In fact, the Torah warns expressly against such belief when the navi deviates from the Torah.
Does it? Actually I don’t think you’ll find concrete proof from the Torah about such a thing unless the prophet is saying to worship other gods.
My point about kabbalah was something else. I wasn’t coming to say that kabbalah contradicted our previous conception of the Torah. My point was that I’d be thrown out of most yeshivish/chasidish places if I said I thought kabbalah is bunk. Why? How does something like that, based on the testimony of select few people throughout history and not many millions, garner so much support from the ‘mesorah’ yet when some guy walks on water and tells us new stuff our response is he must be a charlatan because we don’t listen to new things? I understand there are other problems with him, but my issue is with using this particular point – the ‘only-one-guy-so-he-could-be-a-trickster’ theory – as an argument. It is an argument with a hole.
Let me try to state my opinion very clearly. Just like we have a mesorah, so do they. OF COURSE in our minds their ‘mesorah’ has ZERO validity. That does not need to be said. What needs to be said is that IN THEIR MINDS their ‘mesorah’ is the be-all and end-all, and that because of this they will resort to any and every argument to defend it. SINCE it is impossible to conclusively prove them wrong – NOT that I think it is reasonable at all to believe they are right, but I recognize, as a person with half a head on my shoulders and a fairly decent amount of relevant knowledge, the sheer DIFFICULTY of conclusively proving a thing like this – THEREFORE I think we should recognize that they, as faithful adherents to their religion, will not be persuaded by our arguments, even if they are intellectually honest people, because it is their religion at stake, and they will not in good conscience forgo it if there is even the slightest leeway out of the argument. All that results from these confrontations, in my opinion, is strife. If they ask us how we understand a pasuk, by all means we should tell them. If they tell us to convert, we should defend ourselves in every way possible. But to throw arguments at them which can be disputed even with only the most convoluted and anti-simplicity counterarguments; that is a useless endeavor at best. ?? ???? ?????? ???????.
YehudahTzvi – One who raises a child is as if he bore him. The meforshim say this on countless occasions, even in places where the Torah uses terms like ??. See, for example, Ibn Ezra to Bereishis 46:7.