Chasidut sobre I Samuel 3:6

Yet truly supernal Beriyah and Yetzirah, allowing one who has been influenced by them to prophesize, has ceased to exist. See I Samuel [3:6] and Rashi there.²⁷¹R. Shapiro continues on to explain this reference in the following lines. The divine voice was apprehended on such a physical level that Samuel mistook it for Eli’s voice. Rashi ad locum explains that, at that point in the narrative, Samuel does not yet understand the workings of prophecy, and still does not understand that he is not hearing the voice of Eli. The entire nation received their light, enclothed in Asiyah, elevated by the prophets of each generation, accompaniers of the Matroness [Shekhinah]. Yet the sages of the Talmud wondrously managed to draw down the Torah to our lowly, simple world of Asiyah—though not to the Asiyah within it itself, within the bush, which would have allowed them to see the revelation of divinity and angels within it, and with their ears to hear a simple voice from God—so similar that Samuel erred as he said ‘it is the voice of Eli’²⁷²I Samuel, ibid.—but rather to the Yetzirah and Beriyah in it, that is, to the human intellect in each person, even a child beginning to learn Talmud. How much Yetzirah and Beriyah each person can grasp in Torah is dependent on his particular level of holiness and his own Yetzirah and Beriyah.²⁷³In this and the following passages, through the end of section B, R. Shapiro makes the critical point that, according to kabbalistic-hasidic philosophy—the study of Torah (including, especially, Talmud) is an act of encounter with the very stuff of divinity. It is a quasi-prophetic experience, an intellectual communion with God, accomplished in and via the more supernal and ethereal levels of the learner’s soul. One can surmise that R. Shapiro is here critiquing two camps: one, the world of the yeshivot, who study Talmud but do not recognize its spiritual character; and two, the ‘enlightened’ camps who abandon traditional Talmud study for other intellectual pursuits which they deem comparable to it.