Tzimtzum

Tzimtzum is the Lurianic Kabbalistic doctrine of divine contraction as the precondition for creation. Before creation, the infinite divine plenum (Ein Sof) filled all reality. To make room for a created world, God contracted — withdrew, made absent.

Creation begins not with a divine plus-sign but with a divine minus-sign. The world exists in the space God left when God limited Godself.

The picture is the Kabbalistic statement of subtractive manifestation. Where Vedanta describes the process from the inside — the unmanifest differentiating into the manifest — Kabbalah describes it from the standpoint of the infinite plenum: creation as the deliberate self-limitation that opens room for finite existence to be.

The architecture requires a contraction at the source. If reality is what remains after impossibility is removed, then the manifest world depends on a prior withdrawal of plenitude. Tzimtzum names that prior withdrawal.