The counterpart to the shattering is tikkun, repair: Luria taught that human beings, through prayer performed with precise mystical intention, kavvanah, ethical conduct and the fulfillment of the commandments, actively participate in gathering the scattered sparks of divine light and restoring the broken cosmic order, a task Luria extended even to the individual soul, which he taught migrates across multiple lifetimes, gilgul, until its own portion of the repair is complete.
Luria wrote almost nothing down himself, and the entire system survives because his students, chiefly Hayyim Vital, compiled it from memory and lecture notes into works such as the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life, which became the primary vehicle through which Lurianic teaching spread across the Jewish world in the following century. Its influence proved larger than any prior kabbalistic development: it supplied much of the mystical framework Shabbatai Tzvi's messianic movement drew on in the 1660s, and a century later it fed directly into the founding vocabulary of Hasidism, whose leaders reworked tikkun into a program of everyday devotional intensity accessible to ordinary worshippers rather than only to elite kabbalists. Because of this reach, most Kabbalah practiced or studied after the sixteenth century, including in Christian Kabbalah's later borrowings, inherits Lurianic concepts and vocabulary rather than the earlier Zoharic system in anything like its original, unmodified form.