For Shavuot: Approaching the Arafel

Ki shamah, ki shamah Elokim. For there -- there -- that is where God is.

So goes the chorus to Shuli Rand’s song “Arafel.” There, in the arafel , in the thick cloud, in the fog, in the darkness, there, that is where God is.

This line is based on the Torah’s description of the Har Sinai experience -- “The people stood at a distance, while Moshe approached the arafel asher sham Elokim” -- Moshe approached the thick cloud where God was.

The Har Sinai experience, the ultimate revelation of God, was an experience of thick clouds and smoke like “the smoke of a kiln.” The people stood back, but Moshe -- he approached the arafel.

I think most of us spend our lives, like the people of Israel here, standing back from the thick cloud. We prefer light and clarity and joy and certainty.

But sometimes life-- or maybe God -- hands us some darkness, some difficulty, some suffering, or maybe it is more a thickness and a cloudiness -- a sense of uncertainty, unease, doubt, confusion, total lack of clarity and with it that sinking uncomfortable fluttery feeling in our bellies of not knowing, of being unsure, of not standing on firm ground.

We can’t stand this restless uncertainty; it makes us anxious and we quickly try to escape it. We medicate and meditate and exercise and distract and keep busy in order to run away from it, in order not to feel that unease, that not knowing.

But what if God is actually in the arafel? What if God is in those moments of doubt and restlessness and uncertainty? What if God, or our access to God, is actually through those feelings? What if these feelings are actually an invitation not to stand back or run away but, like Moshe, to approach and come close?

Could it be that the flip side of uncertainty is mystery? That to be in a place of not knowing is actually to know God, to have some tiny experience of the mystery that is beyond us?

I think of the Israelites, freed from slavery, from the bounds of a difficult life, but also from the bounds of a known life of predictability and certainty. Here they stand in the empty, barren, unpredictable desert, facing an unknown and uncertain future; they must have felt unmoored, suddenly removed from all the structures that give a human being a sense of balance and groundedness. I think we know a little of what they must have felt.

So, standing in the desert, at Har Sinai, this Shavuot, do we approach or stand back? Can we see that it is precisely in this uncertainty that God resides, that sometimes the tug of unease -- the intense fear of not knowing and not controlling -- is a call to mystery, a call to connection to our divine source, to the ultimate Ground, a call to break open the narrowness of usual confines and experience something beyond ourselves? This, too, is a gift from above, here, too, here in the thickness of the cloud, here, too, is where God resides. In those desert moments, when we feel that there is fog around us and anxious uncertainty inside us, may God fill our hearts with the courage to approach, to know that He is there -- precisely there, in the Arafel -- waiting for us.