Rabbi Leuchter (he lives in Jerusalem; originally he’s from Lucerne) doesn’t say there’s no need for intellectual clarification, but rather that the essence of faith is the experience and personal identification. But a necessary precondition for that is intellectual clarification (at least for someone whom this troubles).
By the way, this is the approach of many from the Mussar movement (for example Rabbi Yerucham of Mir).

Well, with that I completely agree. I’ve written this here more than once. Just two comments:
1. I wouldn’t define it as an experience but as an insight (that there is God). It’s not something emotional but cognitive. It indeed does not have to rely on intellectual clarification, since intellectual clarifications too are based on foundational insights. The insight is the conclusion of the clarification, and it is not a substitute for clarification. But there are several ways to arrive at that insight: intellectual clarification or intuition.
2. Therefore I also wouldn’t speak here about primary and secondary, but about different ways of reaching that insight. Some arrive at it through intellectual clarification, while for others it is intuitively obvious. And both these and those are the words of the living God.

Excuse me, honored rabbis, what is meant by identification or insight? If there is a logical proof, then the matter is clear; and if there isn’t, how can I identify with such a hypothesis more than with others, or more than simply remaining in doubt? Thanks in advance for the answer. I’d appreciate it if you could answer at length and not briefly.

No, he does not mean insight, but experience.
An experience of an emotional connection with the Holy One, blessed be He. So this also isn’t two ways; there are of course two ways to arrive at the insight that there is a Creator, but in Rabbi Leuchter’s view (and that of many others), the insight is only the first stage; the main thing is to establish an emotional bond with the Creator, through prayer, contemplation of His wonders, and so on.
That’s different from what you wrote.

What does “the main thing” mean? In his view, is there a Torah-level commandment (or a rabbinic one) to establish an emotional bond, etc.? If not, then what is the claim?

On this point I don’t know how to answer—whether in his view this is the main part of the commandment of faith, or whether this is general service of God: to draw close to the Holy One, blessed be He.

The answer is clear:

From the verse, “Know the God of your father and serve Him with a whole heart and a willing soul” — 1. “Know” = believe in the Creator. 2. “And serve Him” = believe in His Torah and observe it.

As for grounding emotion… be yourself—what does that even mean? Or in other words, what difference does it make to the Creator whether you serve Him with emotion or without emotion?

“With a whole heart” — this does not speak about emotion but about full understanding. And in devotion it parallels “with all your heart.”

“And a willing soul” — parallels “with all your soul,” and means with all your will.

“And with all your might” — with all your strength.

I wasn’t making a claim about him but about myself. The corrections were not meant to explain his words but to present my position.

In any case, if in his view the main thing is the experience—then there is a deep disagreement between us. An experience can be created toward any fiction. Pygmalion fell in love with the statue he created. There are quite a few atheists who have deep religious experiences without any object that is the subject of those experiences. Are all of those, in Rabbi Leuchter’s opinion, believers?

As far as I’m concerned, ends pertain only to cognition, not to emotion and experience. See my article about emotions in Jewish law:

משמעות אפלטונית לרגשות בהלכה

And also posts 22 and 86.

In that same context, Rabbi, does the difference between value and fact stem from the fact that value comes from experience whereas fact comes from cognition?

(After all, seemingly every value is also a fact, so what constitutes the difference between them?)

If you mean experience in the emotional sense, then take experience out of the picture. Neither values nor facts have anything to do with emotions. If you mean insight or perception, then what is the difference between that and cognition? Every act of cognition ends in some kind of perception in our mind, and that is the experience in the sense I was talking about here. Both value and fact come to us through cognitive faculties (the conscience as a faculty that recognizes the idea of the good, and the senses that recognize facts). And once it is within us, we have an experience (an insight) regarding them. The difference is that the cognition is done through different faculties, and that the content of the cognition is different. That is to say, there is a difference between physical facts and ethical facts. Ethical facts obligate us to act, whereas physical facts are neutral with respect to norms (the naturalistic fallacy applies to them).

To Rabbi Michi,
You wrote that you completely agree with him, so that misled me.

On the substance of the matter, I don’t see a problem here. In his view, faith is a relationship with the Creator (not that someone who believes only intellectually is a heretic, but the primary goal is an experiential connection). Someone who has feelings for a statue—well, he believes in the statue. So what?
We are commanded to believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, not in a statue.
An atheist who has religious feelings and does not attribute them to the Creator of the world—in what sense does he have a relationship with the Creator of the world?

Yoav, I completely agree if the meaning is as in my comments.
On the substance of the matter, I follow my own view that there is no value in emotions. They are at most a means and not an end. Someone who has feelings for a statue does not believe in the statue, just as the atheist has a religious feeling and does not believe in God. That is exactly what I came to demonstrate. Therefore it is not reasonable to see the emotion as an end, but at most as an expression of faith.

David,
That is what we are talking about here. About what would you like more elaboration?
Just a correction to what you wrote. There can be complete and full faith even without a logical proof. Just as I accept the principle of causality or the existence of the President of the United States even though I have no logical proof of it. It seems reasonable to me, and therefore I accept it. The same applies to faith in God.
A proof is based on foundational assumptions, which themselves are not the result of proofs. I elaborated on this in my notebooks here on the site (Notebook 0) and in my books Two Carts and Truth and Unstable.

Guys, you’re talking about Rabbi Leuchter’s opinion, but if you go carefully through this conversation between Rabbis Leuchter and Feivelson, you’ll see that it comes out explicitly that there is no possibility of knowing about religion through proof alone [and as in Rabbi Feivelson’s story that even Rabbi Uri Zohar had outside influences].