I forgot to cite the only time that Ramchal goes “off-message” in this section to address an extraneous point. He says at the beginning of his commentary to Petach 18 that “the whole purpose of the science of Kabbalah is to understand the specific root of each phenomenon”. That’s to say that thanks to Kabbalah we’re able to trace everything back to God’s own input, step by step, and that the Hebrew letters factor into all of that, too.
It’s important to point out that R’ Yehudah HaLevi discussed the Hebrew letters in his well known Kuzari (see 4:25 especially) in the context of his analysis of Sefer Yetzirah, which we’ll focus upon below. His analysis is interesting in that he draws upon early Kabbalistic as well as non-Kabbalistic philosophical works.
(c) 2011 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman
Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
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