ההקדמות ומפתחותKeys Before the Ari

ha-hakdamot u-mafteḥotIn Gamatria ↗

Learn the keys first, and the Ari's door opens.

Irgas opens with a complaint. Many scholars want nothing to do with the Torah's secrets, and even those who draw on the Sages' sayings cannot grasp the roots of the Torah without them. Worse, some who do study Kabbalah leap straight into the Ari before learning its first principles. They rely on the Ari's remark to R. Ḥayyim Vital that kabbalah books written after the Ramban were built on human reasoning. Irgas answers that the remark concerns particular premises, not the roots of faith, where early and later kabbalists agree. The Ari's students came to him already trained in the older works, so he did not need to teach the basics. Irgas gathers those introductions and keys here, calls the book Keeper of Faith, and casts it as a debate between two scholars.

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