I See Angels

Eric Suben

I.

            In Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, which I recently re-watched after many years, angels are handsome, moody, Armani-clad beings, elaborately bewinged when aloft among Berlin’s spires, unseen by human eyes when below riding the subway or walking the streets or crammed into the back of an ambulance with those in distress. They can hear human thoughts, though, and they can grant unexpected solace to those whose thoughts are troubled. Their touch, though unfelt, can even ease physical pain and renew hope. The film makes angels seem so cool.

            When I first saw Wings of Desire in a black-box theater in mid-city New Orleans, I was far from recognizing angels in my own life. I was a freshly divorced, newly minted lawyer, adrift in the Big Easy, where I had wandered far from my native New York. I knew only that I would love to feel comforted as those in the film had been, but I was painfully conscious of the absence of even an evanescent angel presence in my own life. The movie (even if not an actual angel) brought me the idea of solace, though. Angels could be out there somewhere, and one could be drawn to my need, if great enough, and if the angel happened to be nearby. (Curiously for winged creatures, Wenders’s angels seemed stuck in Berlin.)

            This was in the early 1990s, when angels seemed to be everywhere (including arty films). But I wasn’t someone who went out and bought winged figurines or dashboard statuettes. The angel trend made me uneasy then. Unlike Wenders’ cool Continental wingmen, angels as popularly depicted seemed kind of saccharine and aesthetically suspect. On hearing the word, I would think of a Christmas tree topper used by my boyhood friend Timmy’s family—a sort of cardboard cone covered in white satin, trimmed with gold rickrack, with little wire wings covered in gauze stapled in back, topped with a face-painted Styrofoam ball, tiny blond wig, and a halo of stiff golden thread. Not insignificantly, in my view, the angel was hollow inside.

            This view of the thing surely had something to do with my being a Jew, which made that sort of depiction feel foreign to me from the start. And it had a lot to do with my being an intellectual snob. I could admit to having been charmed, as an undergraduate English major at NYU, by John Milton’s depiction of angels (the good ones) in Paradise Lost. They seemed relatable, and had character and warmth. Professor Low, the instructor who taught the Milton colloquium, had the demeanor of a Presbyterian minister, but even he glowed slightly at the angel Raphael’s description of angel sex in response to Adam’s inquiry:

Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyest,
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence; and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need,
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul….

What a vision for a bashful undergraduate! Raphael even blushes as he tells it. To experience ecstatic union without the inconvenience, the uncertainty, the mess of a corporeal body (even a young one)!

             I never got to have that angelic experience, but I did get to sit at the seminar table while Professor Low taught John Donne’s songs and sonnets. In one of these sonnets, “The Ecstasy,” the metaphysician ruefully observes, “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, /But yet the body is his book.” A mere mortal man, alas, I would have to look there. And that was the quest the failure of which had landed me in a black-box theater in New Orleans, alone, tearing up at Wings of Desire.

II.

The only reliable information I had about angels came from the Hebrew Bible, or illustrated versions I’d read as a boy in religious school. Those angels generally looked just like the humans they were sent to visit, usually with a message about a miraculous birth, or the destruction of a sinful city.

There are the three angels who visit Abraham, announcing the birth of Isaac to his ninety-year-old wife, Sarah. Two of those angels go on to visit Abraham’s nephew, Lot, living in Sodom, to warn him of the city’s destruction. The men of Sodom demand that Lot send the strangers out to be victimized and assaulted. Lot actually offers to send out his own daughters to the rapacious crowd rather than the angels. It doesn’t come to that, but only because the angels themselves pull Lot back inside.

These angels truly live up to their Hebrew name, malakhim, which translates as “messengers.” Angels of a different kind put in an appearance before that, in one of the weirder episodes of Genesis. Just before Noah’s flood, the Torah tells us that the b’nai elohim, finding the daughters of men fair, coupled with them, and begat a race of giants or supermen of some kind.

I read the story as an allegory, and one that refracts and possibly harmonizes all these visions: angels and humans are combined, conjoined, and inhabit each of us (albeit in varying proportions).

Maybe it took this insight to see there had been angels in my life. Each had a message to impart at a crucial time, and each message redirected me, for lasting good, I believe. My angels were real enough, visible, palpable—and all were female. All my angels were malakhim, in the literal sense, although the word is male-gendered. Perhaps each would be described in modern Hebrew as a shlihah, that is, a woman carrying a message, although this leaves out the mystical dimension at work.

III.

            When I try to describe my experiences of angel visitations, they tend to sound prosaic. But ultimately, without all the set decoration—the unleavened bread, the terebinth of Mamre—what were the angels visiting Abraham really saying? “You’re going to have a baby.” Words someone out there gets to hear on any given day of the year. This is not to diminish that Sarah, listening behind the tent flap, had been waiting to hear these words for most of her ninety years, but still: these thrilling words are said every day.

What were the two angels telling Lot? “Get out of town.” Okay, maybe not as common as what their colleague had told Abraham, but not exactly exotic, if you discount the fire, brimstone, and salt pillar that ensued.

If I try to describe my angel visitations with some approximation of Biblical diction and syntax, perhaps I can convey some of how they feel to me.

Marcy

 As I wandered disconsolate among the milling throng outside the examination room, my feet, seemingly of their own accord, began moving me toward the building exit. Leaving now, the pain of failure could be stemmed.

Behold! A being with golden hair blocked my path. “Have faith!” the angel exhorted, appearing in the guise of Marcy, my law school friend, she of the flowing garments, carmine lips, and ruby fingernails. “Thou shalt succeed in all thine endeavors.”

(Commentary: Feeling sure I had just failed the Corporations section of the Louisiana bar exam, I convinced myself there were not enough points in the remaining sections for me to pass the test as a whole, even if I scored every point.

“Marcy,” I said, “I failed. I’m going home now. There’s no point in finishing the test.”

What Marcy said, actually, was, “March yourself in there and take that test.”

Two months later, the annunciation behind her actual words came to pass.)

Fran

Entering the seminary door, I gazed about me at the groups of happy chatterers. My heart dropped in my breast to think that once again, I was alone in a throng. I would be ever a seeker of companionship, never a finder.

A melodious voice reached me from close behind. I turned, and there stood one with black hair, bright red lips, and quivering earrings. “You shall wed again,” she declared. “Your return from your sojourn as a stranger in a strange land shall not have been in vain!”

(Commentary: I ran into Fran, an author from my publishing days, at a Jewish Theological Seminary program entitled, “How Jewish Do You Want to Be?” Though I often went to events like that in hopes of finding my bashert (or at least a date), the effort had started to feel futile.

This was our first encounter since I’d returned to New York two years before. Fran’s exact words were, “Look at you. Still handsome. And a lawyer! You won’t have any trouble finding someone.”

Bolstered, I met Beth during a workshop later that afternoon. Although Beth was not my bashert, our liaison steered me in the direction that would ultimately lead me to her.)

Thea

The table was laid with flatbread, sheep’s milk cheese, and olives. The presence before me, pale-skinned, dark-haired, addressed me thus: “Leave this land and travel to the land of your forefathers, the land promised to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. There you shall see signs and wonders.”

(Commentary: Dining at a Greek restaurant with Thea, a publishing friend, I told her the woeful tale of my breakup with Beth, the sting of which was exacerbated by my approaching fortieth birthday.

Thea said, “Forty is the new thirty. You have plenty of time.”

“But I don’t know what to do for my birthday,” I said. “I was planning to go on a singles retreat to Israel. But last week they told me the retreat was cancelled, and returned my deposit.”

“You should go anyway,” Thea said. “Tomorrow morning, just pick up the phone, call the airline, and go.”

I did just that. And two weeks before my trip, I met my bashert, named Marina. The limo from Ben Gurion Airport trailed a truck bearing the logo “Marina” all the way to Jerusalem. There was my sign and wonder.)

IV.

After I left New Orleans, but before my encounters with Fran and Thea, I was synagogue shopping around my new neighborhood in Manhattan’s East Twenties. One random Saturday, I wandered into a rabbi’s sermon about Joseph and his brothers, who sold him into slavery in Egypt. At the start of that episode, Jacob instructs young Joseph to seek his brothers. The King James Version continues the story thus:

And a certain man found him, and, behold, he was wandering in the field: and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou? And he said, I seek my brethren: tell me, I pray thee, where they feed their flocks. And the man said, They are departed hence; for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. And Joseph went after his brethren, and found them in Dothan.

Joseph follows the man’s direction and finds his brothers, with the well-known consequences.

The point the rabbi made was that the man is nameless and never mentioned again. But his single act of giving Joseph directions changes the course of Joseph’s life and, indeed, of history. So can each person’s smallest action be changing the world in ways perhaps only G-d can see in that moment.

Shortly after I heard this sermon, I was walking on lower Broadway, near City Hall, when a stranger stopped me for directions.

“How do I get to West Broadway and Chambers?” he asked.

Pointing west, I said, “That way one block, then turn right.”

I had walked a block or two downtown before I realized I had steered him wrong. West Broadway was two blocks from where I had pointed the way. If he turned where I said, he would find himself on Church Street.

I was annoyed with myself but shrugged it off. Thinking about the episode that evening, my mind returned to the man who gave Joseph directions. Maybe in some way, I had been this stranger’s angel. By misdirecting him at the moment I did, perhaps I prevented his being—I don’t know, crushed by a falling crane, struck by a speeding taxi. Maybe when he turned on Church Street, he bumped into his bashert, whom he would have missed otherwise.

Or maybe not. The point is, it’s possible I was his angel in that moment. It’s even possible that my slight misdirection somehow altered the course of human history. If so, I can’t take credit for being the angel in that moment. It just happened.

IV.

While Marcy, Fran, and Thea were all friends, they were not intimate friends. And the angels who visited Abraham and Lot were nameless apparitions. Joseph’s angel was just a random stranger along the road, as I was to the wanderer on lower Broadway. Wenders’s and Rilke’s angels are unnamed, and felt rather than seen. I find it curious that the angel never seems to be someone close to you in your life.

Although Beth turned out not to be my bashert, she gave me one pertinent lover’s gift, a Sarah MacLachlan CD containing the song “Angel.” This slow, sad melody, sung in MacLachlan’s soaring soprano, touched that place in me that vibrates to the idea of angels as I conceive them. She sings:

You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here

Many was the night, after my breakup with Beth and before my meeting with Marina, that I found some comfort in this song.

My wife, my brother, my aged parents, all have a need for my tenderness and compassion, which comes and goes. I reassure myself that giving all the time would not make me an angel. Giving in the right moment, when the other is ready to receive, can make me the angel, though neither of us may know it at the time.

VI.

On Friday nights, welcoming the Sabbath, many Jewish people sing “Shalom Aleichem,” a song welcoming angels into the home for the evening meal. Last High Holidays, our rabbi, in his sermon, suggested that the angels returning from synagogue with us are our children. Uncharacteristically for him, he seemed to tear up as he said this. He is the father of eight.

I am the father of three. And it’s true, they are angels to me. As infants, they showed me the well of my own tenderness, as an angel showed Hagar the well of water that would save her child. Now, as young adults, they argue me out of my misconceptions, as Uriel argued with Ezra.

And, like angels, they will not be with me always. Unlike the other angels in my life, though, they were constant presences for a long time, bringing solace, joy, vision, and healing. Now they are moving out into the world, bringing (I pray) their gifts where needed.

They may not know it, and the receivers of their angel messages may not know it. But I know the angels are there in them, and I pray that in the right moment, they will find a world ready to receive.