Question

I greatly enjoyed your trilogy. I’ve already distributed three sets to friends, and they were received with happiness and curiosity. The fourth fellow is within touching distance of receiving rabbinic ordination; as expected, he objects to your views, and I have a problem: inwardly I know he’s wrong and just throwing around slogans, but I can’t find the words to answer. See, for example, this quote:
 

Happy holiday!
I read the two articles you sent me, and they sharpened even further my revulsion toward the author’s approach.
If I was repulsed by his approach because of quotations from his statements, now he has earned my revulsion honestly.
There are two things about him that, in my eyes, are destructive—
A. He does not feel bound by tradition; rather, he observes it by virtue of an intellectual recognition that it is “reasonable,” and as he himself said regarding the revelation at Mount Sinai, that it is within the realm of the possible and the plausible.
And as he wrote about Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, that they do not actually obligate him or anyone in the Jewish people. They are only in the category of “guidance” or “recommendation.”
B. In his eyes, reason is god. But in my eyes God is God, and reason is the most wonderful gift He gave man, as well as the only way to know the Creator seriously and sincerely. 
Maimonides himself, in Guide of the Perplexed, mentions several times that there are things that cannot be understood by reason, for several reasons, one of them being the weakness of the human intellect and man’s tendency to be drawn after desires.
A person who goes too far with his intellect reaches very distant places, very, very distant. And in my eyes the day is not far off when he will leave the path of Judaism.
And as one of the great sages of the world wrote about this, our teacher Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, at the beginning of his book Reasoned Understanding (a very fascinating book!): as a Jew, a person has an obligation to investigate the principles of faith as far as his hand can reach, but first of all he must accept everything from the tradition of our fathers. Therefore, even things he will not succeed in understanding with his intellect, he will continue to observe and will attribute it to the weakness of his intellect.
 
With people like Rabbi Michael Abraham I have nothing to argue about, because in my opinion he is already very entrenched in his error. (He does not believe in individual providence—like Aristotle, by the way.)
I also do not argue with people who take the discussion outside the boundaries of religion (the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the medieval authorities, and yes, customs too), because this is a dialogue of the deaf, since we do not share the same premises and therefore there are no rules for discussion.
Reason is the greatest power, but also the most destructive, because a person who deceives himself into thinking he has attained understanding (which in my view true understanding must pass through the Torah together with fear of Heaven) can ultimately arrive at Hitler’s Final Solution, who thought in his understanding that he was saving humanity from the human race.
 
I wholeheartedly wish for you to understand me, and to leave behind empty pits of extremism and distortion of the Torah.
You do not have to be a Hasid, nor even a mystic. But being a Maimonidean does not mean denying, out of the image, the One who created it.
Happy holiday.
 
End quote…
What, for example, would you answer a person like that?
 
A second question, a somewhat stupid one, and I apologize: only recently I began taking upon myself again a bit of the yoke of Torah and commandments, and I have tefillin that a Haredi relative prepared for me. Now, I myself don’t know, but something doesn’t sit right with me about putting on tefillin that were produced by Haredim, with all the problematic aspects of their way of life (for the reasons you discussed, for example), or is there no connection between the two things?
Thank you very much!