Moses Arrived in Heaven and the Angels Panicked

The Escort No One Wanted to Join

God commanded Metatron, the angel of the divine presence who had once been the man Enoch, to escort Moses through the heavens. Metatron obeyed. Thirty thousand angels were assigned to the mission, fifteen thousand on Moses's right side, fifteen thousand on his left. They went with him not because his ascent was a celebration but because it was a crisis, and someone needed to contain what was about to happen when the angels of the upper heavens realized a human being had entered their world.

The first heaven was already unsettling. Moses walked through it and saw armies of angels stationed at their posts, formations stretching in every direction, beings made of fire and ice arranged in ranks that had no end. Metatron narrated. Moses looked and tried to hold in his mind what his eyes were receiving.

The Fire-Angel of the Third Heaven

By the third heaven the scale had changed beyond any ordinary measure. Moses encountered an angel whose height was so enormous that a human being walking at full speed would require five hundred years to cover the distance from its feet to its head. Five hundred years of walking, upward, along one being. Moses stood at its base and looked up and understood, for perhaps the first time since Sinai, that he had entirely misjudged what he was moving through.

Metatron gave him the angel's name and function and moved him forward. The tour continued upward. Each heaven added something new to Moses's accumulating disorientation: the stores of rain and snow, the treasuries of dew, the great winds that moved through their appointed chambers, the angels whose task was nothing but singing and the angels whose task was nothing but keeping silence, the fire that never consumed what it burned and the cold that never froze what it touched.

When the Angels Tried to Take the Torah

Moses had been in the upper heavens for some days before the angels understood what he was there to receive. When they understood, the mood changed. The Torah, they argued, was too sacred for a human being. It had existed before the world. It was written in black fire on white fire and kept in the divine treasury, and it belonged there. The angels who made this argument were not being bureaucratic. They were terrified of what would happen to a document that had never touched mortality if it passed into mortal hands.

Moses held his ground. God told him to answer them. Moses spoke carefully, he invoked the Torah's specific commandments, the ones about honoring parents, about the sabbath, about refraining from murder and adultery and covetousness, and asked the angels which of these applied to beings who had no parents, who did not labor, who did not want what others had because they had no wants at all. The Torah was not written for them. It was written for humans who needed restraint because they had appetites. The argument landed. The angels went silent.

What the Angels Did Instead

Having lost the debate, some of the angels shifted their response. They offered Moses gifts, each one who had opposed him giving something in reconciliation. The angel of death gave him the secret of stopping a plague. Other angels gave him other knowledge. Moses descended from heaven with the tablets and with an education in divine power that the forty days and forty nights among the angels had deposited into him.

When the people below saw the Tabernacle finished and Moses's face still shining from what the heavens had done to it, they understood, at a level below language, that the man who had gone up and come back down was not quite the same man who had gone up. Something of the upper heavens had stayed in his face. They could not look directly at him without the veil.