Question

Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to thank you for your help on the topic of the commandment to love God. I wrote three columns, and the responses were really good, and some of what I wrote was based on materials of yours that you sent me and on several points that I clarified together with you—thank you very much.
I would like to ask a few questions, please.
1. As far as I understand, there are Mishnahs that Rabbi redacted anonymously in accordance with his own view, and others in accordance with other tannaim, and some in accordance with the majority view. It makes sense to me that if he presents a Mishnah anonymously in accordance with the majority against his own personal opinion, that I can understand. But there are Mishnahs where he personally disagrees with another tanna, and in the end he presents the anonymous Mishnah not in accordance with his own view but with that second tanna, and I don’t understand that. If he holds that his own opinion is the truth, why present the anonymous ruling according to the opinion against you, if you think your own opinion is the truth?
2. There is a book called The Complete Book of the Covenant by Rabbi Pinchas Eliyahu. He writes there that he does not agree with the view of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) that awe is a stage on the way to love, but rather that they are both one and the same thing, and that the reason for awe is itself the reason for love. What do you think?
3. There is a Mishnah in tractate Niddah where the structure of a woman’s womb is described, including the upper chamber and the room and so on, and Maimonides, who was a great physician, describes things in a way that does not match what we know today about female anatomy (I assume you already know this, so I’m not spelling it out). My question is: how does this work out? He certainly knew from his medical knowledge that there was a problem with the Mishnah, so why did he explain it that way? (Even though that does seem to be the plain meaning of the Mishnah—and that too is difficult, because I assume they already knew, even from the knowledge of non-Jewish doctors who performed dissections on bodies, what things looked like.)
4. I tried learning the Rosh on Sanhedrin chapter 4, section 6, and I didn’t really manage to understand what the practical implication is for us today of the dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) there, because they are talking about the Geonim, but I couldn’t understand what principle can be learned from there for later generations.
5. There is a dispute between Maimonides and the Raavad in Laws of Food Impurity, chapter 1, section 4. There Maimonides rules that aside from the seven liquids, all other liquids neither render food susceptible to impurity nor themselves become impure, and the Raavad disagrees and writes that they do not render food susceptible (like fruit juice), but they do become impure. I didn’t understand him, because there is a Mishnah saying that impure liquids immediately render food susceptible to impurity, so if they become impure then surely they should also render food susceptible, and that does not work out. How can the Raavad’s view be explained?
6. In tractate Niddah there is a dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua whether one may derive an a fortiori argument from Torah law (tevul yom) to rabbinic law (the backs of vessels), and Rabbi Eliezer disagrees with Rabbi Yehoshua and says that one does not derive an a fortiori argument from Torah law to rabbinic law. Likewise in tractate Yadayim, chapter 3, there is a dispute between the Sages and Rabbi Yehoshua that one does not derive Torah law from rabbinic enactments and vice versa, and one also does not derive rabbinic enactments from other rabbinic enactments. What is Rabbi Yehoshua’s logic in trying to compare or derive an a fortiori argument from Torah law to rabbinic enactments? It does not seem reasonable to me, in my humble opinion, to learn them from each other, for the reason given by the Sages: that the rationale in rabbinic law is not necessarily—and maybe not at all—the same as the rationale in Torah law, and only God, who wrote and gave the Torah, could command us to derive one thing from another, because He knows that there is some inner logic to it.
7. Someone told me that the author of Leshem writes that every “kelipah” contains within it a positive tendency, and after the kelipah “falls away,” the positive tendency remains by itself, and that this is the way God conducts the world. Is that true, and is it true regarding every kind of kelipah, or are there kelipot whose content is evil from the outset? (I happened to hear two opinions about Amalek from Torah scholars who study the method of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, who says that all evil will be repaired and return to good, regarding Amalek, concerning whom there is an obligation to wipe them out completely. One said that this itself is Amalek’s repair—that it will be cut off completely, and that this is what it means for it to “return” to good. The other said that below the heavens Amalek has no repair, but above the heavens it does, and there it will not be completely cut off, but repaired, and it too will return to good.) What do you think?
Thank you very much.