Here's Havot Yair reponsum 210, written by Rabbi Yair Chaim Bacharach, who lived c.1678 – c.1698 CE saying that he doesn't get it nor does he believe that anyone in his generation does
שאלני אחד מהם שאפרש ג"כ מ"ש המחבר החדש שיאמר לפני הנחת תפילין ולבישת ציצית וכן בכמה דוכתי לשם יחוד הקב"ה ושכינתי' ע"י ההוא טמיר ונעלם וכאשר השבתי לו שלא נאמרו הדברים רק לת"ח מופלגי' השיבני שלא יבקש לאמרו וגם להבין ענינו רק אגיד לו פי' המלות וכאשר דחיתיו שנית חרה אפו ואמר כדעת ודברי עדת המקהילים ובראותי דפקר טובא אמרתי להפיס דעתו שיאמין לי בהן צדקי שגם אני אינני מבין תכלית דיבור דברים אלו וענינם וכן האמת ואולי לא ידעו ולא יבינו את זה כל חכמי הקבלה דורתינו אף המצפצפים והמהגים בקבלת האר"י ובספ"ר שער ג' פ"ח לא ידעו מה הוא.
.’
"One of them asked me to explain as well what the new author wrote—that one should say before putting on tefillin and donning tzitzit, and likewise in several other places: ‘For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah, through that Hidden and Concealed One.’
And when I responded that these matters were never intended except for Torah scholars of exceptional stature, he answered that he does not seek to recite it, nor to understand its meaning—only that I should provide him with the plain meaning of the words.
When I declined a second time, his anger flared, and he declared himself in agreement with the opinion and stance of the sect of the mystics.
And when I saw that he had strayed too far, I sought to calm him, assuring him—truthfully—that I myself do not grasp the full intent of these formulations and their deeper meaning. And that is indeed the truth.
And perhaps even none of the sages of Kabbalah in our generation comprehend it—not even those who chirp and stammer in the Kabbalah of the Ari.
And in Pardes Rimonim, Gate 3, Chapter 8, they too confessed that they do not know what this is."
I think It’s basically using a non dualistic idea of God. Like Advaita (probably where the ideas came from imo).
In this framework The “Shem Havayah” is shorthand for the systems through which undefined infinity (“Ayn” indescribable non dual awareness or whatever you want to call it) take the forms we experience. (The Arizal went super elaborate with this Ab Saag MaH and BaN etc etc). I think What it’s saying was that Klal Yisroel saw this distinction.
As far as “Lshem Yichud” in this framework mitzvos etc are tools for breaking the illusion of separateness. That is what “uniting the Shem Havayah means.” Again, it’s basically Advaita with extra parts.
I may be wrong and have no opinion as to if it is “heretical” or “theologically troubling” (whatever that even means- how can something accepted by 99.9% of your religions greatest teachers and codifiers of Halacha in the past 700 years be inherently “heretical”. That’s kind of like telling a Christian that belief in the trinity is “heretical” to Christianity)
You're correct that the idea isn't explicit in anything I wrote here. But my understanding is that the fact that kabbalists place such emphasis on directing prayer to זעיר אנפין is at least partly due their understanding of אין סוף as סתים דסתימין and the "need" for mediation through ספירות .
"What’s this “unity” business? I know I’m grossly oversimplifying this, but I think it’s useful to say that the big-picture goal is to acknowledge that all of the physical creation is subsumed within God’s infiniteness"
That's not really what it means, even on a simple level.
Unification in this context refers to Malchut and Tiferet, or Zeir Anpin and Nukva reuniting as a result of the mitzvah that's being performed.
I thought you read the "wars of hashem" from R' Yihey Kapihc.
That book is full of this exact type of critique of the Zohar and books of Kabbalah. He has many examples of the emphasis on "Ze'er Anpin" as opposed to the First Cause.
By the way do you sing "Askinu Se'udasa" by Shalosh Seudos?
I didn't mention it in the post, but my Sanhedrin 63a example came from R' Kafach.
I actually sing very little on Shabbos - but that's just a personal thing. However, if you'd ask me, the real problem is the Askinu Seudasa of Friday night (although explaining why isn't appropriate for a public forum). Also, there's a יהא ראווא I saw printed in the Artscroll Family Zemiros (I think that's what it was called) before the Friday night Askinu Seudasa that explicitly invoked אתיקא קדישא.
The problem with what you're saying is that since basically every single contemporary kabbalist will disagree with your interpretation, so it's the anti-kabbalist Boruch Clinton giving his opinion on what the kabbalistic formulation לשם יחוד means vs. people who presumably understand it much better, and so why in the world would anybody listen to you? It would be like expecting me to listen to a Bible critic on what שמע ישראל means. And I say this as somebody who doesn't recite לשם יחוד.
Why do you assume the source of the yud-key-vav-key in לשם יחוד is the Zohar you quoted? Does any kabbalist say that? Is there any reason to believe that all definitions in all kabbalistic texts are 100% consistent with each other? We don't have that expectation with anything else, not with Chumash, Neviim, Gemara, halacha, but all of the sudden we expect that with kabbalah? I mean I can email Rabbi Yehoshua Inbal who probably understands these things (well, at least more than me) and ask if he agrees with your assumption, but is that necessary?
Ok. So if you want to assume that the usage of language in kabbalistic literature isn't consistent and that you can't understand one statement using the direct context of any other, that's fine with me. But, at that point, you've descended to Alice in Wonderland levels of scholarship: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
Yeah, I think it's really naive and foolish to make this type of gezeirah shava. Especially when you wouldn't do it with any other Torah text, you only do it to attack kabbalah. You're not doing scholarship here, you're just playing games.
The good old 'obviously nothing in the Zohar and kabbalistic writings means what it says because that would be heresy and that can't be because reasons' defence.
Why write a book the plain meaning of which is heresy if you don't mean to promote heresy? Why not just play chess instead? All very strange really.
You can say that about Tanach also according to the Rambam. But that's not even my point. It's that Rabbi Clinton tied together two things that have no connection and nobody said have any connection. Like, the l'shaeim yichud, invented by the Reishis Chachma, is obviously emphasizing yichud, whereas the Zohar he quoted is giving an alternate (possibly heretical if you insist on being an anti Kabbalist) definition of Hashem's name in one place in Chumash. No shaychus.
The point of the the לשם יחוד is obviously (and I do mean obviously, as in so obviously that it's perverse to dispute it) is that mitzvos are done for the sake of (i.e לשם) unifying the parts of God that have been torn asunder. This isn't one line in the Zohar, it's one of the basic Zoharic concepts.
Now, what you will say is that when kabbalists say God is divided into different parts and requires human activity to re-unify him then they only mean that 'in a sense'. Just like when Chabadniks say MMS is alive, and present in 770, and is the Messiah, and runs the world, and will redeem us, they only mean it 'in a sense'. Of course, we can't know what 'in a sense' actually is. We can't trust academics to tell us because [reasons], kabbalists won't tell us because it's a secret, so we should just presume that it's kosher and all the disasters that have befallen the Jewish people ever since the revelation of the Zohar are just coincidences or because of Reform or Zionism or whatever. It can't possibly be because all of these texts shoving their non-monotheism in your face every second line are actually not monotheistic.
This is just plain silly. The article is silly too but this is sillier.
I don't say לשם ייחוד so I don't know much, but as quoted in the article it states clearly that is to be מייחד קוב"ה ושכינתי'. This is also the concept of לייחד י"ה בו"ה, as the Gemara states אין השם שלם ואין הכסא שלם וכו. This is just simple stuff. The נוב"י never had a problem with the concept, and in fact i another teshuva (או"ח ק"ז) he gives his explanation of what קוב"ה ושכינתי' means. His only issue is that this is not our intention when doing a mitzvah. Baruch Clinton just had a separate issue with Kabbalah which he somehow interpreted into the לשם ייחוד with zero basis.
Regarding the NY. We know that he denied the validity of Zohar entirely and considered it to be an alien excrescence into Judaism, but he also appreciated that it had spread sufficiently that removing the cancer directly risked killing the patient. Thus he opted for a long term strategy, which was to capitalise on general acknowledgment of the Sabbatean disaster to suppress all study of the Zohar (including supporting bans by the gentile authorities), and hope that over the next few centuries Jews would just forget about it. Part of this strategy was creating plausible deniability about Zoharic practices already in use so they could not be used as wedges by Zoharists to once again get in the driver's seat. I have my doubts that anyone at the time really was convinced by these explanations, but, since you are, maybe there were.
In any case, while the NY's intentions were certainly completely pure and beyond reproach, we see that his strategy was a failure in every respect and completely different strategy is in order.
Also, the idea that the NBY 'was creating plausible deniability about Zoharic practices already in use' sounds strange as an explanation for the NBY's approach to לשם ייחוד, which he vehemently opposed saying before a mitzvah, yet the nusach itself he explained. I believe this is very similar to his approach in the famous censored Zohar, and similar to the approach of RSRH (which I discussed with Baruch Clinton at his last anti-Zohar piece).
Please provide a source for your claims. Yes, I have seen the speech of the NBY (though I lost it and would love a link to it) and IIRC he makes it clear that he does agree with much of the Kabbalistic ideas. I think you realize very well that your position has not been the position of any gadol bYisroel, not the NBY not Reb Yaakov Emden (who was very much a Kabbalist), not RSRH, no-one. You are just creating plausible deniability by claiming that really the NBY agreed with but whatever whatever…
No, you are being silly. In all schools of kabbalah, a central doctrine is that, during the process of divine emanation, some kind of technical mishap happened with the result that Shechinah, which was supposed to be at the top of the sefirotic system, fell down to to the bottom and is now in 'exile', separated from and unable to draw sustenance from the upper levels. The purpose of mitzvos is to raise up the Shechinah to its proper place. Of course, kabbalists claim to find allusions to their doctrines in all sorts of places in the talmud, but this is not how they were understood before the revelation of kabbalah, and kabbalists will freely admit that this is the case (since the geonim and early rishonim, nebbuch, did not have access to this hidden knowledge). The purpose of the leshem yichud is to ensure that the one performing mitzvos has this intention in mind, thus making it more effective.
The correct yeshivish apologetic for this is 'yes, that does all sound a bit alarming, but it's a metaphor for something. What it is is a metaphor for, I don't know, pass the kugel'. Your bold new argument that a prayer written by kabbalists, specially for the purpose of promoting kabbalistic theology, using kabbalistic vocabulary, does not in fact reflect kabbalistic beliefs is certainly bold, I'll give you that.
You didn't add anything to the conversation other than some more bluster about how horrible kabbalah is and how bold I am for pointing out the obvious: that there is nothing off about the לשם ייחוד other than the issue which the NBY raised. And I don't see why the idea of creating and restoring שכינה בתחתונים is something new. It is a recurrent theme in the Torah and in Chazal.
Honestly, I think I try to be openminded about this (I made a bracha on Tefillin this Chol HaMoed), but you are losing all credibility by me with your nonsense accusations and blustering and your claim that if someone can't explain all of Kabbalah to you while shmoozing at a kiddush or commenting on substack then anything associated in anyway with Kabbalah is clearly Kefirah and Avodah Zarah. If you want to maintain your credibility you should focus on substance not on blustering.
That's a different argument than Baruchs's silly gezeirah shava (according to which any believer in kabbalah who ever uses the sheim Hashem for anything, makes any bracha etc, is doing something heretical).
Now, I happen to think your argument that kabbalah as a whole is heretical is ridiculous, and despite your claims of being a moderate, you're quite an extremist (if I can paraphrase what you told Richard Hanania about the puritans, your anti-kabbalah extremism is evocative of "just about any random thing that puritans had decided was forbidden under their ever-escalating purity spirals") But I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me, so what's the point.
I think this is probably the biggest question of modern Jewish history. Some factors are:
- the psychological trauma of the expulsion from Spain
- the use of access to purportedly secret knowledge by Spanish exiles to exert control in their new locales
- the dual aspect of the kabbalah appealing both to very dumb people and intellectuals
- the outlandish racial supremacy of the kabbala appealing to the natural instincts of a despised minority with poor prospects (see Nation of Islam etc.)
- the flexibility of kabbalah being able to justify anything from punctilious observance to extreme antinomianism
- the decision to set up a center in Eretz Yisrael, giving them quasi sanhedrical status in the eyes of many
- the Beit Yosef being the halachic genius of his generation
- a number of obviously very saintly kabbalists impressing people
- a lot of people, probably most, just find rabbinic Judaism boring
- the need for a theology of Judaism in a world that was slowly opening up to criticism of received traditions
Even so, frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss. Gershom Scholem famously said that one who studies kabbalah is always oscillating between admiration and disgust, but I can only empathise with one of those.
Re "the outlandish racial supremacy of the kabbala appealing to the natural instincts of a despised minority with poor prospects"
Do you have any evidence that this motivated the Kabbalist or those who accepted them? I find it unlikely, because already without kabbalah, there's no shortage of pesukim and ma'amarei Chazal praising the Jewish nation as the greatest in the world, disparaging the gentiles, etc.
I agree the Spanish exodus was a huge factor. I still find it amazing that the Beis Yosef, Vilna Gaon, Rogatchover, etc - halachik geniuses were so enamored by kabbalah.
Parenthetically, the acceptance of the Zohar and Yitzhak Luria are not really separate events. The revelation of the Zoharic texts beyond small circles really only starts in the 1550s with the printing of the Zohar. Luria's teachings start to spread from about the 1570s. In most of Jewry, they arrived more or less together.
Here's Havot Yair reponsum 210, written by Rabbi Yair Chaim Bacharach, who lived c.1678 – c.1698 CE saying that he doesn't get it nor does he believe that anyone in his generation does
שאלני אחד מהם שאפרש ג"כ מ"ש המחבר החדש שיאמר לפני הנחת תפילין ולבישת ציצית וכן בכמה דוכתי לשם יחוד הקב"ה ושכינתי' ע"י ההוא טמיר ונעלם וכאשר השבתי לו שלא נאמרו הדברים רק לת"ח מופלגי' השיבני שלא יבקש לאמרו וגם להבין ענינו רק אגיד לו פי' המלות וכאשר דחיתיו שנית חרה אפו ואמר כדעת ודברי עדת המקהילים ובראותי דפקר טובא אמרתי להפיס דעתו שיאמין לי בהן צדקי שגם אני אינני מבין תכלית דיבור דברים אלו וענינם וכן האמת ואולי לא ידעו ולא יבינו את זה כל חכמי הקבלה דורתינו אף המצפצפים והמהגים בקבלת האר"י ובספ"ר שער ג' פ"ח לא ידעו מה הוא.
.’
"One of them asked me to explain as well what the new author wrote—that one should say before putting on tefillin and donning tzitzit, and likewise in several other places: ‘For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah, through that Hidden and Concealed One.’
And when I responded that these matters were never intended except for Torah scholars of exceptional stature, he answered that he does not seek to recite it, nor to understand its meaning—only that I should provide him with the plain meaning of the words.
When I declined a second time, his anger flared, and he declared himself in agreement with the opinion and stance of the sect of the mystics.
And when I saw that he had strayed too far, I sought to calm him, assuring him—truthfully—that I myself do not grasp the full intent of these formulations and their deeper meaning. And that is indeed the truth.
And perhaps even none of the sages of Kabbalah in our generation comprehend it—not even those who chirp and stammer in the Kabbalah of the Ari.
And in Pardes Rimonim, Gate 3, Chapter 8, they too confessed that they do not know what this is."
I think you may be misunderstanding the Zohar.
I think It’s basically using a non dualistic idea of God. Like Advaita (probably where the ideas came from imo).
In this framework The “Shem Havayah” is shorthand for the systems through which undefined infinity (“Ayn” indescribable non dual awareness or whatever you want to call it) take the forms we experience. (The Arizal went super elaborate with this Ab Saag MaH and BaN etc etc). I think What it’s saying was that Klal Yisroel saw this distinction.
As far as “Lshem Yichud” in this framework mitzvos etc are tools for breaking the illusion of separateness. That is what “uniting the Shem Havayah means.” Again, it’s basically Advaita with extra parts.
I may be wrong and have no opinion as to if it is “heretical” or “theologically troubling” (whatever that even means- how can something accepted by 99.9% of your religions greatest teachers and codifiers of Halacha in the past 700 years be inherently “heretical”. That’s kind of like telling a Christian that belief in the trinity is “heretical” to Christianity)
I have absolutely no clue what any of that means.
Nor would I be expected to.
Because I never say it.
I follow the מנהג פפד"מ (פרנקפורט דמיין), remember? :-)
If you're looking for fodder I recently came across the midrash rabbah which says the following about the nifillim (בראשית רבה כ"ו ה):
ויראו בני האלוהים רבי שמעון בן יוחאי קרא להון בני דיניא. רבי שמעון בן יוחאי מקלל לכל מאן דקרא להון בני אלהיה.
This is in sharp contrast to the lengthy passages in Zohar who elaborate on the semi-divine nature of these beings.
That's very interesting. I'll make a note of that.
Was facinated to see that l'sheim yichud is cited by anti-semites! https://thereversion.co/i/163662848/sexual-theurgy-of-kabbalistic-prayer-rituals
Where is this implied: "and that the eternal God isn’t even aware of our actions or prayers" chv"s?
You're correct that the idea isn't explicit in anything I wrote here. But my understanding is that the fact that kabbalists place such emphasis on directing prayer to זעיר אנפין is at least partly due their understanding of אין סוף as סתים דסתימין and the "need" for mediation through ספירות .
The Zohar is a PLAGUE and must be purged from the theology canon
"What’s this “unity” business? I know I’m grossly oversimplifying this, but I think it’s useful to say that the big-picture goal is to acknowledge that all of the physical creation is subsumed within God’s infiniteness"
That's not really what it means, even on a simple level.
Unification in this context refers to Malchut and Tiferet, or Zeir Anpin and Nukva reuniting as a result of the mitzvah that's being performed.
I thought you read the "wars of hashem" from R' Yihey Kapihc.
That book is full of this exact type of critique of the Zohar and books of Kabbalah. He has many examples of the emphasis on "Ze'er Anpin" as opposed to the First Cause.
By the way do you sing "Askinu Se'udasa" by Shalosh Seudos?
I think it's got the same issues as well.
I didn't mention it in the post, but my Sanhedrin 63a example came from R' Kafach.
I actually sing very little on Shabbos - but that's just a personal thing. However, if you'd ask me, the real problem is the Askinu Seudasa of Friday night (although explaining why isn't appropriate for a public forum). Also, there's a יהא ראווא I saw printed in the Artscroll Family Zemiros (I think that's what it was called) before the Friday night Askinu Seudasa that explicitly invoked אתיקא קדישא.
In your previous post about the Zohar you sent a link to it on Sefaria.
It seemed from the comments that you read it.
I've read the first half of it, not the whole thing - although I definitely hope to get through the rest of the sefer.
Ahron Habrit anyone?
https://edwardnathanschwarz.substack.com/p/geraldo-rivera-finally-finds-al-capones?r=5e930t
The problem with what you're saying is that since basically every single contemporary kabbalist will disagree with your interpretation, so it's the anti-kabbalist Boruch Clinton giving his opinion on what the kabbalistic formulation לשם יחוד means vs. people who presumably understand it much better, and so why in the world would anybody listen to you? It would be like expecting me to listen to a Bible critic on what שמע ישראל means. And I say this as somebody who doesn't recite לשם יחוד.
That's fair. So can you provide me with an interpretation that fits the actual sources?
Why do you assume the source of the yud-key-vav-key in לשם יחוד is the Zohar you quoted? Does any kabbalist say that? Is there any reason to believe that all definitions in all kabbalistic texts are 100% consistent with each other? We don't have that expectation with anything else, not with Chumash, Neviim, Gemara, halacha, but all of the sudden we expect that with kabbalah? I mean I can email Rabbi Yehoshua Inbal who probably understands these things (well, at least more than me) and ask if he agrees with your assumption, but is that necessary?
Ok. So if you want to assume that the usage of language in kabbalistic literature isn't consistent and that you can't understand one statement using the direct context of any other, that's fine with me. But, at that point, you've descended to Alice in Wonderland levels of scholarship: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
Yeah, I think it's really naive and foolish to make this type of gezeirah shava. Especially when you wouldn't do it with any other Torah text, you only do it to attack kabbalah. You're not doing scholarship here, you're just playing games.
Happy -
I really admire your enthusiasm!.
Thank you!
The good old 'obviously nothing in the Zohar and kabbalistic writings means what it says because that would be heresy and that can't be because reasons' defence.
Why write a book the plain meaning of which is heresy if you don't mean to promote heresy? Why not just play chess instead? All very strange really.
You can say that about Tanach also according to the Rambam. But that's not even my point. It's that Rabbi Clinton tied together two things that have no connection and nobody said have any connection. Like, the l'shaeim yichud, invented by the Reishis Chachma, is obviously emphasizing yichud, whereas the Zohar he quoted is giving an alternate (possibly heretical if you insist on being an anti Kabbalist) definition of Hashem's name in one place in Chumash. No shaychus.
The point of the the לשם יחוד is obviously (and I do mean obviously, as in so obviously that it's perverse to dispute it) is that mitzvos are done for the sake of (i.e לשם) unifying the parts of God that have been torn asunder. This isn't one line in the Zohar, it's one of the basic Zoharic concepts.
Now, what you will say is that when kabbalists say God is divided into different parts and requires human activity to re-unify him then they only mean that 'in a sense'. Just like when Chabadniks say MMS is alive, and present in 770, and is the Messiah, and runs the world, and will redeem us, they only mean it 'in a sense'. Of course, we can't know what 'in a sense' actually is. We can't trust academics to tell us because [reasons], kabbalists won't tell us because it's a secret, so we should just presume that it's kosher and all the disasters that have befallen the Jewish people ever since the revelation of the Zohar are just coincidences or because of Reform or Zionism or whatever. It can't possibly be because all of these texts shoving their non-monotheism in your face every second line are actually not monotheistic.
This is just plain silly. The article is silly too but this is sillier.
I don't say לשם ייחוד so I don't know much, but as quoted in the article it states clearly that is to be מייחד קוב"ה ושכינתי'. This is also the concept of לייחד י"ה בו"ה, as the Gemara states אין השם שלם ואין הכסא שלם וכו. This is just simple stuff. The נוב"י never had a problem with the concept, and in fact i another teshuva (או"ח ק"ז) he gives his explanation of what קוב"ה ושכינתי' means. His only issue is that this is not our intention when doing a mitzvah. Baruch Clinton just had a separate issue with Kabbalah which he somehow interpreted into the לשם ייחוד with zero basis.
Regarding the NY. We know that he denied the validity of Zohar entirely and considered it to be an alien excrescence into Judaism, but he also appreciated that it had spread sufficiently that removing the cancer directly risked killing the patient. Thus he opted for a long term strategy, which was to capitalise on general acknowledgment of the Sabbatean disaster to suppress all study of the Zohar (including supporting bans by the gentile authorities), and hope that over the next few centuries Jews would just forget about it. Part of this strategy was creating plausible deniability about Zoharic practices already in use so they could not be used as wedges by Zoharists to once again get in the driver's seat. I have my doubts that anyone at the time really was convinced by these explanations, but, since you are, maybe there were.
In any case, while the NY's intentions were certainly completely pure and beyond reproach, we see that his strategy was a failure in every respect and completely different strategy is in order.
Also, the idea that the NBY 'was creating plausible deniability about Zoharic practices already in use' sounds strange as an explanation for the NBY's approach to לשם ייחוד, which he vehemently opposed saying before a mitzvah, yet the nusach itself he explained. I believe this is very similar to his approach in the famous censored Zohar, and similar to the approach of RSRH (which I discussed with Baruch Clinton at his last anti-Zohar piece).
Please provide a source for your claims. Yes, I have seen the speech of the NBY (though I lost it and would love a link to it) and IIRC he makes it clear that he does agree with much of the Kabbalistic ideas. I think you realize very well that your position has not been the position of any gadol bYisroel, not the NBY not Reb Yaakov Emden (who was very much a Kabbalist), not RSRH, no-one. You are just creating plausible deniability by claiming that really the NBY agreed with but whatever whatever…
No, you are being silly. In all schools of kabbalah, a central doctrine is that, during the process of divine emanation, some kind of technical mishap happened with the result that Shechinah, which was supposed to be at the top of the sefirotic system, fell down to to the bottom and is now in 'exile', separated from and unable to draw sustenance from the upper levels. The purpose of mitzvos is to raise up the Shechinah to its proper place. Of course, kabbalists claim to find allusions to their doctrines in all sorts of places in the talmud, but this is not how they were understood before the revelation of kabbalah, and kabbalists will freely admit that this is the case (since the geonim and early rishonim, nebbuch, did not have access to this hidden knowledge). The purpose of the leshem yichud is to ensure that the one performing mitzvos has this intention in mind, thus making it more effective.
The correct yeshivish apologetic for this is 'yes, that does all sound a bit alarming, but it's a metaphor for something. What it is is a metaphor for, I don't know, pass the kugel'. Your bold new argument that a prayer written by kabbalists, specially for the purpose of promoting kabbalistic theology, using kabbalistic vocabulary, does not in fact reflect kabbalistic beliefs is certainly bold, I'll give you that.
You didn't add anything to the conversation other than some more bluster about how horrible kabbalah is and how bold I am for pointing out the obvious: that there is nothing off about the לשם ייחוד other than the issue which the NBY raised. And I don't see why the idea of creating and restoring שכינה בתחתונים is something new. It is a recurrent theme in the Torah and in Chazal.
Honestly, I think I try to be openminded about this (I made a bracha on Tefillin this Chol HaMoed), but you are losing all credibility by me with your nonsense accusations and blustering and your claim that if someone can't explain all of Kabbalah to you while shmoozing at a kiddush or commenting on substack then anything associated in anyway with Kabbalah is clearly Kefirah and Avodah Zarah. If you want to maintain your credibility you should focus on substance not on blustering.
That's a different argument than Baruchs's silly gezeirah shava (according to which any believer in kabbalah who ever uses the sheim Hashem for anything, makes any bracha etc, is doing something heretical).
Now, I happen to think your argument that kabbalah as a whole is heretical is ridiculous, and despite your claims of being a moderate, you're quite an extremist (if I can paraphrase what you told Richard Hanania about the puritans, your anti-kabbalah extremism is evocative of "just about any random thing that puritans had decided was forbidden under their ever-escalating purity spirals") But I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me, so what's the point.
"But I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me, so what's the point."
For others reading the conversation that don't have a strong position either way.
Why do you think that the Zohar and subsequently the teachings of the Ari were so universally accepted?
I think this is probably the biggest question of modern Jewish history. Some factors are:
- the psychological trauma of the expulsion from Spain
- the use of access to purportedly secret knowledge by Spanish exiles to exert control in their new locales
- the dual aspect of the kabbalah appealing both to very dumb people and intellectuals
- the outlandish racial supremacy of the kabbala appealing to the natural instincts of a despised minority with poor prospects (see Nation of Islam etc.)
- the flexibility of kabbalah being able to justify anything from punctilious observance to extreme antinomianism
- the decision to set up a center in Eretz Yisrael, giving them quasi sanhedrical status in the eyes of many
- the Beit Yosef being the halachic genius of his generation
- a number of obviously very saintly kabbalists impressing people
- a lot of people, probably most, just find rabbinic Judaism boring
- the need for a theology of Judaism in a world that was slowly opening up to criticism of received traditions
Even so, frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss. Gershom Scholem famously said that one who studies kabbalah is always oscillating between admiration and disgust, but I can only empathise with one of those.
Re "the outlandish racial supremacy of the kabbala appealing to the natural instincts of a despised minority with poor prospects"
Do you have any evidence that this motivated the Kabbalist or those who accepted them? I find it unlikely, because already without kabbalah, there's no shortage of pesukim and ma'amarei Chazal praising the Jewish nation as the greatest in the world, disparaging the gentiles, etc.
So the perfect storm essentially?
I agree the Spanish exodus was a huge factor. I still find it amazing that the Beis Yosef, Vilna Gaon, Rogatchover, etc - halachik geniuses were so enamored by kabbalah.
Parenthetically, the acceptance of the Zohar and Yitzhak Luria are not really separate events. The revelation of the Zoharic texts beyond small circles really only starts in the 1550s with the printing of the Zohar. Luria's teachings start to spread from about the 1570s. In most of Jewry, they arrived more or less together.