One of the things I found most fascinating–and enjoyable–about my Ulpan experience was the diversity of participants. Our Zoom spanned time zones from Los Angeles to Ottawa to Brooklyn to the Czech Republic to Israel. Participants were secular Americans of Israeli parents, new(ish) olim to Israel–and even a formerly ultra-Orthodox woman who lived her first 19 years in Jerusalem without learning Hebrew! I loved learning why each person was there, and I also loved the Hebrew knowledge that each person brought. Each of them knew different vocabulary, learned of their different experiences.
For example, I headed off to Jerusalem over 20 years ago, and quickly realized that while I could conjugate complex verbs and translate an arcane Biblical sentence, ordering an extra plate in a restaurant was a real challenge! And while my modern Hebrew has improved a ton since I started rabbinical school, during Ulpan I was frequently reminded of the roots of my Hebrew knowledge (pun intended). While modern slang was not my forte (though getting better), I was often the first to identify words with a Biblical or Talmudic root. Know your strengths, right?
In our last class, we were discussing the word for foggy (מעורפל). When my teacher mentioned that he did not know the origin of the word–I piped up, since I did. Arafel (עֲרָפֶ֣ל) is a Biblical word, most often found in pairing with the word anan (עָנָ֣ן), or cloud. The fancy term for this is hendiadys, which occurs when two words connected by “and” express one single yet more complex idea. We see anan v’arafel, cloud and fog, in Psalm 97, which reads:
עָנָ֣ן וַעֲרָפֶ֣ל סְבִיבָ֑יו
Clouds and fog surround [God]
When the Israelites first arrive at Mt. Sinai, God tells Moses that “I am coming to you in a thick cloud,” (anan); one chapter later, when Moses goes to hear the Ten Commandments for the first time, we read that he approached the thick cloud (arafel) where God was. It is a cloud (anan) that descends to alert the people of God’s presence, a cloud (anan) that dictates the movements of the Israelites in the desert, and a cloud (anan) that appears 17 times in the Torah portion we read this past Shabbat–B’haalotcha.
Why–for a Middle Eastern desert climate that is, by and large, pretty sunny–do we have these terms for clouds and fog? And why are they given such import? What is it about the anan v’arafel, the clouds and fog, that spoke so deeply to our ancestors? Perhaps, the answer is in the very surprise of such clouds and fog.
Or, maybe it is deeper than that. The Mekhilta D’Rabbi Yisrael, written in the early 3rd century CE, offers this possibility:
ומשה נגש אל הערפל – לפנים משלשה מחיצות: חשך ענן וערפל. חשך – מבחוץ, ענן – מבפנים, ערפל – לפני לפנים, שנא’ “ומשה נגש אל הערפל”:
“And Moses entered into the mist”: Moses entered through three divisions: darkness, cloud, and fog. Darkness, the outermost; cloud, within; fog, the innermost. As it is written “And Moses entered into the mist, where God was.”
Here in Southern California, we are making the opposite journey; we are emerging from our May Gray and June Gloom into the sunshine of Southern California, coming out of the darkness into the light. And we love it–right??
But even as we celebrate this with the onset of summer, we can remember that Moses met God in the gray–and maybe we can too?