Clouds of Glory

What Shelters Us in the Wilderness Now

Clouds of Glory

There are moments when an ancient story reaches across thousands of years and suddenly feels as though it was meant for this moment.

That happened to me at a Sukkot dinner with friends.

Our delightful hostess read We Are All Sukkah-Dwellers, a reflection by Rabbi Eliezer B. Diamond of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In it, I encountered something I had never heard of before: the Clouds of Glory — the Ananei HaKavod.

Rabbi Diamond describes a teaching from the Talmud that the sukkot in which the Israelites lived during their journey from Egypt through the wilderness may not have been huts at all.

Instead, he writes, the people were sheltered by:

“the Cloud of Divine Glory.”

The cloud, he explains, protected them from the elements and guided them through a “hostile and unforgiving environment.”

I could not stop thinking about that image.

A people newly freed from slavery, moving through an immense wilderness.

No country.

No permanent homes.

No certainty about what waited beyond the horizon.

They were vulnerable, exposed, and still becoming a people.

And above them — or perhaps around them — was this mysterious presence.

A cloud.

Not a wall.

Not a fortress.

Not an army.

A cloud.

And strangely, that seemed important.

What Was the Cloud of Glory?

The Ananei HaKavod are part of an ancient Jewish tradition describing G-d’s presence accompanying the Israelites through the wilderness.

The Torah itself repeatedly describes a pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites by day and fire by night. Later rabbinic tradition developed the image further, imagining divine clouds surrounding and protecting the people during their journey.

Rabbi Diamond uses that tradition to ask a profound question.

If the ancient Israelites could experience the presence of G-d sheltering them in the wilderness, where do we find that shelter now?

He writes:

“This is what we need: the shelter provided by Divine presence.”

But then comes the difficulty.

We can search the sky all we want.

There is no visible cloud hovering over us.

So where did it go?

That question stayed with me long after dinner.

And perhaps because of the time in which we are living, I found myself asking it in a specifically Jewish way.

Where is our Cloud of Glory now?

A People Once Again Feeling Exposed

There are periods in Jewish history when the wilderness feels very far away.

And there are periods when it suddenly feels close.

This feels like one of them.

Antisemitism has once again entered ordinary Jewish consciousness in a way many of us hoped belonged to another era.

What is most unsettling is not any single incident, but the sense that antisemitism is no longer appearing at the edges of public life. It is surfacing in places that once felt ordinary and safe—on campuses, in cultural institutions, on city streets, across social media, and even around synagogues and Jewish schools. In 2026, the atmosphere can feel less like a series of isolated episodes and more like a widening current: louder, more visible, more aggressive, and increasingly difficult to dismiss as temporary. For many Jews, the result is not only fear of violence, but the more subtle fear of becoming conspicuous simply by being Jewish.

And beyond the incidents themselves, something more difficult to measure has changed.

It is the feeling.

The momentary hesitation before wearing a Star of David.

The increased security outside synagogues.

The awareness of Jewish schools, Jewish institutions and Jewish gatherings as potential targets.

The uncomfortable recognition that arguments ostensibly about governments and wars can sometimes slide into something much older — hostility toward Jews themselves.

And perhaps most unsettling is the rediscovery of an ancient Jewish emotion:

the feeling of being exposed.

That word brings me back to Sukkot.

Because the sukkah is deliberately exposed.

Its roof cannot completely shut out the sky.

Its walls are temporary.

It reminds us how little permanence we actually possess.

And that raises another question.

If the walls around us can never guarantee safety, what does?

Perhaps We Misunderstand Protection

At first, I imagined the Clouds of Glory as a kind of supernatural force field.

G-d surrounding the Israelites and preventing anything bad from reaching them.

But the more I thought about it, the less satisfying that interpretation became.

The wilderness was not painless.

The Israelites knew fear.

They knew hunger.

They knew conflict.

They buried people along the way.

The Cloud of Glory did not mean that nothing could hurt them.

It meant something else.

They were not abandoned in the wilderness.

There is an enormous difference.

We often think of protection as the absence of danger.

Perhaps spiritual protection means the presence of something greater than danger.

Presence.

Direction.

Belonging.

The knowledge that even when the road ahead is uncertain, we are not walking it entirely alone.

That begins to feel like a very different kind of Cloud of Glory.

And perhaps a much more useful one.

A Cloud Made of Memory

For thousands of years, Jews have carried something invisible with them.

Memory.

We carry people we never met.

Abraham standing beneath the stars.

Moses before the burning bush.

The Israelites walking into the sea.

Rabbi Akiva.

Maimonides.

The Jews of Spain.

The Jews of Eastern Europe.

The Jews who arrived in America with almost nothing.

The six million Jews murdered in the Shoah.

Those who rebuilt afterward.

Our grandparents.

Our parents.

Our children.

We carry their stories forward.

And somehow they carry us.

Perhaps that is one layer of the Cloud of Glory.

The awareness that we are never merely one person standing at one moment in history.

We stand inside a story.

And the story is much larger than we are.

A Cloud Made of One Another

But Rabbi Diamond takes the idea one step further.

If we can no longer see a divine cloud protecting us, perhaps we should look somewhere else.

Toward one another.

He invokes a rabbinic teaching that G-d has many agents through whom sustenance and protection arrive.

And then gives the simplest possible answer to the question of who those agents might be:

We are.

Each of us, he writes, can provide physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual sustenance to another human being.

That idea completely changes the image.

Perhaps the Cloud of Glory does not descend fully formed from heaven.

Perhaps it gathers between people.

One person beside another.

One family beside another.

One community beside another.

One generation beside another.

And the more I think about the story, the more I wonder whether this is what the Cloud of Glory means for us now.

Not an invisible shield guaranteeing that nothing can harm us.

No such guarantee can exist.

Perhaps it is something more realistic and, in a way, more beautiful.

The knowledge that when one of us enters the wilderness, the others enter with him.

That when one of us is afraid, someone stands beside her.

That when one generation grows tired, another takes up the story.

That when the world tries to make Jews feel isolated, we answer by moving closer together.

How Do We Rebuild the Cloud?

Maybe that is the wrong question.

Maybe the Cloud never disappeared.

Maybe it weakens and strengthens depending upon what we do.

Every act of Jewish connection adds something to it.

Learning.

Remembering.

Teaching our children.

Showing up for one another.

Standing against antisemitism without allowing antisemitism to define Judaism.

Supporting someone who is frightened.

Calling someone who feels alone.

Welcoming someone to the table.

Entering a synagogue.

Lighting candles.

Studying Torah.

Singing.

Arguing.

Laughing.

Mourning.

Celebrating.

Building another sukkah.

The great danger of antisemitism is not only that Jews can be harmed.

It is that fear can slowly convince Jews to retreat from one another and from Judaism itself.

To become quieter.

Less visible.

Less connected.

Smaller.

Perhaps the answer is not recklessness.

It is connection.

Not pretending the wilderness is safe.

But refusing to walk through it alone.

The Glory

And then there is that word.

Glory.

Why Clouds of Glory?

What is glorious about a cloud?

Perhaps the glory was never the cloud itself.

Perhaps the glory was what existed beneath it.

A people moving together.

Families carrying children.

The elderly walking beside the young.

People frightened and hopeful at the same time.

People who argued, doubted, complained, worshiped, failed, and continued anyway.

They kept moving.

And somehow a people emerged from the wilderness.

Maybe that is the glory.

Not perfection.

Continuity.

Not invulnerability.

Presence.

Not the promise that nothing terrible will happen.

The promise that the story will not end there.

Our Sukkah

Sukkot asks us to let go of the illusion of permanence.

For a few days we step outside the walls we normally trust and sit beneath something fragile.

We see the sky through the roof.

We feel the wind.

We are reminded that almost everything we think is permanent is temporary.

Our homes.

Our possessions.

Our bodies.

Even the societies in which we live.

But perhaps the sukkah is not merely teaching us that we are vulnerable.

Perhaps it is asking a second question:

What remains when the walls do not?

For the Israelites, the answer was the Cloud of Glory.

For us, perhaps the answer is faith.

Memory.

Family.

Community.

Responsibility.

Love.

And the strange invisible thread connecting one Jewish generation to the next.

Perhaps that is why this ancient story struck me so deeply when I heard it for the first time around a

Sukkot table.

Because Jews once crossed a wilderness beneath a cloud.

And in some sense, we have been crossing wildernesses ever since.

Egypt.

Babylon.

Rome.

Spain.

Eastern Europe.

The Shoah.

Exile after exile.

Generation after generation.

And somehow the people kept walking.

Perhaps they carried something invisible with them.

Perhaps we still do.

And perhaps we have been looking for the Cloud of Glory in the wrong place.

Maybe it doesn't descend from above quite the way we imagine.

Maybe it gathers between us.

Whenever one person shelters another.

Whenever fear is answered by presence.

Whenever isolation is answered by community.

Whenever memory is handed to the next generation.

Whenever one Jew says to another:

You do not have to cross this wilderness alone.

Maybe that is how a cloud forms.

One person beside another.

Until a people is sheltered beneath it.

And maybe, especially now, that is how we resurrect the Clouds of Glory.