Kabbalah

Reshimu — The Residual Impression

Even in the empty space Lurianic Kabbalah says God deliberately vacated to make room for creation, a faint trace of the original infinite light was said to remain behind, like the last scent of wine clinging to an emptied cask.

Reshimu, "impression" or "residue," is the trace of the ohr Ein Sof that Lurianic teaching holds is left behind within the chalal even after tzimtzum withdraws the main body of infinite light. Chaim Vital's writings offer the analogy of a vessel that once held wine: even after being emptied and cleaned, some residual scent remains, imperceptible in isolation but a genuine trace of what was there before. The reshimu matters because it means the empty space of creation is never an absolute void; it retains a subtle imprint of the divine light that once filled it, significant for how the kav and subsequent vessels interact with that space. Later Kabbalists debated the reshimu's precise nature at length, since it sits at the philosophically delicate point where Lurianic cosmology has to explain how anything of God remains present in a space explicitly defined by God's withdrawal from it.

Written about in

• What Kabbalah says about failure

  Chaim Vital's image is a cask emptied of wine that still smells of wine. Even the space God deliberately vacated keeps a residue of the light that once filled it. The tradition's most delicate point is also its most useful here: no emptying is ever total.