The torah describes a fascinating anecdote in this week’s portion.
After 20 years in Charan, 4 wives, 11 sons and one daughter later, Jacob is ready to leave and relocate his family. But then something happens, something that wasn’t quite in the plan. He hears his brother Esau is on his way with 400 men. From his greatest recollections, Jacob knows that this is not a good thing and the Torah describes that he gets ‘distressed'. It is explained that he is not simply concerned about of the dangers in which his family will now be placed or of being killed, rather, he is also fearful for what he might do reactively, that he might actually kill. He is afraid that this is not going to end well.
What is his instinctive reaction? The portion opens with these timeless words: "And Jacob sent messenger-angels before him to Esau his brother." The purpose of these angels was to bring conciliatory words to the other camp. But, what is the significance of specificying that they were sent ‘before him…to Esau his brother’? And besides, what are angels to Esau? Jacob was the pious one, Esau never cared much for all this stuff.
Seems to me that it wasn’t so much that the messengers were going to Esau as much as the fact that they were going before Jacob.
You see, life can often thrust us into a situation that we simply don’t know how we are going to come out of. It can ‘distress’ us and even make us think ‘uh oh, this isn’t going to end well’. Yet, we see from Jacob, that it is at these moments that we must send out our ‘messenger angels’ who bring ‘conciliatory words’ before us. These messenger angels are our positive thoughts and energies that do not only effect the enemy, but more so, ourselves.
There is a Chassidic proverb that goes “think good and it will be good”. Our thoughts actually have true physical power. They actually have the ability to change the course of nature, to make things good even if they weren’t meant to be.
In fact, we then see that Esau is indeed impressed with Jacob’s angels and upon meeting his brother, falls on his neck and cries. But this was only made possible by the angels before him. First, Jacob needed to believe, he needed to be convinced that it would end well.
And then, we make that phone call, the dreadful day comes or whatever else that could possibly be troubling us comes upon us and it’s not so bad. We see that the long lost brother we thought hated us so badly actually missed us too. The dreadful day wasn’t as dreadful and that we actually could handle life’s challenges much better than we’ve given ourselves credit for.
We can do all this and more, it's no big deal really, so long as we keep those angels in a very safe place, available to send them out before us as needed.