Shevirat HaKelim — The Shattering of the Vessels
The Lurianic account of a primordial catastrophe in which the vessels meant to hold divine light broke, scattering fragments of that light throughout creation.
In Luria's cosmology, the sefirot's first attempt to receive Ein Sof's overwhelming light took the form of vessels (kelim) built to contain it, but in the unstable early world of Tohu ('chaos'), those vessels — especially the lower seven, from Chesed down — could not hold the intensity and shattered. The shattering scattered both broken vessel-shards and the sparks of light they had briefly held throughout the cosmos, where the shards became kelipot, 'husks' or 'shells,' that conceal and constrict divine sparks trapped within ordinary matter. This single event is Lurianic Kabbalah's answer to the problem of evil and imperfection: the world is not flawed by design but by an accident partway through its own construction, which is why repair (tikkun) is not merely improvement but a return to an interrupted process. It is one of Luria's most radical doctrines precisely because it locates brokenness inside the divine process itself, not only in human failure.
Written about in
- What Kabbalah says about failure
Luria's vessels — especially the lower seven, from Chesed downward — shattered because the light they received was stronger than their build. The word the tradition uses for this is not sin. The world is flawed by an accident partway through its own construction, which makes repair a resumption of an interrupted process rather than a punishment for anything.