Parashat Yitro: Approaching the Cloud

One of the best moments of my week involved crying.

Crying with one of my children as the child cried, too, half lying in my arms. Before that moment, I had been walking around with a vague sense of hurry and worry. At that moment of crying, I was entirely at peace, sad, but entirely at peace. There was nowhere else to be and nothing better to do than this. Above all, I felt connected, connected to my child, connected to myself and that deep point of sadness inside me, connected to all the troubles and sadness in the universe, connected to the God who cares about all that sadness, who, as one of my students reminded me this week, is “the healer of broken hearts” (Ps. 147:3).

Sometimes it requires going into the sadness, not pushing it away, but actually approaching it, to feel this sense of connectedness. When Moshe approaches God on Sinai in our parsha this week, the Torah says that everyone else stood back, but Moshe approached the arafel asher sham Elokim, “the thick dark cloud where God was” (Ex 20:18). That is where God resides. In the arafel. In the clouds. In the moments of darkness and worry and confusion and sadness. Yes, of course, God also resides in joy, but here in our parsha, the pinnacle of revelation is depicted as a thick dark cloud. The moments that we run away from, like the people do here, those are the moments that perhaps offer the deepest of connections and revelations if we could only muster the fortitude, like Moshe, to approach them.

Ki shamah, ki shamah, ki shamah Elokim. The Israeli singer Shuli Rand sings a song about this passage entitled Arafel and his refrain is this – ki shamah, ki shamah, ki shamah Elokim. “Because there, because there, because there is God.” There, in that sadness, in our very brokenness, there, in the places we hide from, it is there that we will find God, feel our connection to Him, to each other and to ourselves. There, in the crying, in the thick cloud of darkness.

The Piasetczner Rebbe talks about moments like this as cracks in the soul. Normally we go about our lives with our soul covered over with a thick impermeable layer. Then there are moments, moments of intense emotion, whether sadness or joy, and at these moments cracks open in this covering. The goal is to use these cracks to fully access our soul and our connection to God, to fully enter those moments as opportunities for spiritual connection, moments when we, too, have the ability to approach the arafel.