Monthly Archives: April 2010

Starting From Scratch

I’m going to be “erasing” the contents of this blog until now and starting all over again. I’ve done a lot of learning about Klach Pitchei Chochma in the interim and have decided to take a new approach.

To now I’ve used R’ Chaim Friedlander’s, R’ Yoseph Spinner’s, R’ Dovid Cohen’s (known as the Nazir and whose edition is brand new) and R’ Mordechai Shriki’s editions of the text (though the latter is also new and not quite as extensive as the others, surprisingly so considering R’ Shriki’s erudition). But I’ve come upon R’ Yoseph Avivi’s Zohar Ramchal in which he analyzes Ramchal’s thoughts, and have been struck by his insights. It had been out of print for years and has since been reissued.

To be sure, R’ Shriki had made many of the same points in his own groundbreaking Rechev Yisrael, which I read when it came out 12 or more years ago. Having read Avivi’s work I’d now need to go back to Shriki’s who sometimes argues with Avivi.

There are a number of central themes within Klach (and elsewhere in Ramchal’s writings which I’ll draw from as well) that one would have to take into account in order to offer an intelligent treatment of the work. They include Ramchal’s understandings of why we’re to study Kabbalah, his reasons for having written Klach, his idea that core Kabbalistic themes are actually metaphors (mashalim) whose referents (nimshalim) he sets out to present, the notion that everything will eventually reveal Godliness (Giloi HaYichud), and that all wrong and evil will be turned to right and goodness.

Catch you later.