When we are really struggling, how do we move out of a place of stuckness? How do we find the resources to emerge, not to keep getting sucked down into the whirlpool of hopelessness and helplessness, of fear and anxiety and collapse? Yaakov must have known something about this. He suffered for years over the loss of Yosef, feeling like he was going down to sheol, the pit of hell, and describing the years of his life as few and troublesome.
The Angel that Redeems
How did Yaakov nonetheless manage to survive and even thrive? In his deathbed blessing to Yosef and Yosef’s sons, Yaakov describes it this way: hamalakh hagoel oti mikol ra (Genesis 48:16), the angel that has continually redeemed me from all evil, from each and every moment of distress.
We each have such an angel. Hamalakh. The angel, our particular angel, the special angel that is charged with lifting us out of the pit a thousand times. Mikol ra. Each and every time we are in distress. I picture Yaakov falling into the pit many many times, late at night perhaps, overwhelmed by grief and pain, distraught, restless, anxious, frustrated and hopeless, not wanting to live anymore, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, this angel comes to offer him a hand and lift him up, to bring hm back into the world of the living. When we shift like that, it is grace, a divine gift, truly the act of some unseen angel inside us.
The Magic of that Shift
I invite you to feel into whatever version of this scenario you can relate to. Perhaps first bringing to mind an experience of the pit or the whirlpool, some place of stuckness and emotional distress that feels hopeless and intractable, impossible to bear and no way to help yourself, no matter how hard you try. How have you emerged from such a stuck place in the past? Noticing that in fact you have emerged, maybe after a long time and much suffering, but always eventually there was some shift. And feeling into the nature of that shift, its magical nature, feeling into it as the divine inside you coming to your rescue. Seeing yourself in that pit like Yaakov and feeling the lift from beyond drawing you out, maybe you struggle first for a long time, but still, feeling the presence of that angel drawing you out, urging you again and again to choose life – uvaharta bahayim – to trust and have hope, letting yourself be redeemed, letting yourself feel the shift of grace in your body, that moment when you move from feeling tight and cramped to spacious and relaxed, from sinking despair to the opening, uplifting sensation of hope, like a bird set free, me’afeilah le’orah, from darkness to light, that moment of the miraculous shift of grace in your body. That is hamalakh, the angel, your angel, sent to you by God to be go’el, in the present tense, to continually redeem you, again and again, not a one time event, but a process, a learning, as often as we need it. Goel. Redeeming us.
A Different Plane
This geulah, this redemption, is not the same as simple help or fixing or even support. Redemption has a quality of pele, of wonder to it. It sparkles, it transforms, It is otherworldly. And that’s exactly what we need when we are stuck in such a pit or a whirlpool. We need to somehow get out of the whirlpool into a different, divine realm. As Einstein famously said, you cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. Or in IFS language, parts can’t heal other parts. Only Self Energy can do that. The real redemption, the real healing, only comes from this highly differentiated divine source of energy, not from our human attempts to bandaid and force and effort into a resolution. Efes biltekha goaleinu liyimot hamashiah, we say in Shabbat morning davening. There is none other than You, God, who can redeem us and move us towards the messianic era. Efes biltekha go’aleinu. None other than You. Real geulah, real redemption, is only from this other higher source, and always has this messianic quality, drawing us forward to a higher place in ourselves and in the world, out of the whirlpool and into an alternative divine realm beyond it.
Not Through Our Striving
The thing is that we think we can do it ourselves, that we can redeem ourselves and others through the means of our limited human capacities, through striving and efforting and control and urgency, by either forcing things or resisting them. Yaakov thought that, too, as he tried to manipulate his fortunes in life. We try so hard and we resist with such desperation. We do not surrender easily. It takes falling into that pit and struggling and trying so many times until we hit bottom, again and again, until we reach the end of our human rope and look up. We think we can solve our problems with the same mindset, with the same energy, with the same tightness and fear, with which they were created, out of the narrow perspective of our control. But we cannot. Hamalakh hagoel, Yaakov said at the end of his life, it was the angel who redeemed me, not all my maneuvering. Efes biltekha go’aleinu. There is no redeemer but You, God.
This is also the first powerful insight of AA, that we have to come to the realization that we can’t do it ourselves, that our lives are unmanageable, and that only if we turn our will over to a Higher Power, only then will we come into sanity, also a kind of redemption, to return to sanity in this life. We need to acknowledge, like Yaakov, that it is the angel, God’s emissary inside us, our Higher Power, that does the redeeming, always and only the divine inside us.
Not Meeting Aggression with Aggression
I invite you to pause here and feel into how we do get stuck in a loop of trying to fix things from the same plane in which our problems were created, how we meet tightness with tightness, urgency with urgency, judgment with judgment and aggression with aggression. We are like the go’el hadam, that same word, go’el, redeemer, but used in an almost ironic way to refer to the blood avenger who runs after the accidental killer to kill him, too (Numbers 35), impossibly trying to redeem a deceased relative by meeting aggression with aggression. We do that internally; we are so harsh and aggressive towards ourselves in our inner work. Hatred does not cease by hatred, said the Buddha. Only love can do that. Only love, a divine quality, can heal us. We can’t use the same tools to heal us that wounded us.
Jumping Out to the Divine Realm
So maybe noticing inside how you do often try to effort or force your way out of your most stuck places, how internally you meet tightness with tightness, judgment with judgment, noticing that from a place of compassion, and experimenting with another way, experimenting with jumping out of that tight human realm and letting in the expansive loving patient energy of the divine, breathing that space into you with a deep breath, letting God in. If it helps, you can imagine yourself literally jumping out from one plane to another, out of the whirlpool or the pit into the open air, or sometimes it feels like jumping from a more outer to a more inner place inside you, going deeper into your belly or behind something, moving behind the exterior of human control and efforting and judgment to a deeper more internal divine realm behind it, like diving deeper into the sea, getting all the way down to that place where you and God meet and the waters are still, the place of redemption inside you. Or maybe it simply feels like a moment of total surrender, letting go of the reins and falling backwards in a trust fall into the waiting arms of the angel, God’s emissary inside you.
Returning to Heal the Little Ones
When we shift planes this way, it’s not that we then leave our problems behind, that we jump out never to return. On the contrary, the point of jumping out is precisely to bring relief and love and redemption and healing to the places in you and in the world that need it. It’s just that we can’t do that work if we are still mired in it, in the muck of the pit itself. But now, from this place of geulah inside us, we become the malakh, the redeeming angel for our own suffering parts, the little ones inside us that need that redemption. Which is exactly what happens next in Yaakov’s blessing. Hamalakh hago’el oti, he says, this angel that redeems me, yivarekh et hane’arim, let that angel go out and bless the ne’arim, the children, the little ones inside. Let that redemptive energy come back to heal them.
It is from this divine place, and from this divine place alone, that we can offer blessing and healing and care to the young ones inside us. We don’t abandon the ones who are tight and restless and anxious and fearful. We jump out of their energy so that we can return to them with the blessing of a different energy, the angelic energy of redemption, of wholeness, of calm, of divine love. We offer it to the tight ones of the whirlpool and also to the exiled ones underneath who have for so long been alone and aching for love. When we step out of the whirlpool, we can become the malakh, the angel, that blesses them and loves them into healing. Maybe you can that in yourself, how, from that deeper divine place inside you, you could become the malakh, the angel, offering love and blessing to the little ones inside, letting them feel your light, embracing them, loving them from this place.
External Children Have Their Own Angels
The same is true externally for all of the other ne’arim, all the other children and people in our lives, both those who are our literal biological children, if you have any, and anyone we feel some connection or responsibility for. When someone comes to us stuck in their own loop, we can learn from Yaakov. He didn’t look at his grandchildren and say – I’ll help you. I’ll fix all your problems for you. He said – my blessing to you is that the angel that redeemed me should also be with you and bless you and redeem you. This is what we have to pass on to others, not so much our effort and our control or even our wisdom, but our intimate knowledge of the divine realm, our faith and trust in its existence, our experience of its redemption, even if only in tiny inklings. Sometimes when someone we care about comes to us in distress, we get tight and distressed right along with them. But the best gift we can pass on to them is our trust in this redeeming angel, our confidence and faith in its existence, in the existence of the divine realm both in the world and inside the person before us, trusting that they, too, have such an angel and are such an angel, knowing that their problems, however severe, cannot be resolved from the same plane in which they were created, helping them jump out into the wider space of the divine and let that redeeming energy heal them and help them see the way. Maybe you can feel in your body what it might be like to offer this trust to others, like light shining outward, how you might sit with them from that place of divine redemption inside you, letting it overflow to heal them as well as yourself.
No Pressure
It is important not to pressure yourself around any of this work. If there is pressure or effort or judgment, that, too, is another part of the whirlpool, and we step out of that, too, go behind it, opening to the malakh, to the angel of divine energy that is ever waiting inside us. We can’t be redeemed through pressure or control. Only through surrender to that malakh, to that loving patient divine energy, letting redemption come to you, come to us all.
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
