Laughing at Angels: Va-yera

I was listening to This American Life and heard this great story of a woman who was driving her mother to the hospital for her cancer treatment. Her father was in the car with them.

As usual, the woman was using her GPS, but this time, it took her by a route it had never taken her before, way out and around Queens, in New York City. They couldn’t understand it. Her father asked her, “Has it ever taken you this way?” “No,” she replied. “Never.”

Her parents started recognizing the streets, they turned a certain corner and they suddenly found themselves right in front of an old and favorite Italian bakery where they used to go years ago, exclaiming at the coincidence. Her father jumped out to buy a loaf of bread (because they’re Italian, and when you’re Italian, bread always makes you feel better, she said).

As they continued, the GPS kept taking them is strange directions, but they followed, and along the way, her parents continued to exclaim at places they’d known and frequented in their youth together, for her parents had been together since they were sixteen.

It was like they had been taken on a life review, bringing them back to the joy they had experienced together over their life together.

They didn’t know that this would be her mother’s last visit to the hospital.

A week later, she died.

We may scoff at the idea of “being led” and “angels,” but you don’t have to believe in angels to know that these kinds of things happen to us in real life, maybe not usually as dramatically, but they do happen.

We may also scoff at the Torah as being full of made-up stories that are there to teach us a lesson, yet these stories are also asking us to suspend our perception of reality for a moment and consider other possibilities.

This week in Torah, there are lots of angels, and there’s a lot of reference to sight and seeing, just like this family saw lots of things they didn’t expect to.

The title of the parsha is “Va-yera,” meaning “appeared” or “shown,” and guess what appears before Abraham’s eyes in the heat of the day as he sits in the opening of his tent recovering from his circumcision?

Yes, you guessed it (or knew it): angels.

The angels, interestingly, look like men, and they are intermittently named accordingly. They are coming to announce that Sarah will give birth to a boy within a year’s time.

This makes Sarah laugh—because of the absurdity of still having “fun” in her very old age, and also finally having the baby boy she'd given up on having years ago.

Later, an angel, or messenger of God, as they’re called in Hebrew, appears to Hagar in the desert, where she has been banished to die with her child, Ishmael. God hears the crying and sends a messenger who opens Hagar’s eyes to see that there’s a well of water right there, nearby (it’s not clear if the well was there all along or not).

The same messengers who come to announce Sarah’s pregnancy are those who lead Lot and his family to safety when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—except that Lot’s wife looks back to see the destruction and turns into a pillar of salt.

After the destruction and escape, Lot’s daughters find themselves alone in a cave with their father, hiding, terrified, and imagining that all life on earth is no more. This causes them to decide to get their father drunk and impregnate themselves by him (yuck), and so begin the tribes of the Moabites and the Ammonites—Israel’s future neighbors and frequent enemies!

In mindfulness meditation, there’s a lot of focus on becoming conscious of where we place our attention throughout the day and how that impacts our life; do we pay attention to the negative, like the aches and pains, the things that “shouldn’t” be, all that is wrong in our lives and in the world, every moment focused on what we need to fix?

How good are we at noticing the good and positive?

If we’re not careful, we may become frozen in that habit of noticing mostly the saltiness of life.

We may get stuck in a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife who looks back at the destruction behind her instead of forward if we’re not careful. Or we may become like Lot’s daughters who create new tribes borne out of fear and panic, enemies that become our constant companions.

Tara Brach (she has a podcast, if you didn’t know, and I love her teachings and her soothing voice) says that refocusing our attention away from the negative doesn’t mean we will forget what’s wrong in our lives or the world and become complacent, losing our drive to improve and repair; what it means is that we will be giving ourselves a respite so we have the reserve to support others through their trials and tribulations, and we may even have energy left over for the political work that needs doing to bring healing to the world.

So, I challenge us to suspend our belief system if it’s stuck in a pillar of saltiness, stuck in panic and fear of the end of the world, creating a line of progeny that becomes negative energy, passed down through future generations.

We can laugh at the idea of invisible messengers ever present to help us, or even that a person who comes out of nowhere to help us or give us important information might be an angel, but let our laughter be out of joy for the guidance we may be receiving, opening our eyes to see the possibilities that lie before us.

And let us say Amen.