Ramchal on the Sephirot (1)

We’re going to have to do this in stages, since Ramchal says a lot about the Sephirot. What we’ll do first, though, is present a remarkable metaphor he offers that isn’t well known but should be. Then we’ll quote some other things he says about the Sephirot from various works and either go back to interweave them within this metaphor, or we’ll cite additional unrelated insights of his, depending.

The metaphor is found in Klallei Ma’amar HaChochma 4 [1] and it sets out to explain the relationship between God Himself and the Sephirot; it goes as follows.

He asks us to imagine “a sage who came to a particular community and who, for some reason, didn’t want to be known to be as wise as he truly was but to be taken as just like the others instead. So he’d speak and interact with them in ways that would guarantee that he wasn’t recognized (as a sage) or lauded for wanting to live among them. And he adapted whatever he said or did toward that end accordingly”. We’ll soon see how this goes to explain how God interacts with the world through the Sephirot.

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Notes:

[1]        Found in R’ Friedlander’s edition of Da’at TevunotSefer HaKlallim pp. 309-310.

(c) 2011 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

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