God and the world are, in essence, opposites; they are contradictions in terms of being.
They can exist together only when there is a state of ignorance, when the world does not know the Divine essence and cannot even recognize its presence.
Because as soon as the world feels God, it cannot continue to be anything, much less itself.
That is to say, all the world lives on the basis of the fiction that it has some sort of independent being.
Where there is a knowledge of the truth, the world ceases to exist.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From The Long Shorter Way by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz