Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, in his Kedushat Levi commentary on the opening verse of the Torah, makes a claim that sounds simple but overturns how most people think about creation: God never stopped creating.
A human carpenter builds a chair and walks away. A painter finishes a canvas and moves on. Their creations persist independently of them. But God's creation is fundamentally different. The daily morning prayer says it explicitly: God "creates light and fashions darkness" in the present tense. Not "created." Creates. Right now. Every moment.
The Torah itself hints at this in the verse: "which God created to make" (Genesis 2:3). The phrase "to make" (la'asot, לעשות) implies that creation was not a completed event but an ongoing process. God is part of every creature He ever brought into being. Not as a distant first cause, but as a sustaining presence without which the creature would instantly revert to nothingness.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak connects this to the morning blessing recited after using the washroom: "Who has fashioned man with wisdom." Here the Hebrew uses the past tense, yatzar (יצר), because it refers to a specific human being who already exists. But when speaking of God's ongoing creative activity in the universe at large, the present tense is mandatory.
The Arizal, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, taught that when we say "God is King" (Hashem Melekh), we invoke the concept of ayin (אין), "nothing," meaning that at every moment God gives us life by not withdrawing it. We are "nothing" unless God's creative act continues. The commandments are the bridge between this "nothing" (ayin) and the "something" (yesh, יש) of the physical world, performed in the material realm but connecting to the infinite source that sustains it all.