#celestial-hierarchy { were the angels real in atoms }

First a correction to my own shorthand, because the Talmud story is stranger than a protective bubble. In Shabbat 119b, two ministering angels, one good and one evil, walk a person home from synagogue on Friday night. They are not guards. They are inspectors. If they find the lamp lit, the table set and the bed made, the good angel says may it be like this next Shabbat too, and the evil angel is forced to answer amen. If the house is dark and neglected, it goes the other way, and the good angel is forced to say amen. The angels do not change the atoms. They bless or curse whatever the family already did, and the blessing is that it keeps happening. A recursive story, as it happens.

On whether angels touched matter, the traditions split, and the split is the real answer to your question.

The literal view: Aquinas held that angels can move bodies directly by applying their power, the way they were thought to move the heavenly spheres. Popular piety mostly agreed. A guardian angel could catch you.

The natural view: Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, says that every force in nature is called an angel, and even human impulses. He expected readers to be shocked that the formative power shaping a child in the womb gets called an angel, or that desire does. For him the angel is the working of the world, not an extra passenger in it. The midrash says every blade of grass has an angel that strikes it and says grow. On that reading, grass growing is what the angel is.

So your reading, that the journey was protected by the love of the community, is not a debunking. It is roughly the Maimonidean position. People did walk home from synagogue together. The community, the lit lamp and the set table were the atoms. The angel is the name for the meaning moving through them.