הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי
שֹׁלֵחַ מַלְאָךְ, לְפָנֶיךָ, לִשְׁמָרְךָ, בַּדָּרֶךְ; וְלַהֲבִיאֲךָ,
אֶל-הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר הֲכִנֹתִי. הִשָּׁמֶר מִפָּנָיו וּשְׁמַע בְּקֹלוֹ,
אַל-תַּמֵּר בּוֹ: כִּי לֹא יִשָּׂא
לְפִשְׁעֲכֶם, כִּי שְׁמִי בְּקִרְבּוֹ.
Robert Alter translates the passage this way:
Look, I am about to send a messenger before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I made ready. Watch yourself with him and heed his voice, do not defy him, for he will not pardon your trespass, for My name is within him (Exodus 23:20-21).
Alter comments that “the frankly mythological terms of the
preceding narrative—the pillars of cloud and fire, the Destroyer in Egypt—invite
us to imagine the messenger as a fearsome agent of God, perhaps human in form
like the divine messengers in Genesis, leading the people through the
wilderness.”
The 1985 JPS translation, the Sapirstein translation, and my
grandmother’s 1957-1960 Menorah Press translation render the passage similarly except,
in contrast to Alter’s more literal translation, they translate the Hebrew word
מלאך as
angel rather than messenger. The English word angel is derived from the Greek angelos, which literally means messenger or envoy.
Rashi explains that the messenger or angel is none other
than Metatron (מטטרון), “whose name is like
the Name of his Master,” meaning that its numerical value is
equal to שדי (Shaddai, the
Almighty). For Rashi, this is the meaning of “My name is within him,” though I am reminded of the much later legends about the golem, in some versions of which the clay creature is animated by placing a slip of paper or a tablet inscribed with the name of God under its tongue. Rashi
adds that Metatron will not pardon trespass for two reasons: first, as an angel
who is free of the evil inclination (יצר הרע)
and does not sin, he is unaccustomed to forgiving; and second, “he is only an
emissary [שליח] and does nothing but fulfill his mission.”
What
else do we know about Metatron? Gershom Scholem, the great Israeli scholar of
Jewish mysticism, noted that the Talmud mentions Metatron in the context of its
polemics against Jewish heretics like Elisha ben Abuyah. He writes:
Elisha b. Avuyah saw Metatron seated [in a vision] and said, “perhaps there are two powers,” as though indicating Metatron himself as a second deity. The Talmud explains that Metatron was given permission to be seated only because he was the heavenly scribe recording the good deeds of Israel. Apart from this, the Talmud states, it was proved to Elisha that Metatron could not be a second deity by the fact that Metatron received 60 blows with fiery rods to demonstrate that Metatron was not a god, but an angel, and could be punished…. It is however thought that the appearance of Metatron to Elisha b. Avuyah led him to a belief in dualism.
Scholem’s
discussion thus leads us to the Jewish heretic Elisha ben Abuyah, also called Akher
(the Stranger), who became the model for Isaac Deutscher’s conception of the “non-Jewish
Jew.” As Deutscher explained in his famous 1958 essay:
The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, see Akher as a prototype of those great revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud. You may, if you wish to, place them within a Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond it…. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.
Now,
Deutscher may be right that the Jewish heretic is the more farsighted individual
with the wider horizon. But isn’t there a corresponding danger for the heretic
that he will mistake, from his detached viewpoint, the agent—an agent without
mercy—for the principal?
