Question

To the Rabbi,
I am laying out in this letter several questions that trouble me, and I would be glad to receive an answer.

1. It is hard not to notice a substantive difference between the first four books of the Torah and the Book of Deuteronomy, that is, the fifth book. Aside from all the linguistic differences that biblical critics have pointed out, even a brief look at Deuteronomy gives the impression that this book was written later for certain purposes. There is a noticeable tendency in it, so to speak, to place less emphasis on sacrifices and to stress worship of the heart and cleaving to monotheism. Moreover, if one assumes that the book was indeed written later, the motif that recurs many times becomes understandable: so to speak, a prophecy foretelling what will happen in the future, that the Jewish people will not heed God's voice and will be exiled, along with such a long detailing of all the troubles—as though someone had already experienced them and wanted to explain away the difficulty in faith that they created, and therefore so to speak attributed everything to something already foretold in advance, making the Jewish people the ones to blame. Before the people even entered the Land, they were already being told about exile? It seems that the whole purpose of the book is to adapt Judaism to the post-destruction reality. Also, the passage about the false prophet: if what he said is true, then he is a good prophet, and if not, then it turns out he is not. I too can give such a test. And the very statement of Moses, “I know that you will surely act corruptly,” raises a difficulty: where is free choice?
2. How can there be disputes within Kabbalah? Quite apart from the fact that it seems impossible to disagree about reality—after all, even if it is a spiritual reality, we believe it is still reality—almost all the kabbalists claim some sort of revelations from upper worlds: beginning with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai through Elijah the Prophet, all the elders, and the academy of heaven; continuing through the early kabbalists in their dreams and visions; through the Ari of blessed memory, who attributed things to Elijah the Prophet; and Ramchal and the revelations he claims in his Tikkunim?
3. We see that in all generations, and in every part of the Torah, great importance was given to the form of the letters. Yet today we know that the Torah was not originally given in this script at all. And the Sages already sensed the problematic nature of this issue.
4. The same question arises regarding the interpretations found especially in the esoteric part of the Torah concerning the vowelization, which also was accepted only a very long time after the giving of the Torah. (This one can still be answered, and it is less severe than the previous one.)
5. It is impossible to ignore the enormous reform that took place in Torah after the destruction of the Second Temple, and already during its period. If the Torah is eternal and so on, how can such an extreme change be explained? It almost looks like two different religions.
6. How were all those tikkunim and “tikkunei tikkunim” that the Ari and his school attach to every single commandment accomplished if they simply were not practiced? And even if you argue that they were accomplished through the sacrifices, there are commandments of this type that are not a substitute for sacrifices.
7. Also regarding miracles and wonders: anyone who has read and studied even a bit understands that we are not exactly the last generation in which miracles disappeared. Every generation thought that now, precisely now, all vision had ceased, and so on and so on, and how the sages of the previous generation were so great and wondrous. And all the testimonies we find about such things are always second-hand, like Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin about the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Chaim Vital about the Ari, but no one claimed to write such things about himself. Even all the stories in the Talmud were written generations later. This causes a certain doubt about the truth of the whole matter. Especially when any sensible person today sees how the average person attributes all kinds of interpretations, additions, and things invented out of his own heart to all sorts of ordinary and explainable phenomena—how much more so in earlier generations, which tended more toward naivete.
8. If all the words of the Sages were through divine inspiration and so on and so on, fine—disputes in Torah—but how did they disagree about historical facts?
9. How are we to understand this phenomenon of the Ari claiming that he sees in heaven decisions and judgments that all the generations before him neither saw nor knew? Fine, regarding speaking about the secrets themselves, one can say as all the later authorities wrote, that there are generations permitted to reveal and generations not permitted to reveal, and so on and so on. But we see that even practical rulings were not as he ruled.
10. How does one understand the seeming “pettiness” on high in the biblical stories? What were all those who fell in battle at Ai guilty of because another person violated the ban? And there are many more such reckonings that raise some bewilderment.
11. What does “And He regretted, and He was saddened to His heart” mean? No matter how much they explain and interpret, there is something problematic here.
12. How does one understand all the metaphysical descriptions of the Sages, such as seven firmaments, heaven made of fire and water, and so on?
13. Something else that needs attention is that there is almost no kabbalist who was not touched by messianism; they all were mistaken. This also points to a very negative side effect of studying Kabbalah, though it is understandable why it happens.
14. If the World to Come is eternal, and the entire reality of this world exists by way of tzimtzum, it follows that the tzimtzum is infinite, and by simple logic, when I infinitely contract something infinite, it becomes finite.
15. No matter how much we go around and explain things like “there is no king without a people,” “the bread of shame,” and all sorts of other ideas that in any case are not satisfying—whatever may be—the very fact that there was a point of change in divinity and the world was created is, in my eyes, a severe theological problem.