A secular Jewish woman is called back from a coma by a rabbi blowing the shofar over her hospital bed, and two years later, that same rabbi is murdered in Australia's worst antisemitic terror attack, on the eve of the book they built together going out into the world. "Four Strands of a Single Thread" is a personal essay about how nearly dying, and then truly losing someone, remade one woman's relationship to her own Jewishness. In 2022, journalist and author Nikki Goldstein was in an induced coma with severe pneumonia when Rabbi Eli Schlanger blew a shofar at her bedside; she woke the next day. What began as gratitude became years of recorded conversations between them, published this year as Conversations with My Rabbi.

The gift of oneself is a brief poem that works as both an injunction and a journey: go toward the other, dwell in the word, and read the body, the soul to illuminate one's self. The text closes on a gesture of transmission: leave a footprint, ripen your first fruit, write "the root verse of a more Jewish tomorrow." It's a threshold poem for a better (jewish) tomorrow.