Tzimtzum

Tzimtzum, “contraction” or “withdrawal”, is the first act of creation in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. Since the infinite light of Ein Sof filled everything, there was no place for anything other than God. So Ein Sof withdrew into itself, leaving an empty space, into which a single ray of divine light then entered to form the worlds.

The idea turned the older picture of creation as an outflowing of the divine into a drama that begins with self-limitation. It is a striking reversal: God’s first act toward the world is not a revelation but a concealment, an absence that makes room for something other than God.

Later thinkers interpreted tzimtzum in different ways. Some took it literally, as a real withdrawal of God from the space of the world; others, especially in Ḥabad Hasidism, held that it is a concealment only from our point of view, so that in truth nothing exists apart from God. In modern Jewish thought it has been read as an image of the room God gives to human freedom.