ESSAY: Is God In the Thunder and Lightning? (Shavu’ot)

 Where God Is and Is Not

When God revealed Godself at Mount Sinai, there was thunder and lightning, loud shofar blasts and a smoking mountain like a kiln (Exodus 19:18 and 20:15).   Was God in these intense sounds and sights?  I want to suggest that all those pyrotechnics might have been merely smoke and mirrors, as it were, decoys and distractions from where God actually was and always is: in silence, in stillness, in a cloud of unknowing.  In fact, the only place in our narrative that the Torah says “God was there,” is in the arafel, the thick cloud which Moshe approached.   U’Moshe nigash el ha’arafel asher sham ha’Elokim.  Moshe drew near to the thick cloud of fog which was where God was (Exodus 20:18).  Asher sham ha’Elokim. Where God was and is, in a thick cloud of fog, where perhaps we can neither hear nor see clearly, not loud and not bright, but quiet and still, a muffled place of sanctuary away from the noise.  

Our Internal Thunder and Lightning

We are often confused about where God is.  It seems to us that God is in the powerful sounds and sights of our lives, what we might call the thunder and lightning.  These are the loud insistent voices in our culture and in our psyches, the ones that take up a lot of space, that yell and scream about what we should be doing, the ones that seem to know things, the preconditioned stories and running tapes of obligation, expectation, judgment, urgency and deficiency, striking us down like a bolt of lightning which we mistakenly take for God, the voices that say: Be productive and busy.  Be successful and beautiful and outgoing and put together and self sacrificing.   And do it all on your own.  You’re a loser, you’re stupid, .. .   It’s all your fault.  Get it together.  You should be ashamed of yourself for making that mistake.  You have to do this just right.  These voices also tend to fill us with dread about the terrible things that are already happening and will continue to happen in our world and in our personal lives, focusing exclusively on the thunder blasts and filling our minds with anxious and despairing thoughts.  

And on and on.  Fill in your own loud voice and notice if it sometimes sounds to you like God, takes on that level of authority and feels that true in your body, if the loudest voices in your system, like bullies, feel that true to you, like viscerally true, hard to argue with.  These are the empowered voices, the thunder and lightning of our system.   Maybe getting a sense of it all as a lot of noise and stimulation coming at you from all sides, both internally and externally, the overwhelm of it all.  

Elijah

Is that where God is?  Is God in the noise?  I am reminded of a famous scene with the prophet Elijah when he, too, came to understand where God truly is and is not: 

And lo, the Lord passed by.  There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind – an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake – fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire – a still, small voice (I Kings 19:11-12).

What are the loud sounds and sights that you mistake for God in your life?  The mighty wind that breaks things, perhaps shattering you sometimes, and the earthquake and the fire – feeling their intensity and how they take you over so completely with their insistent and ostentatious power.  What are the forces of that kind of clear unquestioned power in your system?  What voices do you assume are from God that might not be, that might actually just be smoke and mirrors?  

Entering the Fog

God speaks in a still small voice.  In order to hear that quiet voice, we need to, like Moshe, enter the arafel, a thick cloud of fog.  I invite you to experiment with entering such a fog right now.  Your mind may still spin and worry and criticize and analyze and generally make a lot of thundering noise.  You don’t need to fight with it or get it to stop its commentary.  Instead, you can imagine that you are entering a thick cloud of fog that muffles those voices, as if you are putting on ear plugs or a noise machine or are suddenly inside a soundproof room, or perhaps a womb, a protected fuzzy place where sounds from the outside are only heard from a distance, no longer loud or distinct, but muffled and incoherent.  

We normally resist fog. We don’t like that fuzziness, not hearing so well or thinking super clearly.   It scares us not to know.  Our minds prefer the solidness of figuring things out and making sense of the world.   It makes us feel that we are in control.   And all of that is not bad.  Clarity and understanding are of great use in our lives.  I don’t knock them.  At the same time, we have to be willing to step into the unknown sometimes, to let go of the fierce urgency to make sense of our experience, to tolerate the fog for a little while in order to come to a deeper clarity and understanding, in order to come to know God and ourselves.  We can practice stepping willingly into that cloud of unknowing, into that fog, the place just at the periphery of our consciousness where what we don’t yet know sits waiting for us to uncover it with courage and openness.   Letting all those clear insistent noises of your past and present fade into the distance, what you think you know for sure, all the stories we tell ourselves, and stepping into the mystery, trusting it, trusting that you will be held here, trusting that when you let go of control, let go of figuring out, let go of all the preconditioned tapes and shoulds, trusting that you are held aloft in something else, something lighter like a cloud, and something much deeper and ultimately more reliable, more true, more eternal.   The thunder speaks loudly, but there is in this fog a quiet voice that will nourish us more completely, nourish our hungry souls in exactly the way they have been longing for for a very long time, in a way that all the noise in the world could never do, no matter how much we think it can.  

Silence

All the noise in the world and all the words in the world cannot nourish us the way that silence can.  In the fog, we can experience some of this nourishing silence.  There is a hasidic tradition that the only part of the 10 commandments that God spoke Godself was the single letter alef (Rabbi Mendel of Rymamow as cited in Zera Kodesh on Shavu’ot, as cited by Art Green, Radical Judaism, p. 90), which, without vowels, has no sound at all; in other words, God spoke — and continues to speak — silence into the world, is revealed to us through silence, through this silent alef.  It is not a silence of nothingness or absence but like the fog, a silence of presence, of substance, of beingness, like the quality we bring when we sit quietly with another who is suffering; our presence, like the divine presence, even more palpable for its wordlessness.  

Entering the fog and letting yourself hear through a different kind of ear the silent alef of God’s presence here right now and always in everything.  Letting all the thunder and lightning of your to do list and your worries and skepticism and self doubt and despair, letting all that noise and also all the noise of the many words we speak, including all these words of mine, letting all of those fade into the background – they can still be here, but letting them become fuzzy and incoherent, like a radio no longer tuned to a station, noise without content, not paying it much attention, blah blah blah – and instead  attending to the silence inside and outside you, the place inside where the two meet, that deep point of stillness amidst the raging noise of the storm, opening to the experience of God’s silent alef in the fog.  Not understanding it or analyzing or commenting, just experiencing it nonverbally.  How can you feel God in the silence?    Once the loud thundering noise has quieted, what is the quality of this other still small voice from deep inside your own inner being?  Taking a deep breath, slowing way down and entering the silence of the fog, trusting it to guide you on your way.  

Photo by Karol Wiśniewski at Pexels