did you get here? where are you going? And hear in your heart the certainty of more destiny still ahead for you. Where does it lead? And when do you begin the journey?
Notice whatever knowing comes to you. Hold it tight. Absorb it into your heart. Keep it safe to look at later. Whatever knowing has come to you.
Thank your angels or your witnesses, and release them, knowing you can call on them as witnesses whenever you need, whatever wilderness you find yourself in. And looking either inward or outward, thank El Ro’i – the God who sees me.
It was an Instagram post by Jericho Vincent that started my head spinning this week.