What Are You Seeking?

Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire
In the family narrative, what sets the wheels turning is the fact that Joseph was seventeen, a na’ar, a youth, immature in his management of relationships...The word implies much more than biological age: Joseph behaves with the narcissism of youth, with a dangerous unawareness of the inner worlds of others.
The Kotzker Rebbe
The angel taught Joseph--that always when one is wandering along the paths of life, in the moment when the soul is most perplexed, say to oneself that one will clarify that which the soul needs and its ambition, that one may return and explain these needs first of all, to the self.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook
The greater the soul, the more it must struggle in order to find itself; the more the depths of the human soul are hidden from the conscious mind. One must have extended solitude and hitbodedut (self-reflective prayer), examining ideas, deepening thoughts, and expanding the mind, until finally the soul will truly reveal itself, unveiling some of the splendor of its brilliant inner light.”

The Bible is constantly confusing people with angels. Abraham receives three men into his house who suddenly deliver messages from God. Indeed the midrash recounts that the three men were three angels each with one errand (one to announce the birth of Isaac, one to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and one to save Lot) and the reason for this according to the midrash is that, “An angel is never sent on more than one errand at a time.” Jacob at the Jabbok River wrestled with a man who suddenly turns out to be an angel and this man/angel changed Jacob’s name to Israel, which means “one who wrestles with people and angels and who survives.”
The reason for this confusion is simple. In Hebrew, the word for angel is malach, which means “messenger,” and so for Judaism any person with a message from God is a malach, an angel. Now you must understand that there are two kinds of angels: the malachim, the angels who are human beings recruited into God’s messenger service, and then there are the angels who inhabit the olam habah, heaven, and who are not and who never were human beings. These heavenly angels also communicate with us but their main role is to be minions of the Holy One Blessed Be He who inhabit the world to come always hovering close to the divine presence. Angels like Gabriel or Uriel or Uziel or Michael have specific names and functions and personalities. The Bible describes two angels with fiery swords standing guard at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, and other angels overpowered the prophet Ezekiel with powerful visions of a heavenly chariot, but they are all part of the malachai hasharet, the angels who serve God. These angels come equipped with wings and music and white robes and halos and with signs and fearful portents. They are very easy to spot in a crowd. They also tend to be terrifying. The poet Rilke wrote, “If the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us, our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.” So all in all it is a good thing that there is a division of labor amongst the angels.
The angel who met Joseph in the field was not winged or terrifying, he was just a messenger angel—a man who was also an angel from God. Joseph surely did not know that this man was an angel, and the man himself may not even have known, yet he was a malach, a messenger bearing a message from God that was both important and fragile. Important because it was a message from God and hearing it changed Joseph’s life, but fragile because Joseph might not have heard it. He could easily have dismissed the stranger’s directions to Dothan, figuring that he might have confused his brothers with some other shepherds heading that way. Angels present us with a message but also a choice—the choice of whether or not we can hear the message.