You understand of course that the sort of visceral adhesion onto G-d’s Presence and the experience of “seeing” it that prophets enjoy isn’t a natural phenomenon. It isn’t simply the last and inevitable rung of a ladder one climbs to become one. It calls for input from what Ramchal terms “intermediaries”.

What they do, we’re taught, is act as “lenses” which the prophet peers through to see (and perhaps as the “glue” which they adhere to, to extend the metaphor).

Some might argue that like all lenses, these lenses must likewise color and otherwise affect what the prophet sees. But while that’s true *to some degree*, since some intermediaries are purer and thus “clearer” than others; nonetheless it’s G-d’s Presence itself that the prophet sees and senses, as only a prophet would know.

What that indicates, though, is that there are many qualities of prophetic perception. Some are greater or lesser in degree, and others are greater or lesser in kind, depending upon the makeup of the prophet himself as well as of the intermediary he merits.

This series is dedicated to the memory of Yitzchak Hehrsh ben Daniel, and Sarah Rivka bas Yaakov Dovid.

Copyright © 2004 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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