Isaac Luria arrived in Safed in 1570, already known for kabbalistic writing on the Zohar produced during an earlier stay in Egypt, and spent the roughly two years before his death in 1572 teaching a small circle of students a strikingly reworked account of creation. Its starting point is tzimtzum, the claim that before creation could begin, the infinite divine presence, the Ein Sof, had to contract and withdraw from a conceptual point within itself, opening an empty space in which a finite world could then come into being; without this self-limitation, Luria taught, there would have been no room for anything other than God to exist at all.
Into that vacated space God then sent vessels, kelim, meant to contain and channel the emanated divine light, but the light proved too intense for the vessels assigned to the lower, harsher sephirot, and they shattered, scattering sparks of divine light trapped within shards of broken vessel throughout the material world, an event Luria called shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels. This single dramatic image did enormous theological work at once: it explained the presence of evil and impurity in the world as a structural byproduct of creation itself rather than as a separate hostile force, and it gave every subsequent human and divine action a cosmic stake, since each one either frees trapped sparks or buries them further.