Thank you for your answer,
allow me to make something of a reversal in perspective and say, following Kant,
since man knows only his perception of the world, the world of phenomena, and not the objective world in itself,
and since the doctrine of tzimtzum was conceived by a human being (the Ari), who admittedly received some sort of inspiration from above, divine inspiration, but that inspiration necessarily passed through the prism of the “world of phenomena” that he knows, (Maimonides would say: through the imaginative faculty, and a person cannot imagine something he has never seen, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the color red), as in that parable of the “island” in Guide for the Perplexed, part 2 chapter 17.

It follows that the world of “Primordial Man” and the world of Emanation have a human structure because a human being conceived them!! (even if through divine inspiration)
and if the conceiving human who merited divine inspiration had had 3 hands, one eye, and so on, the structure of the Godhead that he conceived would necessarily have been different.

Or, to return to the “island” parable: if that same child who grew up on an island had grown up and merited “divine inspiration,” he could under no circumstances have conceived a doctrine of tzimtzum that in effect describes the creation of the world in the model of a fetus in its mother’s womb and its birth,
because that reality would not have been known to him.
In the phenomenal world of that person on the island, there is no such thing as a woman carrying a fetus in her womb.

That also explains why, for Maimonides, the doctrine of negative attributes is something essential,
because the (positive) attributes say nothing at all about God or the Godhead, which lie beyond our world of phenomena; rather, they refer to the cognition of God in the consciousness of believers, and therefore their negation is important.

These pilpulim are not relevant to the original discussion you raised. Here you’re raising doubts about the reliability of Kabbalah, and that’s perfectly fine. But the original question concerned what Kabbalah itself holds.

These are absolutely not pilpulim. A person is bound within “his perception of reality,”
and any projection from our reality onto another reality, all the more so a divine reality,
is flawed and mistaken at its foundation.

As for the substance of the doubts I raised about the reliability of Kabbalah,
what do you think?

Thanks

These doubts are ancient and worn out. I share them only partially. In my view, Kabbalah is not a tradition from above but the fruit of people’s spiritual intuitions. But the human form, even if it is a product of human perception, is the form used to describe divinity in our language. That is not a mistake but a use of language. So man is not bound in the sense you describe.
Also regarding Kant, many fall into the same error. Kant is not describing a limitation of human perception, but describing what perception is. By definition, perception is fitting what is perceived into the cognitive system of the perceiver. That is not a limitation. Think about perceiving an object as red: the color red exists only within our cognition. In the world itself there are no colors. Is that a mistake or a confinement? Absolutely not. I think I wrote about this on the site (you’d have to search).

If, as you say, Kabbalah is not a tradition from above but the fruit of people’s spiritual intuitions,
and different people have different intuitions,
then why do we need it at all?

There is God and there is the world, and that’s it!!
Why do we need this spiritual system in between that is based on intuition?

As for cognition,
is a woman with a fetus in her womb also only something within our inward cognition?

Whether this is a limitation or not is a semantic matter,
and that is not the essential issue.
The essence is that man projects from the world of phenomena he knows, in which he is trapped, onto the divine world,
and that is the problem.

Who said different people have different intuitions? There is a lot in common (not only among kabbalists but also among different and distant mystical systems), and there are also disputes. The same happens with scientific and other intuitions. By the same token you could ask: science was not given at Sinai but is the fruit of people’s intuition, so who needs it? Intuition is a cognitive tool, not a collection of subjective inventions.

Of course, you may choose not to be interested in spiritual dimensions beyond the world and God, and that is your right. There are those who are not interested in the physical world either, and others who are not interested in God. Each person according to his areas of interest.

Your closing sentence is really a masterpiece: it doesn’t matter whether this is a limitation or not, but man is trapped in the world he knows, and that’s what matters. As HaGashash HaHiver used to say: it doesn’t matter whether gross or net, the main thing is that there’s something in hand.

All right, I think I’ve exhausted this.

I was talking about what is semantic versus what is essential, and there was no need to go all the way to HaGashash.

With your permission, I’ll return to the issue of intuition. You claim there is much in common among the intuitions of different people,
so what is common between the account of the chariot in the few verses in the Hebrew Bible,
and the Hekhalot literature with the seven firmaments and that model of the heavenly Temple identical to the earthly Temple,
and the ten sefirot in the Zohar and that the God of Israel is Zeir Anpin,
and tzimtzum, the shattering of the vessels, the repairs and unifications, the shells and the elevation of the sparks, and the creation-birth model, and the other detailed descriptions in the Kabbalah of the Ari?

What is common to all those intuitions?

Thanks

I don’t see any point in getting into a learned discussion of the details. In your own words you can already see the lines of similarity, but it seems to me that you’re insisting. In any case, this belongs elsewhere and to people who are experts in the field. To me it really isn’t important.

A good question, and Michi’s answer proves that Kabbalah is about idolatry and denial of the Torah and of Moses our Teacher.

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth.”

I spoke about the fact that the kabbalists project from our world (the world of phenomena) onto the divine world,
and in this they make a serious mistake.
So here is a nice example from Etz Chaim, Gate 44 chapter 1 — Rabbi Chaim Vital describes the world of Emanation:

“And the matter is that among all of them there is no recognizable configuration of a face and no distinction of specific limbs like these five sefirot, which are wisdom, understanding, knowledge, beauty, and kingship. And although each sefirah is included of ten, it seems to me that just as a man’s seed, though it includes the limbs of the body and all of them are within it (as is known, that within it are the veins of the head, and of the heart and liver, and of the whole body, as is known to physicians who let blood from it for the benefit of illnesses of the whole body), nevertheless what predominates in the seed is the aspect of kindness. And so it is in each and every sefirah. But in these five sefirot mentioned above there is a full configuration in each one of them, and every detailed limb is in each one of them. For the entire configuration is revealed and explained in each one of them. And all this is called Emanation. Thus the matter of the ten sefirot of Emanation has been explained.”

According to ancient medicine, all of a person’s vital organs come from the seed (head, heart, liver, etc.); the woman
is only an “inn” for the fetus developing in her womb for 9 months.
Therefore, when the doctrine of the Ari projects from the way man is formed to the way the world was created, it gives decisive weight
to the male side (the male sefirot) within the Godhead: “just as a man’s seed, though it includes the limbs of the body and all of them are within it, nevertheless what predominates in the seed is the aspect of kindness (which is a male sefirah). And so it is in each and every sefirah.”

If the Ari and Rabbi Chaim Vital had lived today and known modern medicine, they would know that
the contribution of the seed and the egg to the fetus is equal!
But since they did not know this 400 years ago, they described the Godhead incorrectly!

Therefore any projection from the world of phenomena onto the divine world is mistaken at its root.
The Godhead does not change; only the opinions and cognition of human beings, who project their world onto it, change!

Benjamin, you have not understood the words of Etz Chaim correctly, specifically here.
What it says, “just as a man’s seed, though it includes the limbs of the body and all of them are within it, nevertheless what predominates in the seed is the aspect of kindness,” means only to refer to the color of the seed, which is white, unlike the egg (which is visible to the eye without surgery by means of its product, in the case where there is no fetus — namely menstrual blood, which is red). That and nothing more.
I do love people who take the writings of the Ari out of context. See at length in the articles of the great Rabbi Nir Stern, may he live long, against today’s scholars of Kabbalah.

One more thing: it is as clear as day that if the Ari and Rabbi Chaim Vital were alive in this generation, they would interpret the system of divinity according to today’s terminology and discoveries, including what you mentioned. The guiding principle of Lurianic Kabbalah (which is the most extreme in comparing divinity to the form of a human being, and even to an entire family, following the Zohar) is “From my flesh I behold God.” The flesh is the parable and the main point; the terminology is secondary. It makes no difference whether one speaks in the terminology of Avicenna and other physicians and the like, which was known in their time, or in the cutting-edge terminology of Nature articles in the 21st century. On that a whole edifice is built, but the essential truths remain the same truths, because we are dealing with the same essence (for after all, Kabbalah deals primarily with the world of ideas, and from it projects onto this world), only quantified and made accessible by other means (and therefore the conclusions from it are also different).
Therefore, to say that they described divinity in an “incorrect” way is both true and not true. True — because one must always explore wisdom and seek the goal of knowledge, just as Newton’s physics displaced that of his predecessors (and all the same, wonderful things were also done with Aristotelian/Platonic physics), and Einstein’s displaced Newton’s (although the industrial revolution took place while Newtonian physics ruled the roost), and who knows which “truths” will be displaced in a few more years.
And not true — because the main thing is the essence (which cannot itself be defined in words, only the properties derived from it, and from them to project upward), while the words change from time to time. Midrash is not like medieval medicine, and neither of them is like the medicine of our day (and who knows what will be in a few years, as above). Therefore the terminology does not matter and is open to change.
In addition, and perhaps this is even the main point, the whole bodily conceptual system of Kabbalah, according to Kabbalah itself (at least the Zoharic and Lurianic varieties), is not understood as mere conceptualization, but as a clothing of a much deeper content — some will say these are combinations of divine names by which heaven and earth were created, and some will say these are philosophical truths, and some will say… the common denominator is that the clothing is only words, and in principle one can use whatever words one wishes. Therefore there is no basis for saying as you do, “therefore any projection from the world of phenomena onto the divine world is mistaken at its root” — because there is no projection here, but merely clothing.

I can’t help repeating your quote: “I do love people who take the writings of the Ari out of context.”

In Etz Chaim there is an explicit reference to the fact that the seed contains all the limbs of the human body — “as is known, that within it are the veins of the head, and of the heart and liver, and of the whole body.” And from this he projects onto the structure of each and every sefirah, while the role of the egg is not mentioned at all, because they did not know of its existence!
And you’re talking to me about colors… red… and white…

And 2 more important things.
As you noted, Lurianic Kabbalah makes a major principle out of Job’s words, “From my flesh I behold God” (Job, who was not even one of the prophets of Israel, and the Sages dispute whether he was a real-historical figure or a legendary one), while ignoring what was said to the master of the prophets, at Mount Sinai: “for man shall not see Me and live.”
And as Rashi, the greatest of the biblical commentators, says in that same context, on what is said in tractate Yevamot 49b:
“All the prophets looked through a dim glass and thought they saw, but did not see; Moses looked through a clear glass and knew that he had not seen Him face to face.”

And a second point: here is another example from Etz Chaim. This time the projection is not from the human body at all, but from cosmic reality as people conceived it until the modern era:
“And behold, every world has ten individual sefirot, and every individual sefirah in every world is included of ten more particular sefirot, and all of them are in the form of circles, one within another and one inside another, without end or number, all like onion peels one within another, in the pattern of the spheres as mentioned in astronomical books.”
(chapter 1, page 29)

We know today that this cosmic reality is a complete error and utter nonsense. The earth does not stand at the center of the world, and all the stars and spheres do not revolve around it. And in fact there is no such thing as spheres at all; it was all the product of human imagination.
And out of that mistaken imaginary product, the Ari and his students projected onto the structure of the upper worlds.

They thought they saw, but did not see!!

It seems that Mr. Benjamin Nahum is no lightweight. He’s well versed both in Maimonides and in the writings of Rabbi Chaim Vital. He’s worth answering.