GENESIS XVIII:1-XXII:24
BETWEEN MEN AND ANGELS
The biblical text shows the patriarch Avraham (Abraham) sitting in front of his tent, Kechom hayom, in the heat of the day. God had cleared the heavens so that the midday heat would compel travelers to seek shelter. In this way they would benefit from the hospitality of Patriarch Avraham, who in turn would be happy to see them and forget the pains he suffered due to the circumcision that had been performed three days earlier. God had appeared before Avraham when three angels appeared in the form of men. Avraham rose to greet his visitors and the Chachamim (Sages) questioned the attitude of the patriarch, who abandoned the divine presence to welcome his visitors. From this the Chachamim deduce that receiving a visitor, attending to a traveler, is more important than to be in the presence of God.
For Maimonides, the reception of guests is an insufficient reason to abandon the presence of God. Several legal regulations teach the opposite. When reciting the Amidah (Central silent prayer),for example, one should not respond to the king’s greeting because it would constitute an interruption of the prayer that requires absolute concentration. Even if a snake is coiled around a person’s leg, he should not interrupt the recitation of the Amidah, because during the prayer the person is in the presence of HaShem (God). Since our text says that HaShem had appeared to Avraham, how can we explain the patriarch leaving God aside and approaching potential guests?
To solve the problem, Maimonides suggests that this episode occurred in the patriarch’s mind. For even HaShem appears in the light of day, a fact that demands the highest degree of prophecy possessed only by Moshe (Moses), the teacher of the Hebrew people and the great prophet of Israel.
Upon receiving his guests, Avraham and his family provided them with the necessities to wash their feet and prepared a sumptuous meal for them. This fact presents a new difficulty, because the angels of God neither eat nor drink. The exegete Rashi is of the opinion that they did not actually eat, they only pretended that they were eating and drinking. In other biblical episodes we note that angels do not eat, as revealed by the
an episode with Manoah, Shimshon’s (Samson’s) father.
According to Maimonides, this difficulty is immediately resolved because the episode existed only in Avraham‘s intellect,hence the inaccuracy with reference to the food of the angels. Because dreams, in addition to the fundamental message they represent, can contain falsehoods.
Maimonides may not have been comfortable with the idea of the existence of angelic beings and preferred to limit them to the patriarch’s imagination. On the other hand, the Biblical narrationtestifies that two of these angels continue their mission to save Lot, Avraham’s nephew, and destroy the cities of Sedom(Sodom) and Amorah (Gomorrah). For Maimonides it was preferable to find a rational explanation for the facts and only ultimately was he willing to resort to the postulation of the existence of angels.
What are angels? The most direct answer is that they are emissaries of God who have a very specific task. An angel does not do more than one task; therefore, God had to send three angels: one to heal Avraham and announce the birth of Yitschak(Isaac), the second to save Lot and his family, and the third to destroy the cities whose inhabitants had become totally perverted. Angels lack a will of their own and automatically obey divine instruction. Therefore, human beings are on a higher level when they serve God, because they do so in the exercise of their free will.
However, one can learn from these heavenly beings that obedience to God must be unequivocal and that, at the time of fulfilling a Mitzvah (religious instruction), that task must fully absorb the person’s attention.
