So speaking of angels who come to visit us, it’s time to gather around, children, because I have a good story to tell you.
It’s a Torah story, and I know that you know a lot of those. But this might be one that you haven’t heard before. Even though it might feel familiar.
I tell you this story tonight – even though there are many pressing things we could talk about – because it is this week’s haftarah portion. It is from the Book of Judges – an under-appreciated book about the doings of the Jews in the Promised Land from the time they settled until the time they decided a king would be nice. So maybe 300 or 400 years of history.
So as I implied, it is a story about a visit from an angel. Two visits in fact.
So why do we read this story this week?
Well, you know that every week’s haftarah portion is connected to the week’s Torah portion because of a similar theme or some shared language or plot device. Now this week’s Torah portion, called Naso, is quite a mixed bag. It has some administrative stuff, cataloguing gifts to the priests. It has some harsh, hard-to-redeem stuff about the testing of the fidelity of wives. On the other extreme it offers us the gift of the words of the threefold priestly blessing – y’varekh’kha Adonai v’yishm’rekha – “may God bless you and keep you,” words that we continue to bless each other with to this very day.
And this week’s portion sets out the rules for taking a nazirite vow. And that’s the connection to this week’s haftarah.
What? So now you want to know what a nazirite vow is?
Fine. A nazirite vow is a vow that a Jewish person way back in antiquity could take in order to dedicate themselves to God. To be a little separate from the world and connected to the Divine. A vow like a monk or a nun might take in Catholicism.
The nazirite vow was open to men and to women. We don’t know if they hung out together or lived communally the way monks do and nuns do. More likely, they continued living their lives in the thick of the community, but people understood that they were different and somehow set apart.
In taking the vow to become a nazirite, these people would give up cutting their hair. And they would give up wine and, in fact, any product of the grapevine – so no wine, no juice, no grape jelly, no wine vinegar, and dolmas were right out. And, for the duration of their vow, they would not be allowed to go near the dead, even if it was their close loved one who died. And if they did so accidentally, they would have make the vow over again.
The nazirite vow wasn’t a lifelong commitment. Just for the period of time the nazirite would choose. At the end of the term of their vow, they would bring a sacred offering to the Temple: two lambs, a ram, a basket of matzah. And these would get offered up to God. And right then and there the nazirite would finally shave their head and those locks that had not known a scissors for however many years would get thrown right into the fire. And when all that was done, the nazirite vow would have been fulfilled and released, and the now former nazirite could at last sit down to a long overdue glass of chardonnay.
So children, put your thinking caps on. No wine. No cutting of hair. Does that sound familiar at all? Does it bring to mind some Sunday school story or Leonard Cohen song?
That’s right, Samson. Samson the great hero, who led the Israelites for twenty years and brought the roof down on the Philistines!
Samson was a nazirite, and Samson is the link to this week’s haftarah portion.
So... are you ready?
It is long ago in the land of Israel. The Israelites, once slaves, have been living in the Promised Land for hundreds of years. But it hasn’t all been peaceful. And right now, they have been conquered by the Philistines and are living under Philistine rule.
The Israelites are holding out for a hero.
And here in this moment of fear and hope and worry, we meet a woman who, like this moment of time itself, would like to give birth but is unable.
What is her name? We don’t know. Torah doesn’t tell us. Torah just says that she was married to a guy named Manoaẖ. You probably don’t like that Torah does tell her name. I don’t like it either. And neither did the rabbis of the Talmud who, on one page of Bava Batra, supplied the names of many of the unnamed women in Torah. And this woman, they say, is named Tz’lelponit, which I guess might mean “the one who is drawn to the shade,” or maybe it means something else.
So here she is one day – maybe she’s resting in the shade, maybe she’s working in the field – and suddenly a malakh Adonai – an angel of Adonai – appears to her and says, “You shall conceive and bear a son.”
Not waiting for her reaction, the angel continues with instructions: “Avoid all wine and all liquor. Do not eat anything impure. And do not cut your hair. For your child is going to be a nazirite from the womb! And he shall be the hero who will deliver the people from the Philistines.”
Is this feeling familiar? An angel coming to announce a miraculous birth? Maybe like the angels who came to Abraham to prophesy the birth of Isaac, although they didn’t speak to Sarah, she just overheard them. But what about Mary? Ding ding ding. Yes, that might be why this is feeling familiar, because you are maybe more likely to know that core story of Christianity than this side tale of Judaism.
Anyway, back to our protagonist whose name might or might not be Tz’lelponit. She clocks this visitor as an angel right away. She goes home and tells her husband what happened, although, maybe knowing her husband’s skepticism, she describes the visitor as “a man of God” who looked like an angel and who was astonishing. Anticipating her husband’s questions, she says that she didn’t asked the stranger where they came from, and the stranger had not volunteered their name.
Manoaẖ is cautiously excited about this prophecy. But wants to know how you raise a nazirite baby! So he prays to God to send this messenger a second time so he could ask the follow-up questions directly.
God complies and sends the angel again – again not to Manoaẖ but to Manoaẖ’s wife, whose name might or might not have been Tz’lelponit. This time she realizes if she doesn’t have her husband there, she’ll be spending the next five verses of Torah repeating everything again. So she runs and fetches Manoaẖ and he follows her back to the field. Manoaẖ asks the stranger, “Are you the man who spoke to my wife?”
(Because where his wife saw an angel, he insists on seeing a man.)
“Yes,” answers the angel.
“Oh! May your words come true! And tell me, what rules do we need to follow for raising the boy,” asks Manoaẖ.
“Just what I already told your wife,” answers the angel. “No wine. No liquor. Nothing that comes from a grapevine. Nothing unclean.”
“Well, please stay and let us offer you something,” says Manoaẖ. “It’s goat night.”
Here, midrash tells us, the angel is trying to figure out if Manoaẖ thinks he’s a man, and is offering him dinner, or if Manoaẖ thinks he’s an angel, and is offering, well, an offering.
“No,” says the angel, trying to answer both possibilities. “I won’t eat your food. And if it is a burnt offering you’re planning, offer it not to me but to Adonai.”
Clever, huh?
And this is where we learn that angels presumably don’t eat. Maybe because they don’t have anatomies. Or maybe because the reason they fulfill their mission is because it is God’s will, not because there might be treats at the end. Angels are messengers who don’t need to be tipped.
Manoaẖ, still curious, asks the stranger’s name. “So we can name the baby after you.”
But the angel declines. “You must not ask my name; it is wondrous, unknowable.”
And so again, like other times in Torah, like after Jacob’s wrestling match, an angel refuses to share their name. Maybe because it can’t be heard or understood by human ears. Maybe because the angel is its own name – its name is its essence, and thus unpronounceable. Or maybe the angel knows that when the story gets told down the road, it’s going to leave out the name of Manoaẖ’s wife, and the angel withholds its own name in solidarity.
So Manoaẖ and his wife prepare the goat and the meal offering and set it on a stone altar. And then a marvelous thing happens as they watch. The flame leaps up from the altar toward heaven. And the angel of Adonai steps into the flames of the altar and ascends to the sky on the updraft, while they watch, astonished.
They throw themselves to the ground. Manoaẖ, finally believing that this was an angel, says to his wife, whose name might or might not have been Tz’lelponit, “Oh! We shall surely die! For we have seen Elohim! We have seen the Divine!”
But Tz’lelponit, more perceptive and comprehending, says, “Look, if God wanted us to die, God would not have accepted our offering, nor let us see these things, nor announced to us about the birth of our child.”
And of course she was right. Just a little down the road she gives birth to a son. Shimshon – Samson – she calls him. Bright as the sun, drawing her out of the shade. He grows up and is blessed and the rest of it you know, more or less.
And so, our story comes to an end. You probably want some big moral from it, and I don’t have one. I just thought it was a story you should know exists. A cool story, a Jewish annunciation, and an angel who, like Dr. Seuss’s lorax, “lifts itself up by the seat of its pants; heists itself and takes leave of the place, through a hole in the sky without leaving a trace.”
And if you are sticklers for finding meaning, we can turn this story over a few times in our hands, and squeeze some lessons out of it. For instance:
It’s not always the person with the well-known name who’s really at the center of the story.
If your intuition tells you that you’re talking to an angel, trust it.
If an angel does something for you, don’t force reward on them if they say no. It might not be how they operate.
But gratitude to the Divine is always good.
What else?
You never know when you’ll be deployed as an angel for someone else.
When they say they see an angel in you, don’t argue.
You never know what part you’ll have to play in all that unfolds.
Don’t drink while pregnant.
And when you are next sitting in the field, in a shady spot, in a moment when something new needs to be birthed into the world, just keep your eyes open.
Happy special birthday to my teacher, Rabbi Shohama Wiener.
Painting by Carlo Saraceni, ca. 1610