Shalom Aleichem: Angels and Emotions

There I was, in a professional training, thinking about angels.  Don’t tell all the scientists in my family!

Here’s how it happened:  I am in the process of getting a certificate in NARM, a therapeutic approach to healing developmental trauma.  Last week we had four-day training focusing on emotions.  We explored how emotions function to communicate with us, to give us essential information about our inner states and what we need for our well-being. 

That is a significant element of what angels in the Jewish tradition do as well.  Yes, there are angels in Judaism, but they are not Hallmark cherubs or the souls of our beloved dead.  In Jewish thought, angels are messengers; in fact, the Hebrew word “angel” and “messenger” is the same:  “mal’ach.”  To make it even more interesting, the mystical tradition understands angels as inhabiting the world of Yetzirah, which is the world of emotions.  (There are four “worlds” or dimensions of experience: the physical, the emotional, the intellectual and the soulful.)  In this understanding, angels are actually emotional energies at their essence, messengers about emotions, giving us essential information we need.

But the message of our emotions isn’t always so easy to hear.  As children, we shut down authentic expressions of emotions such as anger and grief so that we can stay connected to our caregivers and environment.  Young children always choose the connection to their caregivers over their inner authenticity; it is a survival instinct.  Those unexpressed emotions get stuck in the body and impact the nervous system.  We develop unconscious patterns to protect ourselves from those intolerable feelings, which are also survival strategies, but strategies that are often the source of difficulties we encounter as adults.

This is where it can be really helpful to explore the metaphor of angels.   The place many Jews encounter angels is in the Shabbat song “Shalom Aleichem.” As we gather around the table on Shabbat evening, we sing a song, greeting angels of peace and inviting them into our homes.  We ask them for a blessing of peace.  But as my friend and teacher Rabbi Aryeh Ben David once pointed out to me, we don’t then invite them to pull up a chair and make themselves comfortable.  Instead, we conclude the song with “Tzeitchem leshalom:” Leave in peace.  We tell the angels, “You can go now.”

Part of the healing for developmental trauma comes when we can reconnect to our own emotions, those faithful messengers of our inner states.  Through a variety of practices and therapeutic approaches, we can learn how to welcome our emotions in, receive their message, and ask them for a blessing.  But an equally important part of the process is to allow and honor the disconnect when it gets too much.   Just as the Shabbat angels come and go, we can give permission to ourselves to let the emotions depart.  That too is part of the healing process.