Shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, is the second moment of the cosmogony taught by Isaac Luria (1534-1572) at Safed and transmitted chiefly through his disciple Hayyim Vital. After tzimtzum, the withdrawal that leaves a space in which something other than God can exist, a ray of divine light enters that space and is to be received and held by vessels, the sefirot in their primordial configuration. The upper vessels hold. The lower seven shatter under the intensity of what they receive.
The consequences organise the rest of the system. Fragments of the broken vessels fall, and they carry with them nitzotzot, sparks of the divine light, which become caught in the kelipot, the shells or husks that constitute the realm of evil and, in the material world, the ordinary substance of things. Evil is therefore not an independent principle and not the result of a human fall; it originates inside the process of creation itself, as a structural consequence of a light too strong for what was made to hold it.
This has a striking practical corollary. Because sparks are dispersed everywhere, in food, in objects, in places, in other people, every ordinary act done with right intention can raise a spark, and the whole of religious life becomes cosmic repair. That is tikkun, the third moment, and it is what gives Lurianic Kabbalah its characteristic urgency and its unusually high estimate of what human action accomplishes.
Gershom Scholem argued influentially that Luria's myth gave mythic form to the experience of the 1492 expulsion from Spain, exile written into the structure of the cosmos itself. Later scholarship, Moshe Idel's in particular, has questioned how directly that connection can be drawn, noting the antiquity of some of the components and the limited evidence that Safed kabbalists understood themselves to be responding to the expulsion. The debate is unresolved and is a standard example of the difficulty of reading mystical systems as coded history.