Question

Dear Rabbi Michi, have a happy and kosher Festival of Freedom.
 
 
 
 
In my many sins, between the Passover Seder night and the holiday, I read a bit about the false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, inspired by the spirit of the holiday that speaks about freedom from slavery to Pharaoh, to false gods, and to falsehood, which is idolatry in general, as opposed to servitude to the one and only God.
From there I ended up reading about the conception of divinity that was common in Sabbateanism, which speaks of the abstract Infinite as a huge, vast light that contains within it two contradictory wills: the will of the serpent and Samael, representing the divine aspect that regrets the contraction and the creation of the world; and the divine will to give and receive, to create a connection with His creatures and benefit them. And this is in addition to the view that was common in Sabbateanism that the Infinite Light, that is, the Holy One, blessed be He, the God of Israel, is only one sefira among His manifestations. He is not actually the Cause of causes, the first cause, or the first existent, because that is a perfect entity that is indifferent to the fate of the world and of human beings altogether, and the creation of the world could only happen through the Infinite Light. What caught my attention was the issue of the conceptual, kabbalistic-esoteric roots from which this movement drew its inspiration. Many researchers, from what I read, identify something like a similar approach in many kabbalists—who admittedly did not go quite that far, but said similar things—that regarding the question of contraction and the emergence of evil there are different approaches: there is the classic approach, which says that the contraction occurred in order to create the world, and evil was created as a side effect of creation; there is another, more esoteric approach, attributed to Rabbi Yosef ibn Tabul, who claimed that the roots of evil, harsh judgments, and the like were included within the Infinite itself, and that the purpose of creation was the Infinite's desire to rid itself of its own evil and purify itself.
Now, it is clear to me that all these are esoteric sources, and even more so the far-reaching interpretations given to these sources, which expand their words beyond the plain meaning.
 
But when I went to the Chabad library, to the books of the early rebbes and of the Baal Shem Tov himself, I noticed a very esoteric phenomenon that hints at paradoxical ideas of this kind:
* The saying that the way He emanates His essence and His will includes several different components that supposedly contradict one another: an interpretation that says that in the end of days, first God will be revealed as King over all the earth, because it is proper and logical that all the inhabitants of the world should know this, including the nations of the world; all impure and pure animals will refine Him and praise Him. But afterward, from His more inward and exalted will, which is a longing beyond the grasp of reason and has no rational cause, He will destroy the nations and the animals, and in general everything that is not directly connected to holiness, from the earth, because His will is ultimately to return to the world as it was before the contraction, and in such a world only the very essence of the Infinite, of which the souls of Israel are a part, can exist.
* The saying that there is supposedly a competition over divine abundance between the wicked, who try to cling and draw sustenance from divinity through the "back side" of holiness and through deriving nurture from kelipat nogah, from which their clarification will come, and thereby their allotted time will be extended, because otherwise the Holy One, blessed be He, would supposedly regret their creation, as in the generation of the flood.
* A saying that there are supposedly two different aspects or worlds in which, on the one hand, the wicked can be considered to come from a higher source of chaos, and the righteous from Atzilut, and vice versa: the Esau above as opposed to the Jacob below, and the Haman above as opposed to the Mordechai below; a divine illumination that is manifested more among the unlearned than among Torah scholars, and vice versa, which will be clarified in the future.
And so on.
* Similar sayings in the book Glei Razia, which speaks of an inner darkness that existed before the formation of the world and concealed itself and drew sustenance from the light of creation.
 
I know that you do not accept books as a source of authority for worldview, and do not think that one statement or another says anything about reality. My question, simply, is this:
What is your opinion of esoteric conceptions in general, which often try, as it were, to anthropomorphize God or give Him different faces, different aspects, and different countenances, even contradictory ones—not by way of metaphor, but beyond that—and claim that specifically this way it is possible to understand certain things more easily, things that should not be grasped in a rational and reductive way? (Rabbi Dr. Moshe Roth, who was your student if I am not mistaken, in his books Fantasy Judaism and on his blog and Facebook, often argues precisely this—that reducing every explicit and anthropomorphic statement to rational explanations actually diminishes divine greatness, and one must be prepared to accept things as they are, literally.)
I ask this because I too have a tendency toward rationality, and a strong aversion to concretizing spiritual worlds as something truly concrete and multi-faceted in the same way that things exist in our reality. But at times it seems that abstraction and esotericism that grow from the assumption that there are hidden, independent, or real wills within the spiritual worlds, and even within God, can open the door to understanding many things in the universe—of course, so long as it does not fall into idolatry.
What do you think? In your opinion, where is the boundary between apparent parables and illustrations on the one hand, and conceptions of deep spiritual things as literal, in a language that is supposedly hidden but precisely for that reason gets translated into wills, desires, split wills, and so on, as in ordinary language? And where, in your opinion, is the boundary between a monotheistic conception of God and a conception that is idolatrous?