“God created the universe in a space vacated, as it were, of His presence.
From this perspective, before the world was created, God existed alone and without limitations.
There was no one outside of Him and nothing beyond His Being.
In terms of that reality, we cannot speak of space as either geographical or situational.
We can refer only to the source from which space—the universe—was afterward created.
In that sense, before there was a universe, God was the Place of the world.”
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Understanding the Tanya, p. 215, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
