Parashat Vayetze: On the Accompaniment of Angels

This week’s parsha is framed by angels. At its start, as Yaakov leaves home, running away from his angry brother, he lies down and dreams of angels going up and down a ladder. The story then unfolds about his adventures away from home, in Haran -- his years of work for Lavan, his marriages and the birth of his many children. And then, at the end of this saga, on his way back home, Yaakov again encounters angels of God.

Angels at the beginning and angels at the end. Angels to my right and angels to my left. These are angels of accompaniment. They surround and accompany the story just as they surround and accompany Yaakov on his lonely, perilous journey.

But what good do they do him? What good does it do Yaakov to have had this vision of God and His angels at the start and end of his journey? God promises him protection in that initial dream, but other than one single instance at the end of the story when God warns Lavan not to harm Yaakov, we don’t see that Yaakov receives much benefit from the accompaniment of these angels.

Yaakov goes through an extremely difficult phase of his life here, symbolized by the repeated use of the rock in his story. He leaves home, apparently with no possessions -- why else would he use a rock as a pillow – and must work to earn his keep and his wives from Lavan instead of paying for them with gifts as his grandfather’s servant did years before with Rivkah. Work and hardship. Those are the operative words in Yaakov’s narrative. There always seems to be a rock blocking his way, as he is tricked by Lavan over wives and salary, toiling for 20 long years away from home.

So, I ask again, what good did those accompanying angels do him if they didn’t save him from such hardship?

Apparently, the purpose of accompanying angels, of a sense of divine accompaniment, is not to relieve hardship. Life is hard and angels don’t change that. What accompanying angels do is give one the strength to persevere in the face of such hardship. Right after Yaakov’s initial encounter with the angels in his dream, the Torah says, Vayisa Yaakov raglav vayelech. “Yaakov lifted his legs and went.” Rashi, citing the midrash, explains, “Once he heard the good news that he was promised protection his heart lifted his legs and it became easy to walk.”

His heart lifted his legs. Those angels couldn’t change the fact that Yaakov had a difficult journey to walk. But they could help his heart lift his legs to the task, could give him the faith and confidence and security to proceed undaunted. They could “frame” his hardship, help him see it through the lens of faith, as part of a story that ultimately has a good end. And this knowledge, this belief that all will ultimately work out for the better, this knowledge helped Yaakov persevere through it all. It gave him the energy, the excitement and the optimism to lift a huge rock off a well, again and again.

If we, too, have angels accompanying us – and sometimes I think that we do -- they won’t protect us from life’s hardships any more than they protected Yaakov. What they will do is lend us the confidence and security to carry on with those heavy rocks, help our hearts lift our legs to the journey with a spring in our step.