At 35 I’m a scared little boy again; face disfigured with hideous tears, hands shaking and clenching. I wish I could say that my faith has been a source of comfort. That my knowledge that mom is in paradise is enough to keep me from grief. But a month after her funeral there’s only despair. My sister and I now live in a world without our mother, and will continue to live in a world without our mother for the rest of our lives. What memories, I wonder, will nurture us in sleepless nights? What stories will we tell her grandchildren? Videos of her exist that capture her voice, her expressions, her laughter, her wit, her shining youthful skin, her benevolent eyes… but can they ever contain her essence? The vital core of who she was? Her spirit? I suspect not. The image is never the substance. People only inhabit the earth once.

In America’s 250th year, there has been a disturbing rise in antisemitism in the country’s politics. Whilst the left argues that American Jews who support Israel are “pro genocide” and root their hostility toward Israel in Marxist postcolonial theory, on the right the charge is that to be Jewish is to be fundamentally un-American and even a threat to America due to dual loyalty to Israel. Such a narrative reeks of historical illiteracy. Rightwing antisemites forget (which is to say, they ignore) how intertwined the story of the American founding is with diaspora Jewry.

The far left has been using their donors and organizations to prop up the “woke right”/ “alt right”/fake right as controlled opposition in an attempt to weaken Republican campaigns, drive down voter turnout, and poison the minds of the next generation of conservatives.

My first poem in seven years.

We tend to conflate personal holiness with constant effort. And while personal holiness does indeed require actions and not just words, I think our conflation of personal holiness with nonstop effort still—in a way—gives us a distorted view of G-d and our relationship to Him. We begin to think of G-d as a father whose love is conditional upon our meeting certain expectations, and if we fail to meet those expectations, then He’ll no longer love us.

To be a “postliberal” conservative is to be someone who seeks to rediscover and excavate a conservatism that emerges from a deeper strata of Western civilization—pre-Enlightenment—and draws legitimacy from a more ancient and teleological epistemology beyond and apart from the classical liberal framework that gave birth to the fake conservatism you and I have been exposed to for practically our whole lives.