According to what you say, you attach about as much importance to the aggadic literature of the Sages as you do to Hasidic stories, which are presumably the work of kabbalists.
That’s the connection.

Now we’ve moved on to riddles. Not one of my hobbies.

Riddles? I’m not sure what you mean.
I’ll rephrase the question: Lurianic Kabbalah, for example—just as he made it up out of his own heart, as I believe, that same ability could also have existed in one of the great poets of the generation. And on that basis I don’t see a huge difference between him and other myth-makers who tell moral tales.
As someone who has studied or researched Kabbalah for some time, do you still think there is some extra honor that should be given to a kabbalist, or is my assumption well founded?

You keep returning again and again to the aggadic literature of the Sages and Hasidic stories, when the topic of discussion that you yourself introduced is the attitude toward Kabbalah. This bouncing around from here to there seems like a riddle to me.
As for your question: if you think the Ari made everything up out of his own heart, then what is there to ask? Whether he is a fabricator worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature? What is the point of comparing him to poets? You mentioned that I don’t assume that. So what exactly do you want from me?
In short, I still haven’t deciphered the previous riddle, and now you’re sending me another one. If we don’t make progress, I’m stopping here.

I assumed that your attitude toward Hasidic stories and toward Kabbalah was the same. My mistake.
“Made up out of his own heart” not in the sense of literary creation worthy of becoming a bestseller, but in the same sense that Freud made psychoanalysis up out of his own heart: the ideas presented by both are their way of understanding the complexities of the world, but at the end of the day neurophysiologists still haven’t found parts of the brain that match the definitions of ego, superego, and id.
Is that a definition you can agree with?

The comparison to Freud is much better. I’ve written more than once that Freud’s doctrine really is entirely unfounded and has no empirical basis whatsoever, and yet he created something very important and significant. It is a conceptual system for understanding the psychological world, something that did not exist until his time. Now one can argue or agree, formulate hypotheses and test or refute them, and so on. In that sense, this system is not an invention but a discovery. That is definitely similar to what Kabbalah does.

Well then, if Freud’s conceptual system was created for the sake of discussing psychology, then I have to ask what the Ari’s conceptual system was meant for. You didn’t say, but I have to assume it was not for the sake of discussing God. Even if it came only to speak about the distance between our world and that of the Holy One, blessed be He, I doubt whether there is room for such immanent foundations in Judaism.
Is there really any need for discussions of sparks and shells, the shattering and repair of the vessels, in Jewish discourse? As you often point out, it has no content other than Jewish law, which is a closed world.

It was meant to understand the world and how it operates.
All the concepts you described are highly practical for that purpose.
That there is nothing in Judaism beyond Jewish law is entirely true, but how is that connected to our discussion? Kabbalah is not connected to Judaism. It is a conceptual-intellectual system for understanding the world.
By the way, Kabbalah also offers explanations for Jewish law, but we won’t get into that here.

The world and its workings were being investigated at that same time by those responsible for the scientific revolution.
The motive behind psychoanalysis I can understand, since the human psyche is not at all clear to us, but the order of the world is something we are capable of grasping, and the fact that Lurianic Kabbalah developed at the same time that Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton were making their discoveries indicates to me a disconnect between the Jewish people, who had at that time been expelled from Spain, and the flourishing European intellectuals, and that disconnect is no longer necessary.
Kabbalah may indeed not be connected to Judaism, which makes it clear why the New Age embraced it, but it places the Jewish people at the center of its world, and along with that it makes fairly absurd claims, such as that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world with the letters of the Hebrew language (Sefer Yetzirah), and that is still not to mention anthropomorphic descriptions of angels and exalted beings that verge on idol worship (Shiur Komah).
The only positive aspect I can grant the writings of the Ari is that they express service not for its own sake, such that if they are studied at a young age and not treated as something so holy that our eyes may not be exposed to them until age forty, they may develop into service for its own sake. In that I can see some benefit, but I have trouble seeing whether there is anything beyond that.

You should read Maimonides’ introduction to the Mishnah. There he speaks about three groups in interpreting aggadic literature. And the same applies here. This kind of simplistic and childish criticism shoots rational thought in the foot. Rationalism does not have to come with poor reading comprehension. Do you even understand the concept of “creating a world by means of letters”? Before you understand it, you can’t disagree and criticize, and it is evident that you do not understand.

Can you refer me to a rational explanation of Sefer Yetzirah?

This discussion keeps moving from place to place, each time to a different point, with strange links to aggadic literature and poets and so on. At last we landed on Freud, and I wrote to you that this is a better comparison. You asked about basic kabbalistic concepts and I answered you on a principled and general level. You could have asked for a specific explanation of one of them as an example, how it helps one look at the world, but you didn’t do that. You preferred to move on. For every such basic concept I can offer you perfectly reasonable explanations, which you can accept or reject, but you certainly won’t be able to ridicule them the way you tried to do. As for details, the situation is different, at least for me. Maybe there are those who would explain all the details to you as well.

Somehow, every time I answer one thing, you move on to discuss something else in order to preserve your wavering criticism of Kabbalah. It looks like stubbornness and not a serious, substantive discussion.

As for your question, I don’t know interpretations of that kind for Sefer Yetzirah, but it is certainly possible that there are some. You’ll have to look if it matters to you.

I gave my own explanation for the usefulness of the kabbalistic way of looking at the world (“A person should always engage in Torah and commandment even not for their own sake, because from not for its own sake one comes to for its own sake”). It only makes sense that something like this was needed after the expulsion from Spain, and Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto showed that it is indeed possible to translate these writings into service for its own sake.
If you think there is some other benefit to Kabbalah, I’d be glad to know. My view may be too simplistic, since this is a world from which I am as far as east is from west, and perhaps I am sinning in the same way many kabbalists do, who grasp this world in a practical way, one of amulets and heavenly maggidim.

In any case, I think it is your place to give me a rational interpretation of Sefer Yetzirah and not send me off to search on my own, since you accused me of poor reading comprehension.

Unfortunately, you are continuing with poor reading comprehension and your stubbornness. I wrote that if you have a specific question, ask it. Don’t ask me here to interpret Sefer Yetzirah or Kabbalah for you.

How do you understand the statement that by means of the letters of the Hebrew language the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world?

It seems to be something like Aristotle’s four elements, so one can speak about a periodic table of 22 elements that in different proportions make up reality. One can continue the analogy and say that just as letters make up words, so the “letters,” in the senses I described above, make up the parts of reality.
There are two possibilities for interpreting this:
A. An ontological possibility — to understand that the letters have ontic status, meaning they are a kind of entities, and the Holy One, blessed be He, used them as the building blocks of the world. Of course, we are not speaking of letters as we understand them, but of abstract entities represented by the letters. Many dealt with the shape of the letters and what it expresses. The claim is that this is not a conventional form, as in every language, but an essential one, representing something real.
B. A more moderate approach, which seems more plausible to me, is that reality in the world operates according to principles represented by the letters. Like the division into sefirot, which represent different forces and modes of operation that, in various proportions, make up reality.
Now one must assign meaning to each letter and what it represents. This too can be done on a number of levels: through the words composed from it, or through its typographical form—the bet and the kaf are open forward and closed behind, and so on.

Thank you very much for the detailed answer.