Lurianic Kabbalah described the breaking of the vessels as a cosmic catastrophe requiring an elaborate, largely esoteric discipline of restoration; eighteenth-century Hasidism took the same doctrine and turned it into a program for ordinary daily life, a transformation as consequential as the original teaching.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and his successors taught avodah be-gashmiyut, service through corporeality: raising the sparks trapped in material things not through ascetic withdrawal or scholarly study but through ordinary activity, eating, working, even idle conversation, performed with focused awareness (kavvanah) directed toward God. Where Lurianic practice as taught in Safed had been the province of an elite of ascetic scholars performing specific meditative intentions, Hasidic teaching held that a simple person's attentive handling of an ordinary meal could accomplish the same cosmic work, since the sparks are said to be scattered everywhere without discrimination.
This democratization was not uncontested. The Mitnagdim, the traditionalist opponents of Hasidism led by the Vilna Gaon, viewed the popularization of Lurianic theology, and especially its extension to bodily activity by people without extensive kabbalistic training, as a dangerous dilution bordering on antinomianism, in memory of the Sabbatean and Frankist movements, which had used similar mystical material to justify transgression. Hasidic teachers insisted their doctrine required, rather than dispensed with, halakhic observance, holding that sparks are raised through commandments correctly performed, not through their violation, and rabbinic bans and counter-bans followed before an uneasy accommodation was reached in the nineteenth century.