Jewish mystical tradition grapples with this very question, offering a powerful, and somewhat unsettling, origin story. It's a story of creation through destruction, a cosmic recycling program, if you will.
The idea is this: at the very beginning, God created worlds, plural. But, according to some accounts, these weren't quite right. They didn't please Him. They were…imperfect. As we find in Genesis Rabbah 3:7 and elsewhere, God destroyed these worlds. Imagine the scale of that!
But what happened to them? Were they simply erased?
That's where the really fascinating twist comes in. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, in his book Esh Kadosh, offers a powerful reinterpretation, linking the idea of destroyed worlds with the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari) and his myth of Shvirat HaKelim, the Shattering of the Vessels, and Kibbutz HaNitzotzot, the Gathering of the Sparks.
The Ari taught that God's light was originally contained in vessels, but these vessels couldn't hold the immense power, and they shattered, scattering sparks of divine light everywhere. This shattering, this cosmic catastrophe, was actually the prelude to tikkun olam—the repair of the world.
Rabbi Shapira takes this a step further. He suggests that those shattered vessels, those destroyed worlds, weren’t just discarded. Instead, they became the very foundation for our present universe, the olam ha-tikkun, the world of repair. He transforms a myth of destruction into a myth of creation.
Think about that for a moment. The imperfections, the failures of previous attempts, are built into the very fabric of our reality. It's a profound idea, isn't it?
Essentially, as described in Tree of Souls (Schwartz), Rabbi Shapira created a new myth that doesn’t contradict the Ari’s. The end result of the two versions is the same, even if the path they take to get there is slightly different.
Rabbi Shapira also believed this cosmic shattering could happen again. He even saw the Holocaust, which he experienced firsthand in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a time of the Breaking of the Vessels (Esh Kadosh 122-124). But even in the face of such unimaginable horror, he held onto his belief in renewal and new creation. For him, the primary task was repentance. Only in this way, he argued, could all the worlds be mended.
It's a challenging and ultimately hopeful message. It suggests that even in the darkest of times, even when it feels like everything is falling apart, there is the potential for rebuilding, for repair, for a new beginning.
So, the next time you look around at this world, remember the broken vessels. Remember that even our imperfections, our struggles, and our failures can be the seeds of something new and beautiful. Maybe, just maybe, that's the point.