To Be Earthly Angels (Vayechi)

In the final parashah of Breisheet there are many scenes packed tightly together, but one moment is both dense and strangely under-taught: Jacob blessing his children. And then, especially, the moment when he blesses his grandsons, Menashe and Ephraim. The language is unmistakably ancient, and even a little bit odd. Not all of it feels like what we’d call a “blessing” in a greeting-card sense. It’s rawer than that. Truer than that.

But there is a passage Jacob offers that has found its way into Jewish life far beyond its original scene. Many of us know it not only as Torah but as melody, sung when children come close to Torah, sung at a brit milah or a baby naming, sung when we need to say: may the Holy One hold you and guide you and keep you.

Jacob says, in essence:

The God before whom my ancestors Abraham and Isaac walked,
the God who has shepherded me from the beginning of my life until today,
the malach who has redeemed me from all misfortune,
may that One bless these children. (Gen. 48:15–16)

And right away the Torah gives us something we can’t quite pin down. Because the first two phrases are “God, God.” And then suddenly: “hamalach hago’el oti mikol ra, the malach who redeemed me from all harm.” Who is this malach?

I want to lean, openly and gratefully, on the work of my teacher and friend Professor Benjamin Sommer of JTS, who helps us read this verse with both rigor and holy imagination.

One straightforward reading (Radak’s) is simple: Jacob mentions God twice, then mentions an angel, meaning: an angel sent by God. God acts; God sends; God saves. Clean and classical. Another reading (Sforno’s) is emotionally subtle: perhaps Jacob is saying that even if the children are not fully worthy of God’s blessing, because children act like children, and grown-ups act like children, and all of us are unfinished, still, let a malach bless them. Let there be mercy even when merit is complicated.

And then comes a reading that is genuinely daring. Ramban suggests that God in the first line, God in the second line, and the malach in the third line are not three different beings at all. They are one. The malach is not a separate creature acting at a distance. The malach is a manifestation of God, God made accessible, God made near, God appearing in a form that can meet a human life.

Ramban points to a thread in Torah where God’s presence shows up in an “angel” who speaks as God, carries God’s identity, even bears God’s Name within. It is as if Torah is telling us: the Infinite is infinite, but the Infinite is not trapped at infinity. The One can appear as many without ceasing to be One.

And here Professor Sommer adds something mystical and remarkably practical: God’s unity encompasses what appears to us as multiplicity. The oneness of God, too vast to grasp directly, can be refracted into the world through channels, through vessels, through “smaller versions” that do not diminish God but deliver God’s Infinite Light into the finite world.

Let me say that in plain language.

Oneness is breathtaking. And it is also, for most of us most of the time, out of reach. We cannot live every hour in the consciousness that all is one. We have bodies. We have bills. We have grief. We have responsibilities and limits and fear and longing. We are finite. And the Infinite can feel impossibly far.

But what if the verse is offering a bridge?

What if Jacob is blessing these children by saying: the Holy One who is beyond everything has accompanied me through something, through concrete, particular moments of protection and guidance and rescue. And sometimes that accompaniment arrived in a form I could name only as malach: messenger, presence, agent, embodiment.

Here is the turn that matters for the first Torah of 2026:

God is beyond things.
And we are things. We are some-things. We are finite vessels.
And through each of us, through our choices, our courage, our compassion, God’s blessing can become touchable.

There are small acts of redemption, friends, that you and I are called to make real in this new year.

Not redemption as a slogan. Not redemption as denial. Redemption as the steady decision to show up for another human being in a way that makes the world more repaired than it was before. Redemption as the refusal to let cynicism be our theology. Redemption as saying: I will be a messenger of blessing. I will be an earthy malach.

Because the world does not only need grand declarations. The world needs redeemed minutes. Redeemed conversations. Redeemed comments we could have withheld but chose to offer with gentleness. Redeemed attention. Redeemed generosity. Redeemed presence.

And yes, this year begins with us more intact as a Jewish people than we were at another recent turning of the calendar. Not intact enough. Not safe enough. Not whole enough. And we are also part of a broader human community that, again and again, has continued to show up for each other in the face of so much.

So I want to ask a question that Vayechi places right at the center of the room, and I want to ask it without embarrassment and without retreating into abstraction:

How can I be a malach for God’s blessing?

Not “what’s my resolution.”
Not “what’s my personal brand.”

But: what is one more thing I can do, one more way I can stretch the finite vessel that I am, so that God’s infinite blessing has a clearer path into this world?

Maybe it’s reaching out to someone you’ve been avoiding because it’s complicated.
Maybe it’s volunteering in a way that costs you comfort, not just time.
Maybe it’s learning someone’s name, really learning it, honoring their dignity.
Maybe it’s making space for someone else’s fear without rushing to fix it.
Maybe it’s giving tzedakah with a little more honesty about what you can actually do.
Maybe it’s refusing to speak about people as if they are problems.
Maybe it’s choosing, one day at a time, to be a source of steadiness.

We get to be agents of blessing. We get to be angels for each other. Not instead of God, God forbid, but as the way God’s presence becomes livable here.

That is Jacob’s gift at the end of his life: not only tribes and inheritances, not only prophecy and poetry, but a spiritual technology for the generations, this insistence that blessing can travel through a human life.

So as we begin 2026, with Torah open in front of us, let’s take Jacob’s words as both comfort and commission:

May the God who has carried us until now,
the God who is One and yet arrives in many forms,
the malach-presence that redeems from harm,
bless these children. Bless all of us.
And may we, in turn, bless.

Happy New Year. May it be a year of more kindness than cruelty, more courage than despair, more repair than rupture, for you and yours, for our communities, and for this aching world.