The new age of Kabbalah: contemporary Kabbalah, New Age and postmodern spirituality

In recent years, a remarkable revival of interest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism has taken place in Israel, the United States and other Western countries. This revival, which includes a resurgence of Kabbalistic and Hassidic doctrines and practices, coincided with the emergence of the New Age and other related spiritual and new religious movements in the last decades of the twentieth century. New Age themes appear in various contemporary Kabbalistic and Neohassidic groups, and there are significant similarities between them and other recent spiritual and religious revival movements. This article demonstrates that central characteristics of the new spiritual culture appear not only in new Kabbalah and Neohassidic groups that explicitly use New Age themes, but also among more traditional forms of Jewish mysticism. These shared characteristics can be explained not so much by direct influences, but rather by the nature of both phenomena and the postmodern context as a whole. This article claims that the new «postmodern spirituality» reflects the cultural logic of late global capitalism and responds to the new social conditions in the postmodern era.