Sandalfon, Anafiel, and the Rainbow Above the Highest Heaven

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The First Gates and the Weight of the Climb

The traveler had passed through more gates than he could number, and still the sky above him refused to end.

Each heaven had its own guards and its own wardens, and none would let him pass until he named them and answered their questions. He had learned the passwords and answered the questions. He had watched armies of angels part before him like reeds bending in a flood. But every time he believed he had come near the top, he lifted his eyes and found another vault stacked above the last, and another above that, and the Throne he climbed toward hung as far off as when he had begun.

So he kept climbing. There was nothing else to do with such a height.

Then, at the rim of the heaven where the great Chariot stood, he saw what he first took for a wall of dark stone rising without a seam.

The Angel Whose Height Takes Five Hundred Years

It was not a wall. It was an angel, standing behind the Chariot with his back to the traveler, and he was so tall that a man walking at speed would need five hundred years to travel from his feet to his crown.

His name was Sandalfon. The traveler could not see where the angel ended. He tilted his head back until his neck ached and still the figure climbed out of sight, up past the ledges of cloud and the places where the light thinned to almost nothing, and vanished into a brightness that hurt to hold.

Sandalfon did not turn. His hands were busy. Out of the prayers that rose from Israel far below, thin as smoke, he was weaving a crown. His fingers moved without pause. He gathered the words of the faithful and bound them into gold, garland upon garland, a thing made entirely of what the earth had whispered upward.

The Crown That Rises of Its Own Accord

When the crown was finished, Sandalfon did not reach up to set it in place. Even he did not know the exact place where his Maker abides. So he spoke to the crown instead, and charmed it, and the crown rose from his hands on its own.

The whole of heaven felt it go.

The holy Chayyot, the living creatures who carry the Throne, broke into song. The Seraphim roared like lions, and their roar had words in it. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts," they cried, "the whole earth is full of His glory." As the crown drifted past the Throne of Glory, the wheels of the Throne began to turn. The foundations under the footstool shuddered. A wave of fear rolled outward through every heaven at once, and it struck the traveler like wind off a mountain, so that his knees gave beneath him.

Then the crown reached the place he could not see, and settled, and all the hosts spoke together with one voice. "The Eternal is King," they said, "the Eternal was King, the Eternal will be King in all eternity." And it happened not once but again and again, crown after crown, prayer after prayer, forever. He had arrived in the middle of something without beginning or end.

The Prince at the Gate of the Highest Heaven

Above the heaven of the Chariot lay one more, the highest, called Aravot, and its gate was kept by a single prince.

Anafiel stood in the doorway of the highest heaven, and his radiance spilled out and covered the chambers behind him so that the traveler could not tell where the angel stopped and the light began. He ruled over all the other angels. When lesser angels came before him, they lifted the crowns from their own heads and fell on their faces, and did not rise until he permitted it.

The traveler had heard the name whispered in the lower heavens. This was the one who carried the Name of God folded into his own, so that he was called Anafiel and the Name in a single breath. This was the one the oldest tellers called the creator of the beginning, who held the secrets of heaven behind his teeth. This was the hand that had reached down and gathered Enoch up out of the world and carried him through these gates to be remade into an angel of fire. The same hand had once laid sixty lashes of flame across the back of that remade angel when he failed to stand at the proper moment.

The traveler stopped at the threshold and did not dare to ask to pass.

The Rainbow That Rests on a Cherub's Shoulders

Beyond Anafiel, above the roof of Aravot, the traveler saw the last thing his eyes could bear.

A rainbow arched over the highest heaven, but it was not the bow set in the clouds after rain. It was the bow of the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence), the Presence itself, and its light was the light Ezekiel had once struggled to name. "Like the appearance of the bow that shines in the clouds on a day of rain," the prophet had said, "such was the surrounding radiance." Its clouds wrapped the Throne of Glory. Above its arches turned the wheels of the Chariot, the Ophanim, rimmed and full of motion.

The rainbow did not hang in empty air. It rested across the shoulders of an angel who stood beneath it like a pillar holding a roof of colored fire. His name was Kerubiel, prince of the Cherubim. His mouth was a lamp of fire and his tongue a fire that consumed. His eyebrows were lightning. His eyes were sparks that would not stop throwing light, and on his head sat a crown engraved with the Name. Between his shoulders lay the rainbow of the Shekhinah, and the splendor of the Presence shone full on his face.

The traveler tilted his head back one more time to find the top of it all, the source of the light, the seat of the crown that Sandalfon kept sending up. He did not find it. The rainbow blazed, the crown rose, the hosts sang their endless song, and above every vast thing he had passed there was still another, brighter and farther, with no visible end. He lowered his eyes because he could not do otherwise, and the light went on without him.