' Hebrew Mysticism '...

The role played by Kabbala and Hasidism in the thought and spirituality of contemporary Judaism is far from insignificant, though its importance is not as great as in former times........... Although there is hardly any living Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature, the personal thought of religious writers such as Abraham Isaac Kook (c. 1865–1935)—spiritual leader, mystic, and chief rabbi of Palestine—remains influential. Furthermore, religious thought in Westernized Jewish circles between the two World Wars received a powerful stimulus from the philosopher Martin Buber, whose work is in part devoted to the propagation of Hasidic ideology as he understood it......... “Neo-Orthodoxy,” the theological system founded in Germany by Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), was indifferent to mysticism at the outset, but it too came to be influenced by it, especially after the rediscovery of living Judaism in Poland during World War I by Western Jewish thinkers. Also significant is the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72), a Polish Jewish theologian of distinguished Hasidic background and dual culture—traditional and Western............... from Britannica