Isaac Luria

Luria arrived in Safed around 1570 and died of plague in 1572, aged thirty-eight. His teaching career lasted roughly two to three years, he wrote almost nothing, and he taught orally to a small closed fellowship.

What we have is therefore the work of disciples, above all Hayyim Vital, whose voluminous writings are the principal channel, and the versions disagree. Lawrence Fine's study is the standard account of the circle, its practices, and the transmission problem. Anyone who states the Lurianic system flatly is stating a reconstruction.

The system as it came down reframed Kabbalah around a catastrophe. Tzimtzum: the infinite contracts, withdrawing from a point to make room for anything other than itself, so that creation begins with a divine self-limitation. Shevirat ha-kelim: the vessels made to receive the divine light cannot hold it and shatter, scattering sparks of holiness that fall and become embedded in the shells of the material world. Tikkun: the work of gathering and raising those sparks, which is performed by human beings through observance, intention and prayer.

The reason this spread as no previous Kabbalah had is that it gave a shattered people a cosmology in which their condition was legible. Exile was not merely punishment; exile was the structure of reality, God was in exile too, and the ordinary observant Jew was engaged in repairing the universe. Within a century Lurianic categories were standard across the Jewish world, and they underlie both the Sabbatian movement and Hasidism. Tikkun olam, in its modern and largely secular sense of social repair, descends from Luria by a long and much-altered road.

The system that reaches us under Luria's name begins with a question older masters had left alone: if God is everywhere, where can a world be? The answer taught at Safed is tzimtzum, contraction. The Infinite withdrew itself from a point, so to speak, to clear a space in which creation could stand. Into that cleared space poured a ray of divine light, caught in vessels prepared to hold it; and the vessels failed. Shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels, scattered sparks of light into the depths, where they lie captive in husks, the kelipot, which are the stuff of evil and of matter. Everything that follows, in this reading, is rescue.

The human task is tikkun, repair: every commandment performed with intention, every prayer, every ethical act frees sparks and restores the broken configuration of the divine face. History itself is the long labour of gathering, exile is at once the condition of the sparks and of Israel, and the soul returns in gilgul, transmigration, until its share of the work is done. The power of the scheme is that it makes cosmology, ethics and messianism one mechanism: the end arrives not when heaven decides but when the last spark is raised. Gershom Scholem read it as Jewish history after the Spanish expulsion projected onto the cosmos, catastrophe built into creation itself and hope built into daily practice, which is much of why it conquered the Jewish world within a century.