The Repair

God inhaled and withdrew from the world, contracted Himself to make space for the world: an act of self-purification, to free Himself from evil. But the evil was mixed in with other divine powers, and when it flew outward in Creation it shattered the vessels, the lights of primordial humankind, and everything was dispersed—the original pure lights and all their impure forms too. And so everything Made was mixed, the constructive and destructive laced together. And as the descendants of Adam Kadmon, the primordial one, we are given breath to gather the shards, the evil as well as the good ones, and return them to their right places. This is the Repair: our only meaningful work. —from "The Archivist" by Martha Cooley