Series Six: 05. Red Blue

Pretend and Protection Surrogates

Story

In the middle of the night I heard a loud thud and then crying. I got up and made it as far as the bathroom where I found my three-year-old, E, coming to get me. 

“I fell out of the bed and I hurt myself and a dog was eating Mickey Cat,” he sobbed.

Mickey Cat is the name E gave to a pink cat he found at the bottom of our bin of stuffed animals, forgotten long ago by his older sister, D. I had always thought it looked goofy, even a bit shoddy, but E was instantly smitten. Now Mickey Cat has driven tow trucks, lived in the time of dinosaurs, gotten COVID no less than five times, and is best friends with another stuffed cat that E named Stabilizer. While E has slept every night since babyhood with Bunny and Elephant, it is Mickey Cat who is the star of his stories.

“A dog was eating Mickey Cat? It sounds like you had a bad dream,” I said. I sat on the side of the tub and held E as he told me more. E was outside D’s elementary school and a long brown dog came up and started chewing on Mickey Cat before he could yank her away. As he told the story, E started to calm down, and I got him to sit on the toilet. Then D overheard what was going on and joined us in the bathroom, wanting to help. 

“Dreams can be scary,” she said, reaching for a tone more mature than her almost-seven years. “You know, one time I dreamt that Dad died! It made me feel better to go into his bedroom and see him alive. Maybe you need to see Mickey Cat right now?”

E immediately started to sob again. Dad was out of town, and who knows where Mickey Cat could have been in the pitch black of 3:45AM. 

After much reassurance, I finally managed to get both kids back into bed and crawled in between them. The kids share a queen-size bed by sleeping width-wise, so there is plenty of room for parents to cuddle as long as they bend their knees. Everyone was still riled up, so I suggested we sing. They asked for The Angel Song. 

I didn’t grow up hearing much about angels participating in my daily life, besides my aunt telling me that thunder was only the angels going bowling. I’m sure I encountered The Angel Song at some point, but it wasn’t until I reheard it recently that it stuck. I’m a sucker for a good Hebrew sing-along, and this text is technically a prayer from the Bedtime Shema, so I inserted the song into my nighttime rotation with the kids. I didn’t really consciously consider that this would introduce them to the concept of angels: 

Beshem HaShem, 
Elohei Yisrael:
mi’yimini Michael 
u’mi’smoli Gavriel
u’mi’lefanai Uriel 
u’me’achorai Rafael
ve’al roshi, ve’al roshi Shechinat El

Here’s the English translation (or how I translate it anyway):

In the name of The Name, 
Divine of those who wrestle with the Divine:
May the angel Michael be at my right,
and the angel Gabriel be at my left;
and in front of me the angel Uriel,
and behind me the angel Raphael,
and above my head Divine Presence.

A song that I love in Hebrew feels really, well, specific in English. I understand a decent amount of Hebrew and can cobble enough together for a basic conversation. Still, since I’ve mostly encountered it in prayer settings, hearing Hebrew switches my brain into spiritual mode. I don’t understand just enough Hebrew so that it is easy for me to abstract the words from what they actually mean into how they make me feel, especially in song.

I’ve translated The Angel Song to my kids before, so it’s not a secret to them. I like the idea of intentionally conjuring divine presence in each direction, so I wanted to be sure they understood the physical mechanics of the song. But I wasn’t very specific about who or what angels might actually be, or these angels in particular.

Usually we just sing the song and leave it at that, but that night D and E wanted to talk. They asked me if angels were real, and then before I could answer they started telling me about all the angels they know. E said that Mickey Cat is half angel, half cat. D whispered to me that she talks to angels and even has an angel’s phone number. I listened to all of this without adding detail to their interpretations. What could I say about their own experiences that they wouldn’t know better than me? Eventually I somehow extracted myself from the room and they both went back to sleep in peace.

Then a couple weeks later, in the middle of the night, D swung open our bedroom door and declared: “I had a nightmare.” I invited her to climb into bed between Justin and I and to tell us what happened.

She said she was at her school in the hallway outside the cafeteria and a robber was there. She screamed: “Everybody run! There’s a ROBBER!” He reached out and grabbed her hand but she pulled it away. She had looked in the robber’s pocket, and she saw he had a gun. My brother’s girlfriend was there and got her out of the school. 

I could sort of laugh off the Mickey Cat dream. I couldn’t laugh off this dream. I held D close, comforting her, comforting myself. I asked her if she wanted to sing together and she asked for The Angel Song. She sang every word along with me in Hebrew, and then the whole thing over again in “yai dai dai dai”s at the end. 

It occurred to me then that this is why we have angels. Protection surrogates, beings we imagine from the spiritual realm to intercede in our fate. I wanted so badly to tell D that angels would protect her at school, maybe even that someone or something called God would protect her.

But I was suddenly self-conscious, lying there with D and my partner. I realized that for the most part I had sung The Angel Song without him in the room. I knew that as a non-Jewish “militant agnostic” he would become pretty wiggly if I started making promises to the kids about God. Even I feel wiggly making promises about God, especially using that language. Though we celebrate most Jewish holidays, we don’t frame our spirituality in terms of deference to any one being or entity, except perhaps oneness itself. Oneness wouldn’t protect her if a “robber” came to her school. But maybe Something Else could. Is there Something Else? Is that Something Else what other people call God, or is it another part of the Oneness? If we can’t know for sure, then why not pretend? If we tell our kids about the Tooth Fairy and even leave some ambiguity about Santa Claus, then why wouldn’t we tell them about angels?

When D and E were each six months old, we introduced lovies: small stuffed animals attached to tiny blankets that they could keep in their crib and use to soothe themselves back to sleep in the middle of the night. We replaced our own familiar touch and smell with those of polyester animal-shaped objects that over time would take on their own familiar touch and smell. Lovies or stuffies or whatever you want to call them are there to comfort kids when we’re not in the room, so that we don’t need to come into the room. If a lovie is a comfort surrogate, maybe an angel is a protection surrogate. A tool we introduce once kids are old enough to pretend, once touch and smell aren’t enough to feel safe.

I brought up D’s dream in a class I am taking on Jewish Dream Work with the co-founder of Kohenet, Rabbi Jill Hammer. She told me that perhaps in dreams, kids can share some of the fears that are too scary to bring up with adults otherwise. The dream makes the feeling concrete, gives them something we can look at and talk about and address together.

In that way, is an angel not unlike a dream itself? An image we use to make a feeling concrete? When you experience an inexplicable sense of protection and support in the midst of crisis, why not attribute that to an angel? Not that the idea of angels doesn’t point to potentially real entities. Who can say? It’s easy to get hung up on a specific notion of “angel” and then dismiss the idea altogether when any physical description of a non-corporeal being is a kind of spiritual cosplay. If there are beings that exist on a different plane and affect life on this plane, I don’t think they would have wings and wear robes except inside the minds of humans.

Throughout history, Jews as well as people across cultures have imagined and continued to imagine “angels” and beings like them in different ways. The angel who gave D her phone number? Apparently she is a pink bunny named Rosie who can change color and has a different name for each color so really she’s only named Rosie when she’s pink. Is that idea so different from that of the fierce cherubim with wingspans twenty cubits long that were to be fashioned in gold guarding the Temple’s Holy of Holies detailed in the instructions in the Bible? A color-changing bunny is certainly not so different from the chubby winged babies that we associate with cherubs today.

The imagined is not always imaginary. What we experience in dreams is real even if it isn’t true. Or perhaps dreams are true even if they aren’t real. “Real,” “true,” words are a form of pretend too. Maybe that’s why I always come back to song as a source of comfort. Singing together creates a space in time where we can feel, even if we can’t know.

Divinatory Meaning

Red Blue is Body and Communication. From the moment we are born, we learn to use our voice as a means of survival, crying to receive care and connection. The constant feedback of the umbilical cord is replaced by our own vocal cords, a phenomenon known as the acoustic umbilical cord. Crying out to be heard and then being listened to builds the fundamental trust that ultimately allows us to communicate. 

What care are you crying out for? Who or what are you crying to? Who or what is listening? 

Are your feelings coming out as unspecified cries, or are you able to know and articulate what is going on for you in the moment? For example, is your anger coming out as shouting at those around you, or are you stifling your emotions in order to please others? Red Blue can invite you to look at your communication patterns and examine how you are getting your needs met. 

What are some of your fundamental stories? Do they need updating? Pay attention to what you say to yourself, especially if it’s harsher than how you might talk to anyone else. Pay attention to how your body is talking to you, and how you are responding.

If Red Blue comes up in a reading, it may also be a good time to pay attention to your imagination. Dreaming is one way that our body tells stories, conjuring pretend scenarios to run through real feelings. Kids of a certain age are able to sustain hours of pretend. Though we call it play, it is serious work that becomes harder to do the older you get. Whether it’s from your subconscious or a flow state, you may be surprised by the images that emerge from being fully present.