And so, too, his neoconservatism is firmly rooted in Judaism. In an essay on Michael Oakeshott written many years later, Kristol recalled the day in 1956 when, as an editor of Encounter in London, he found on his desk an unsolicited manuscript by Oakeshott entitled "On Being Conservative." It was a great coup for the magazine to receive, over the transom, an essay by that eminent philosopher. Kristol read it "with great pleasure and appreciation" — and then politely rejected it. It was, he later explained (although not to Oakeshott at the time), "irredeemably secular, as I — being a Jewish conservative — am not." Oakeshott's "conservative disposition," to enjoy and esteem the present rather than what was in the past or might be in the future, left little room for any religion, still less for Judaism:

Judaism especially, being a more this-worldly religion than Christianity, moves us to sanctify the present in our daily lives — but always reminding us that we are capable of doing so only through God's grace to our distant forefathers. Similarly, it is incumbent upon us to link our children and grandchildren to this "great chain of being," however suitable or unsuitable their present might be to our conservative disposition. And, of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.

Kristol was "born theotropic" — and born Jewish. In a recent essay on evangelicals and Jews, Wilfred McClay recalled a dinner when that subject came up and Kristol, "with casual assurance," remarked: "Well, after all, religion is what you're born with." He was not moved by the reminder that evangelicals are not born with their religion — that, on the contrary, they have to be "born again." Kristol's neo-orthodoxy required no such rebirth. In "An Autobiographical Memoir," he confessed that his "religious observance" was not always commensurate with his "religious views." But one religious commandment he did faithfully observe: "Honour thy father and thy mother." And thy forefathers and foremothers, and thy children and grandchildren: the Jewish heritage and the Jewish religion.

My husband, Irving Kristol, died on the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 2009. Four years earlier, he started a "Commonplace" notebook. The first entry, under the date 10/16/05, was inspired by the cycle of holy days that had just concluded with Yom Kippur:

The High Holidays are gone and I am impressed once again with the two spirits that dwell in the breast of Judaism (and X'ity). First, the rationalist (in the Aristotelian sense), which provides rational explanations for religious practice, and the second which takes religious practice as primary and, contemplating it, derives profound human meanings from it. I believe the second is more authentically religious, but also the most dangerous, since it can open doors one didn't know existed. The first, however, is more "conservative" as well as more popular with rabbis and clerics, since it provides them with plausible explanations for the laity.

When I was at Commentary, we published only anthropological-rational explanations for the holidays. Even then I knew it was a sterile exercise. Judaism does not explain the holidays; the holidays explain Judaism.

The first explanation is reductive, the second expansive — reductive to the material, expansive to the spiritual.

"Spiritual": has there ever been a human community that did not believe that, when a man died, his spirit left him? Modern science is trying hard to reduce the spiritual to the material. But the scientists themselves know damn well that when they die, something more than reduction has occurred.