Regarding souls, you write that “you have no idea,” but I actually think it is important that you take a position.

The main idea of “no man has power over the spirit” means that there is no providence at all in this world, apparently over the past two thousand years. The point is that anyone who pays attention sees that when you say “I don’t see providence,” you are referring only to the material world — “the earth.” But if you hold that “in the heavens” (say, the world of souls and spirituality) the Holy One, blessed be He, does intervene — for example, decides to attach soul X to body Y at some stage of life —
then in practice you are saying that there is providence and divine intervention even nowadays, at least to some extent.

Now, obviously you cannot really know how God manages souls, but on the other hand, as long as you have no statement on that subject, it is impossible to say that you hold there is no providence at all, but only none in the material world.
And since the material and spiritual worlds are ultimately connected (every believer assumes this), one can assume that you do hold by some degree of providence over reality.

*There is another possibility: that you are a panentheist (that is, you hold that matter and spirit are ultimately one), and then my question is probably beside the point. But from what I understand, you are a monotheist, not a panentheist.

So again, I would be glad if you would try to express a position.

I don’t have a position, and there is no need to express one. When I say there is no divine involvement, that means there is no involvement in what happens in our world. Not in the world of souls, and not in attaching souls to bodies. My claim is that if a force acts on a body, it will accelerate, and if no force acts, it will not accelerate. That’s all. What happens in the world of souls is not connected to this.
As for panentheism and monotheism, you are mixing up concepts and not defining them correctly. None of this is connected here at all.

I want to explain why the issue of your being a monotheist or a panentheist is in fact relevant.

If you were a panentheist, you could not make the claim you are making, because according to the panentheist, our material world is only a reflection of deeper inner worlds (have you ever seen The Matrix?).
In practice, a panentheist is not really a dualist. He cannot claim that God acts in a spiritual world but does not act in the material world, because ultimately everything is interconnected.
If something operates in the deeper worlds, it operates here in the material world.

But as stated, this is only a clarification. You are a monotheist anyway.

Again, I’m saying that you are mixing up concepts. Panentheism is an approach that deals with the relationship between God and the world, not between matter and spirit. But that is not important to the discussion. In my view it is also not a well-defined approach, and it is doubtful whether it says anything at all.

May I ask why the Rabbi thinks it is doubtful whether this approach says anything? I’m interested, because I came from Rabbi Kook yeshivot, so pantheism is something very basic for me — or at least it used to be. This approach sounds logical, though certainly not proven. But what are its flaws?

This is not about flaws. Before discussing flaws, one has to understand what exactly it means. It is supposed to be something between pantheism (everything is divinity), which is just nonsense, and the ordinary conception that there is God and the world exists outside Him and opposite Him. Panentheism tries to say something in between: everything is in God. What exactly does that mean? That we are His limbs? That He is connected to us and gives us life? That He is the soul of the world (that is, the world is an organism and the Holy One, blessed be He, is its soul)?
I think that usually they mean the last one, but does that mean that He runs everything and makes all the decisions? Then what do they want from us? And if we are independent creatures, then what exactly does it mean that He is the collective soul of all of us (and of the world)?
It looks like word games without any clear meaning.
There is no need for bombastic words and semantic hair-splitting in order to understand that God exists, created the world, and maybe also sustains it at every moment (like a power circuit, with us as the control circuit). Everything else is just empty chatter and mere verbiage.

We are independent creatures with free choice who need to peel away layers in order to reach the divine essence within us.
That means we have free choice, and it means we are also divine, and the sum total of everything is divinity.
That’s all.

🙂 More power to you. It seems to me I could not have summed up better why this is meaningless nonsense. An excellent way to end the discussion.