Faith is the center of my life and its foundation. By faith I mean unfailing trust in grace: righteous love from the one whose name is salvation, bringing forth repentance and a desire for the good things that come from the one whose governance and peace are always increasing. It is not an accessory to my opinions, a cultural inheritance, or a word I reserve for moments when certainty becomes convenient. It is the ground on which I stand when certainty cannot be had.

I believe in one God. This was intelligible to me even before I accepted any religion. God is not the strongest member of a class of beings called gods, nor one object among other objects in the universe. God is absolute. As I experience God, there is only God. There are no gods. The Holy One, blessed be He, is the source from whom all good things come, the giver to whom every honest achievement must finally be attributed, and the one before whom any claim of spiritual possession should become humility.

I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Gnostic. Those names identify traditions whose writings, practices, arguments, and people have formed me, but none of them accurately contains what I believe. I do not say this to make a private denomination of myself. I say it because inherited labels carry conclusions I do not receive, while the substance of faith asks for greater honesty than a convenient affiliation can provide.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I do not declare him authoritatively divine. I understand him as a little above the angels and as the perfect fulfillment of the one spoken about in Psalms and Isaiah: the righteous servant, chosen mediator, prince of peace, faithful son, burden-bearer, and manifestation of God’s saving purpose in human life. The relationship between Christ and his Father, and the ontological nature of that configuration, are immanently ineffable. What is ineffable is not merely difficult to explain; it is unavailable for assignment. I therefore do not pretend to know, classify, or declare what cannot be known, classified, or declared.

This refusal is not a reduction of Christ. It is a refusal to replace reverence with metaphysical paperwork. The inherited formulas that divide nature, essence, person, will, action, suffering, and divinity can preserve a doctrinal settlement without disclosing the reality they name. God is capable of what is impossible to us, but our inability to describe a thing does not authorize us to close it inside a definition. I can confess the son, follow his action, recognize his holiness, and trust what God accomplished through him without claiming to possess the interior architecture of God.

The four Gospels do not disclose Jesus from a single neutral vantage. They preserve distinct portraits formed by distinct communities, purposes, memories, and spiritual frames. Matthew presents authority and priestly legitimacy; Mark lets the human catastrophe remain rough and immediate; Luke organizes forgiveness, repentance, and a church able to live in the world; John reveals zeal, mystery, light, spirit, and the prophetic challenge to institutional capture. Their differences do not make them worthless, and forcing them into one smooth voice does not make them true. Each reveals and obscures. Reading faithfully requires epistemic discipline: attention to the seam, the omission, the changed name, the relocated event, the purpose of the teller, and the figure who can be seen only when the portraits are allowed to remain distinct.

I believe Christianity is a cargo cult attached to the manifestation of God in the flesh. I use that severe description because much of Christianity reproduces the external cargo of Christ—names, offices, rituals, declarations, authorized boundaries—while failing to reproduce the holiness of his action. Yet its shortcomings also contain a peculiar beauty that certifies something of its truth. The structure of Christ’s actions carries a holiness that a deeply observant rabbi could recognize, a pattern too strange and coherent to dismiss casually. Either divine fate arranged it or learned minds constructed the narrative with extraordinary purpose. The biblical authors often appear too rough, partisan, inconsistent, or savage to have manufactured the polished system later theology claims to find. Ironically, that roughness can function as a certificate: holiness survives through people who could neither tidy it nor fully understand what they carried. Much the same is true of the prophets.

The Torah is the word of God. Its authority is outgoing and ongoing, not an obsolete scaffold discarded once another religion arose. I receive it as the rabbis do: as living instruction that continues to demand interpretation, attention, argument, remembrance, and practice. Christ is not made clearer by severing him from Torah. His gestures, disputes, healings, parables, silences, use of scripture, relation to the temple, and treatment of the vulnerable become intelligible inside the Jewish world from which they came.

God’s instruction is not merely a store of answers to consult after a problem has already taken shape. I want it to become the perspective from which the problem first appears: a grammar of importance that gives money, suffering, love, opportunity, fear, and blessing their proper proportions before they begin making sovereign claims. Fixed return to Torah matters because the world continually repairs its own hierarchy inside us. Torah can repair salience in the other direction, not by making every decision an exercise in splitting hairs, but by teaching the heart what deserves to remain first when everything else becomes loud.

I do not receive Paul, Hebrews, or Revelation as governing authorities. I do not believe baptism must be by water. These boundaries matter because they change the architecture of the faith that follows. They prevent a later theory of Christ from automatically overruling Torah, prevent a sacramental mechanism from replacing an inward turning, and prevent the most confident institutional voice from being mistaken for the voice of God merely because it was bound into the same volume.

Righteousness does not arise from mutilating the self until no unwelcome impulse remains. It does not consist in terror of one’s biology, performance of spiritual normality, or the production of an immaculate internal monologue. Faith in grace brings forth repentance. Repentance is a real turning: away from contempt, exploitation, cruelty, entitlement, deceit, malicious degradation, willful blindness, and the elevation of self over another; toward humility, consistency, sincerity, gratitude, zeal, and reverence. These qualities do not buy grace. They are among its fruits.

What comes from the heart matters more than the fantasy of never having an unruly thought. The test is what a person cultivates, protects, excuses, and brings into the world. A person may be frustrated, afraid, slothful, despairing, neurologically unruly, or inwardly at war and still turn toward the good. The spiritual life is not the permanent conquest of every weakness. It is the continued refusal to enthrone weakness as contempt, and the continued willingness to be corrected by love.

My understanding of Christ is inseparable from the tragedy of Judas. Jesus chose someone he knew could betray him, kept him near, shared bread with him, washed his feet, protected him from premature exposure, and called him friend at the wound. Judas shows that perfect love does not become coercion merely because it knows the cost of freedom. Grace can be refused. A relationship capable of faithfulness must also be capable of betrayal. The sorrow of Christ is therefore not only the cross and the garden. It is the long discipline of loving someone he would not force to remain.

That same pattern appears at the scale of covenant. Israel, the disciples, the church, and the individual soul each receive love they can misunderstand, convert into entitlement, or answer with a performance emptied of trust. The answer is not divine domination. It is an open return: bread still offered, mercy still possible, the door not made meaningless by being kicked down. Love that preserves agency accepts the possibility of grief while continuing to make repentance real.

I understand faith also through the image of the excellent bride. God’s apparent silence need not mean absence. It can be the respect by which divine strength does not drown the smaller light of the beloved. A bride formed only by constant signals of approval has not yet learned fidelity; she has learned the management of reward. Trust matures when she can remain at the door without manufacturing proof, accept correction without becoming an imitation, and say not “if you love me” but “I am yours.” Grace does not erase her character. It softens cruelty, straightens what cannot bear weight, strengthens her capacity to give and receive love, and reveals rather than replaces the person who was loved.

This is why faith and repentance cannot be separated. Trust in perfect sufficiency does not make conduct irrelevant. It makes transformation possible without turning transformation into a fee. The one who trusts grace can admit error without believing error is the final name of the self. The one who loves God can receive a narrow way without imagining hardship to be proof of abandonment. Loving devotion and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss. Faithfulness rises from the earth while righteousness looks down from heaven. Their meeting is not a technical system but a life ordered toward communion.

I believe in miracles. God works through us to perform good things. I have experienced events I understand as answers to prayer, warnings, provisions, voices, coincidences too exact to forget, and moments in which knowledge arrived by no ordinary route available to me. I attest that these things happened without claiming that the attestation settles their mechanism. Imagination, error, interpretation, and false confidence remain possible. The supernatural can be real while remaining inscrutable, and discernment is necessary precisely because not every inward voice deserves obedience.

I have lately begun to recognize that my spiritual nature has needs, as everyone’s does, and that attention to those needs requires patience. I am too inclined to chase each small possible indicator of God as though I were a detective and every coincidence were a case that must be solved immediately. I need to let multiplicity stack: to allow many indications to accumulate into a pattern before I assign them a meaning. More importantly, I need not ask God to perform. A relationship with God cannot be made sound by repeatedly demanding a sign, an answer, or a timely demonstration of presence. This is a discipline I am working on, not yet a perspective I can claim to have distilled or matured.

I believe in angels, both the biblical and the benevolent variety. I do not need to reduce every encounter to a named rank or a complete cosmology. An agent may convey warning, help, presence, or instruction without giving me authority over its nature. The invisible world, if it is truly governed by God, is not made more truthful by my ability to inventory it.

I believe in reincarnation into the present life one is currently living for the purpose of spiritual refinement. This is a lunaric-adjacent view: not a procession of exotic identities offered as biography, but a return into the life already being lived, where another passage through the same existence permits correction, learning, mercy, and a better answer. I hold this as belief rather than demonstrable machinery. Its moral meaning is immediate. Life is not disposable. The present is the place in which the soul is refined, and what remains unlearned returns as work.

A melon plant taught me something about why this formation matters. It produced abundant fruit, but the fruit passed almost immediately from promise into fermentation and collapse. The gift arrived without a sufficient place in which its goodness could remain. The lesson is not merely to restrain abundance or close more doors. A blessing needs a vessel already ordered toward the giver, or the blessing can become its own sovereign and consume the life receiving it. Seeking first the kingdom means asking for the indwelling and priority by which what God gives can ripen, remain good, and become nourishment rather than decomposition.

Human beings often need to see life from a vantage within what I think of as God’s light cone: to experience events in relation to Hashem rather than from the small and urgent center of the self. I can imagine such a vantage, but what I imagine is not the way it actually is. The way it is would probably be beneficial to me in ways my imagined account cannot reproduce. It therefore cannot remain an attractive interpretation laid over experience. It has to occur at the level of change, until the perspective itself increasingly resides in Hashem.

I recognize the mutual unintelligibility of the different camps of Judeo-Christian faith. They often use the same words for different objects and different words for the same devotion. A Christian can hear ongoing Torah as a rejection of grace. A Jew can hear son of God as the multiplication of gods. A mystic can hear ineffability as permission for invention, while an institutional believer hears it as danger. I do not expect one camp’s grammar to become another’s merely by insisting more loudly. I try instead to attend to holiness, fruit, fidelity, and the direction in which a teaching moves the heart.

The genealogies, lists, names, offices, cities, musicians, and displaced identities in scripture matter to me because scripture often teaches through structure as well as declaration. Samuel can be a descendant of Korah, a Levite situated in Ephraim, a sanctuary servant, prophet, mediator, and anointer of David without any one of those identities exhausting the others. Heman’s lineage can be read not only as pedigree but as a field of repeated delimiters, alternate names, containment, substitution, burden, descent, compassion, and faithfulness. Korah’s failed claim to sacred access is answered within his own surviving line by a mediator appointed rather than self-appointed. I do not mistake such readings for a license to make every sequence say anything. I regard them as an invitation to read closely enough that literal placement, symbolic meaning, and spiritual consequence can illuminate one another.

I actively listen to Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi and Rabbi Kirt Schneider. I read the Bible every day, usually the Psalms or wherever I feel led. This daily return matters more than the construction of a finished system. Scripture is not present in my life only when I am preparing an argument. It is prayer, correction, company, memory, disturbance, and the place in which language is repeatedly made capable of carrying reverence.

Remembering to pray about an emotionally difficult situation is not a reliable way to proceed. I do not always remember, in the middle of hurt or anger, that I should pray; sometimes I lash out. The difficulty is not simply forgetting a useful action. Inside the event, pain can become the entire visible world. Deepening my faith must therefore mean deepening the maturation of my experience of life: asking God to let me perceive everything as it relates to Him, so that prayer is not merely recalled after salience has already been captured. I am still working on inhabiting that perspective. I do not yet live there consistently.

Faith is therefore not my confidence that I have solved God. It is confidence in God when God remains unsolved. It is trust in grace before the evidence has arranged itself for comfort, trust that produces repentance rather than complacency, and love that seeks the good because peace under God is always increasing. It is the center of my life because every other center eventually asks to be worshiped and then proves too small. God alone is God. I belong to Him, and I ask that what is false in me be corrected, what is cruel be softened, what is weak be strengthened, and what is good be made useful in love.

Longer foundations and partial expressions of this faith appear in And Jesus Wept for Judas, Towards a Perfected Christ, Was Jesus Man and God, Man or God?, On the Nature of God, Pride Leads to Contempt, and The Most Excellent Bride.