Professor, Interrupted
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of first-person essays by members of the Duke community reflecting on a year living with COVID-19.
“Interrupting angels.” Who knew such things were ever imagined?
In my teaching and research in the area of Jewish magic and mysticism, I’ve become acquainted with all sorts of angels. Angels of wrath and of mercy. Angels of esoteric knowledge and crafty deceit. Angels for each nation, and angels for every mood. The angel of rain, of the sea, and of destiny. I think of such figures as reflecting pre-modern ways of understanding invisible, intangible, and yet manifestly real elements of our reality. The idea of angels lends concreteness to elements of our daily experience which even now, when they are explicable by scientific means, still seem personal — kind or vindictive or ironic in their timing — in a way that gravity isn’t.
For too many people, the last year has brought tragic and traumatic familiarity with the singular angel whose personality is most developed in rabbinic writings, the angel of death. I, however, am lucky, for I have spent this year in the company of a far less dangerous angelic band: the interrupting angels, the angels of delay. In the Talmud — the magnum opus of rabbinic law and lore — the rabbis state that “angels accompany every person.” It doesn’t say they have to be helpful.
A teaching attributed to the 18th-century Jewish mystic, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (also known as the Baal Shem Tov, “Master of the Good Name”), describes the creation of angels as taking place in two stages: the angelic soul comes into being when a person decides to do something; and the angel’s body is created when the action is completed. A short span of time between intention and completion brings helpful angels into being. These angels smooth the path forward for their mortal creators, a metaphysical embodiment of “one good deed leads to another.”
A long gap between a decision to act and acting on that decision, however, brings an interrupting angel into being. Such angels came into existence frustrated — distressed by its wait for a body — and, in turn, they frustrate the plans of whoever brought them into being. Born irate, “angels of delay” generate low-grade misery, and (in my experience) the presence of one begets companions. Accompanied by the host of my own ambitions and intentions, I fall further and further behind.
Indeed, the Baal Shem Tov, for all his wisdom, does not address my situation: plans that never stood a chance of being fulfilled. I suppose such vain intentions birth sad or angry wraiths, the disembodied black moods and bleak weariness that sometimes weigh me down, sapping energy and clouding thoughts. I think of these as the intangible yet unmistakable manifestations of what my own children — working their way through fourth and seventh grade in “Zoom School,” the older even celebrating a “Zoom Bar Mitzvah” in January — call “COVID sadness.” There are days where they go back to bed before lunch, maybe hoping for a do-over. Days where their cameras are off because even being seen is too hard. I resist the malaise — going back to bed is a luxury I don’t have — but as I go about my daily tasks, I feel the weight of my frustrations and their disappointments pulling on my limbs. I fear that in my sluggishness, I have begotten an entire heavenly host of interrupting angels. It would, at least, explain why thinking is harder and writing takes longer, even as tasks pile up and patience grows short.
And yet, I keep in mind that the Baal Shem Tov discusses the creation of interrupting angels in the context of comparing life’s journey to a narrow bridge that every individual must cross. Helpful angels may smooth our way, while frustrating angels impede our path, causing us to look down and grow afraid. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, summarized this teaching: “Know that every person is required to cross an exceedingly narrow bridge, but the ultimate, essential thing is not to be afraid of it at all.” Dogged persistence is its own kind of bravery.
For someone like me — one who enjoys being busy, delights in checking things off ambitious “to do” lists, and finds energy in being reliable — the experience of the last year has been a wearing, wearying slog, one where the image of fighting invisible beings created by my own (in)action seems all to reasonable a metaphor. Once, tasks like planning a syllabus, drafting a committee report, prepping a class activity, or even just reading around the margins of a new book project gave me energy; now they can feel alarmingly close to “too much.” But somehow, some days more trudgingly and grudgingly than others, I muddle through. Syllabi get written, reports get turned in, Zoom seminars offer moments of slightly hysterical joy, and the book…well, the book will come in due course (with many interrupting angels birthed along the way). My various obligations may take a little longer to complete, but I do them — or they were phantom busywork to begin with. On days when I do little, I know that time will carry me forward without any effort. The bridge may be narrow, but its span is finite. It is just slower going, encumbered as I am by these angels of delay.
As I muddle along, I try to be kinder to myself, more frankly realistic, and to extend the same compassion to others, as we all trudge around with these interrupting angels weighing down our limbs and gumming up our intentions. I like the idea that ticking things off my “to do” list — even ridiculously simple things, like “reply to email” or “laundry” or “check on BFF” — brings a bit of balance back into the world. Sure, any “helpful angel” created by “answer that email” is probably rather puny, but what more can I expect from this year? Modest happiness, tempered success? I’ll take it, for now, as I rebuild strength and wait, and keep putting one foot after the other, on this narrow bridge to the future. Who knows what angels the next year holds?
Laura Lieber is Professor of Religious Studies, Classics and Divinity at Duke University and director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies
