In Judaism, the most extensive explanation of pre-creation God comes in Kabbalah or Kabbala, a mystical belief system first developed in the 12th century. An oral tradition that adherents say has its roots in unwritten revelations passed down to Moses and Adam, Kabbalah is perhaps best known as the origin of the theory of the Tree of Life. However, it also lays out several doctrines through which the technicalities of creation are laid out.
The Bible states that in the beginning God’s creation emerged out of nothingness. In Kaballah, “something” is known as “yesh,” was created out of “Ein,” or nothingness, by God creating room for that which is not God. To do so, God performed “tzimtzum,” the condensing of Himself an infinitely dense and powerful point which then exploded out to create space for the universe to be created, in a manner that parallels the modern concept of the Big Bang.
In Kabbalah, then, space and time do not exist in the same manner that we consider them in our everyday lives. Instead, God existed as an infinite force, the “Ein Sof,” meaning “without end.” The aspects of God outside the human world are fundamentally unknowable, Kabbalah suggests, to the point that adherents may differ from the teachings of the Bible in referring to the creator as “it” rather than “He.”
