What The Angel Taught You

I love this story. From an article at aish.com by Rabbi Noah Weinberg and Yaakov Salomon:

According to the Talmud, before we were born, when we were safely ensconced in the comfort of the womb, we all had access to the ultimate search engine. God dispatches a personal angel to each and every soul in utero, who sits besides each and every one of us, and actually teaches us all the wisdom we will ever need to know on this planet. Everything.

And then...just before we are born...the angel gives us a little "tap" between the nose and the upper lip and everything he taught is immediately forgotten. That is how all human beings receive that small indentation in the skin beneath their noses, anatomically known as the "philtrum."...

"Strange story," you say. And who could blame you? First of all, how do we know that angels exist? And secondly, why would God send an angel to teach us everything we need to know, only to instruct him to then make us forget everything he just taught us? What would be the point?

Proving the existence of angels is not an easy chore, nor is it the purpose of this book. However, if we believe in God (and four out of five people say they do believe in some kind of deity), trusting that He would have some kind of ministering work corps is certainly not very far removed.

More perplexing is question # 2. Why bother to teach us everything, only to erase our memory chip immediately afterwards?

The answer, like most answers after we know them, is really rather simple. The best way to acquire real knowledge, and to retain it, is through self-exploration. The facts and the understanding that we become most proficient with are those that we ourselves have studied, researched or experienced personally. Wisdom that is spoon-fed to us or acquired second-hand is not nearly as clear or as functional. So allowing us to keep the knowledge we learned in the womb would surely not be in our best interests. So why bother teaching it to us in the first place? Because learning something once, makes it so much easier for us to learn it for the second time.

Use the title link to read the whole article, which addresses some of those things that we already know but may not dredge up often enough. The article is taken from the following book.


What the Angel Taught You: Seven Keys to Life Fulfillment