Honor for the Arizal and Care with Every Text

Rav Chaim of Volozhin saw with his own eyes how the Gaon honored the Arizal. When he spoke of him, his whole body trembled, and he said how awesome it is to speak of such a G-dly person, whose ability to perceive the awesomeness of Hashem’s works grew even greater after he merited the revelation of Eliyahu HaNavi. Yet the Gaon felt that many writings of the Arizal had been corrupted by emendations of students other than Rav Chaim Vital, who had failed to understand the Arizal’s true meaning, and he did not rely on them for halachic rulings. He said that the words of the Zohar and the Tikkunim cannot be properly understood without several weeks of intense effort, since every idea has to be worked through laboriously. His revised Sefer Yetzirah, formed in his younger years, was as clear as the Arizal’s, with one small change where the Arizal’s text was mistaken. When Rav Chaim asked whether this would make it easy to create a golem, the Gaon answered that he had once begun to create one, but in the middle of the work he had a vision that stopped him, and he thought that Heaven was holding him back because of his young age. It was before his bar mitzvah.