A few theological thoughts on When The Angels Left The Old Country

[seekingferret]

Maybe it's just because I've recently been playing and replaying The Ghost and the Golem, which has explicitly mutable metaphysics. The story repeatedly asks how you how you respond in situations where you don't have a traditionally active narrative choice, and often something like, "I stop and say a quick prayer" is a choice. If the story's metaphysics are purely rational, this does not affect the metaphysical reality but merely informs character. If the supernatural is real, the extent to which the prayer affects reality depends on the specific metaphysics, whether there is an active, interventionist God or if prayer mechanically manipulates the spirit world. But The Ghost and the Golem's storytelling adapts to your choices, so to some extent whether your prayers matter to the universe and how depends on whether you want them to matter.

I thought a lot about this as I read When The Angels Left the Old Country, which I know I'm late to, but I only managed to finish Good Omens this year, after many frustrating unsuccessful tries, and I wanted to have read it first. Good Omens has a very specific metaphysical vision of the universe, where God is Ineffable and human choices unfold in a matrix of incomprehensible prophecy and apparent randomness that we must make the choice about whether to consider purposeful. By turning this into a Jewish story, the metaphysics become a lot more fluid. Prophecy is no longer a constraining element of the story. But I think the story is still very interested in this question of an active but ineffable God. The Angel's changes throughout the story, as it gains a permanent name and a temporary hanger-on, are constrained by metaphysical rules that we are not privy to and which might evolve circumstantially based on what HKB"H requires in the situation. This is fascinating to me.


I'm also very interested in another metaphysical conceit that Lamb cribs from Gaiman, but not from Good Omens. The idea that supernatural beings have a sense of place but migrate with their believers is much more an American Gods vibe, and I found myself questioning how well it fits within a Jewish take on Good Omens. Good Omens is in a way a very international story told deliberately in a very parochial way. The Apocalypse is a worldwide phenomenon; the Antichrist is a local phenomenon. We are given hints through the text that the chaos of the End Times is broadly affecting people the book's characters are only dimly aware of, that the theological reach of the forces of Good and Evil is not constrained by borders or oceans. I struggled a bit to make sense of the idea that God would need to send European angels to protect the Jews in America. Maybe I'm overreading the ambiguity, certainly Lamb plays very nicely on Ash's expectations of demons in the New World with the demons in Ellis Island, so perhaps there are angels already in America and Uriel's journey is more about Uriel's specific set of missions rather than about New York needing more angels. But this is a metaphysical conceit that I don't always love, it feels too polytheistic to mesh nicely with the rest of the theological world building and I'm not sure I like its thematic resonance in this story, which is not at all preoccupied with what the spiritual lay of the land was before Jews started to come to America.


This is a stupid thing to be bugged by, but I wanted to like the way the angel would become Maariv or Shacharit, it felt like a nice idea of how angels interact with time, but... there's aggadah in the Talmud (Chullin 91) that angels only pray once a day, or maybe once a year. I'm sure Lamb was working from equally relevant tradition, the book clearly does not lack in textual underpinning, but I wanted acknowledgement of the contradiction at least.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I didn't get the impression it was an American Gods-type thing. It seemed more of an immigration type thing. Ash wants to go to America to go to America, not because there's a pull that, in an American Gods sense, the Gods come along with the immigrants as a natural consequence of immigration; they bring their Gods with them along with the rest of their culture.

I don't know if you read Angels when it was still on tumblr; I didn't manage to read the whole thing before it was taken down, but one of the plot points was that Ash has a brother already in the US, which adds even more to the whole Jewish immigration plotline, as families come piecemeal, rarely all at once.

So I don't think it's a situation of "send European angels to protect the Jews in America", I think it's much more "these European angels come to America to protect one specific Jew, who they have known since birth; the demon wants to come because he's getting very antsy about pogroms".

[seekingferret]

I think it's left vague enough that you could be more right than me, but it's called When THE Angels Left the Old Country, and the definite article gave me American Gods vibes.

I really like the idea of Ash already having a brother in America!

[lannamichaels]

Fair point. It's also a change in title from tumblr, where it was "Why The Shtetler Angels Left The Old Country And What They Accomplished In America", which was based off of an old essay contest. So I'm definitely influenced from reading a previous version of the book.

[chestnut_pod]

I think there's any amount of text indicating a variety of prayer frequencies for angels -- the famous story from Shabbat 119b, for example. Those angels are praying, potentially, once a week! The passage from Chullin 91 has fully nine levels of unresolved disagreement about how many times angels pray, so I'm not sure once a day is as strict a baraita as all that. The Rambam would insist that the mere presence of angels makes the whole thing necessarily a prophetic vision, after all.

I feel like treating this book as though its plot is mainly referencing Gaiman (or even opposing Gaiman) is a bit reductive, though obviously it's a clear referent. Rather, I see Lamb moving quite fluidly between a variety of influences, including Yiddish migration literature like IBS' urban magical realist stories and what seems like a pretty solid grasp on nuts-and-bolts Jewish migration history of the turn of the century. I'm pretty sure Rose is a shout-out to Rose Schneiderman, and there's a pretty thinly veiled Cecilia Razovsky expie who definitely did not come from Gaiman, for example. (Also, this one might be a reach, but there were some distinct plot elements and motifs there that made me think Lamb read Dreams in the Golden Country as a youth.) So I agree with lannamichaels that the decision to go to America is not merely cribbed from Neil Gaiman's "mushroom" metaphysics of gods but represents Ash and Uriel's own agentive decisions to proactively migrate, just like the people of their shtetl -- for reasons which we all know are profoundly international. I think in this particular instance, the migration metaphor is just migration! Can't argue with wanting to see more of the "spiritual lay of the land" pre-colonization, though.