Redefining Kabbalah: Combinative American Religion at the Kabbalah Centre

This article argues for understanding the practices of the Kabbalah Centre as "combinative American religion," Catherine Albanese's theory of metaphysical American religion, which better reveals its founder's and practitioners' negotiation of the United States in the twentieth century than the terms mysticism or New Religious Movement (NRM). The use of mysticism to describe Kabbalah has been debated in the study of Judaism. Debates over the term mysticism, the "authenticity" of Kabbalah as mysticism, or even specific examples such as the Kabbalah Centre's founder Philip Berg as "authentic" Kabbalah obscure the historical question: how has the Kabbalah Centre been an example of American religion? Highlighting the Kabbalah Centre's combinative tendency shows how similar the Kabbalah Centre is to other religious practices in the United States. This article analyzes Philip Berg and the Kabbalah Centre as an example of how practices typically understood in a trajectory of Jewish history also have a place in American history, expanding the complexity of both historiographies.