Комментарий о цитате к Тегилим 97:2

ויעמוד העם מרחוק ומשה נגש, “The people stood from a distance, whereas Moses went close.” Why did the Torah have to write this, seeing it had already written (in verse 15) that “the people saw and trembled and stood from afar?” We may have to understand that verse 15 describes the people as standing even further distant from the area where the mountain had been fenced off. Now the Torah wanted to tell us that although in the meantime the people had been elevated to the level of being prophets, they were still not comparable to the level of Moses who could approach much closer. The word הערפל with which the Torah describes the place which Moses approached always appears as meaning “a thick darkness” as mentioned by all the commentators such as Rashi, Kimchi, Ibn Ezra, etc. Examples are: Psalms 97,2 ענן וערפל סביביו. The meaning of all this is that the attribute כבוד is not visually accessible even to the angels. This is why David writes in Psalms 18,11: “He made darkness His screen, dark thunderheads, dense clouds of the sky were His pavilion round about Him.”

OUT OF THE MIDST OF THE FIRE, OF THE CLOUD, AND OF THE THICK DARKNESS. “The cloud and the darkness” explain the expression out of the midst of the fire, for Clouds and darkness are round about Him.¹⁷⁶Psalms 97:2.