Four Strands of a Single Thread

In September 2022, I was in a coma. A sudden, life-threatening bout of pneumonia ravaged my lungs, and for days I hovered between life and death in a sterile ICU room, machines humming, my family holding vigil. I don't remember the first time Rabbi Eli Schlanger came to see me. But I'm told, by my husband, who begged Eli to say a few prayers over my near-lifeless body, that he stood at my bedside and blew the shofar. A ram's horn, an ancient symbol of our people, a sacred instrument polished by his gentle and regular touch, sounded over the beeping and whirring of the machinery of the intensive care ward. Its raw, trembling cry cut through the veil between worlds and landed in my body, which so far hadn't responded to the drugs or tubes or pumps taking over my breathing. Eli's miracle didn't happen immediately. But about twenty-four hours later, I stirred. The virus attacking my lungs began to recede, and they brought me out of the induced coma. And so began the strange homecoming I didn't see coming. This could have been an essay about three strands of a single thread — my relationship to my Jewishness. Not the passive cultural inheritance of my youth, which I rebelled against and resisted, nor the pretend-assimilated Jewish identity I put on and took off like a spring coat, but a deep, ancestral, living thing. It took nearly dying to wake up to it. I write this now knowing there is a fourth strand I never wanted, and could never have imagined, and that it has rewoven every thread that came before it. The First Strand: The Sound That Woke Me Like many of my generation, I had walked a seeker's path until then, flirting with different versions of spirituality like new romances — cozying up to Eastern mysticism, self-help, yoga, with earnest intent but never focusing on one tradition. Judaism had always felt dusty to me. Male. Coded. Out of touch and arcane in all the wrong ways. What's with separating men and women in the shul? What's with the wigs and the bad black suits? I worked at Vogue. I whirled and twirled in the fashion world, and this religion with its archaic rules made me cringe. But all that changed when the shofar rang out its ancient notes and called me toward something nascent in my DNA — something woven into the core of my being. I discovered that faith is not something you choose. It's something that chooses you when everything else rips apart. I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it to be poetic. I say it because it's the truest thing I know. There is a sort of humiliation in nearly dying. It bypasses vanity and the ego. You don't get to curate it, you don't get to edit it for effect, there’s nothing glamorous or Instagramable about it, you’re simply a body in a bed, being kept alive by strangers and machines, while the people who love you stand in a corridor helplessly wondering what to do next. My daughter, Liberty, is the one who spotted Rabbi Eli in that corridor. She’s the reason any of this happened at all. I have thought about that a thousand times since — that it was her instinct, her small act of reaching for a stranger in a black suit and a kippah (skullcap) on his head, that became the hinge on which the rest of my life turned. When I came back, and I do mean back, as though I had been somewhere else — I didn't return to the same woman. I returned wearing my Jewishness differently. Not as an inheritance I was obligated to carry, but as something that had reached into the sacred and secret internal spaces of my soul and rearranged the furniture. I started asking questions I'd spent fifty-seven years avoiding. I started calling Eli. He started calling me. What began as gratitude became curiosity, and out of that curiosity bloomed the deepest education of my adult life. The Second Strand: The World We Woke Into The second strand is the world we all woke up to after October 7, 2023. Suddenly, being Jewish wasn't just an inherited cultural identity or a High Holiday obligation — it was dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the world my German grandparents fled in the 1930s with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Antisemitism didn't just rear its head; it swallowed the room. I saw the so-called educated classes cheer on savagery. I watched, with a kind of horror I didn't have language for, the media I was part of, peddle lies and libels, as university luminaries accused eighteen-year-old students of genocide, as mobs chanted for the death of Jews "from the river to the sea" in my own city, on our Harbour Bridge and at the steps of our Opera House and on my own streets. What had once felt like safety, our so-called “assimilation”, began to look like a dream. Or worse, a sedative. The West, in its moral free-fall, now embraced the very ideologies it once swore to fight. It was a narrative and social inversion so complete it left me gasping. Like many liberal-leaning Western diaspora Jews, I never thought much about being Jewish. I was living my life, working, mothering, writing books about self-love and shadow work, comfortable in the assumption that the worst of our history was, for people like me, a museum exhibit rather than a live threat. October 7 ended that assumption for an entire generation of secular, assimilated Jews, all at once, in real time. I felt the ground move under people who had never once considered themselves particularly Jewish, and I felt it move under me. Eli and I talked about this constantly. He never let me sit in despair without also handing me a framework for meaning; that was his gift, and I didn't yet know how much I would need it. The Third Strand: The Conversations

In the middle of all this, Rabbi Eli and I began recording a series of conversations that became the foundation of a book: Conversations with My Rabbi, (published by HarperCollins). In it, I asked the hard questions of Jewish faith, modernity, and purpose, and he answered with wisdom rooted in Torah, Kabbalah, and timeless truth — anchored, in the end, around the Seven Noahide Laws, an ancient, almost startlingly simple and universal code for how any human being, Jewish or not, might live an ethical life. The book was not meant to preach. It was not meant to convert anyone; that's not what we do as Jews, Eli would remind me, almost amused that people assumed otherwise. It was meant to be a real, raw, sometimes funny, sometimes fierce exchange between a secular Jewish woman and a rabbi, about what it means to live well, think deeply, and act ethically in a fractured world. We wanted it to offer something radically hopeful: a window into Jewish thought that was compassionate, relevant, and powerful enough to resonate across cultures and time, the way it always has for a people who have survived exile, trauma, miracles, and rebirth. I called myself, half-jokingly, his foot soldier. He had the learning; I had the platform and the questions of an ordinary, doubting, striving, modern woman. Between us, I thought, we might build something that could outlast either of us. I had no idea how literally that would turn out to be true. The Fourth Strand: What I Did Not Want to Write On the evening of December 14, 2025, Rabbi Eli Schlanger organized “Chanukah by the Sea”, the candle-lighting ceremony he had run on Bondi Beach for eighteen years. It was the quintessential Eli event — families gathered in joy and prayer for the festival of light, on brand and on mission for a man who used to say he wanted the whole world to light up with the Jewish flame. He had organized extra police and security, because even Eli, sunny and fearless as he was, understood the risk of being so identifiably Jewish in a public place in this particular moment in history. He was murdered that night, along with fourteen other people, in the worst act of antisemitic terrorism Australia has ever seen. He was forty-one years old. He left behind his wife, Chaya, and five children, including a baby boy only two months old. I’m not going to gild the lily, because that was never Eli's way and it will never be mine: I do not know how to contain this. In all our months of conversation, we had talked about murder in the abstract, in spiritual and philosophical terms — what Jewish law says about justice, about the soul, about how a person comes to terms with violence done to the innocent. Then Eli was, in the plainest and most obscene sense of the word, killed. I have sat with that sentence more times than I can count, and it still doesn't sound like something that happened in my lifetime, in my city, to my rabbi, in the middle of a conversation we were still having. His last recorded words to me were on December 10th. He told me the book was going to “go global”. Four days later, he was gone. Here’s the part I didn't expect, and the part I think matters most. I did not stop. Conversations with My Rabbi was published in May 2026 by Harper Influence in America, HarperCollins in Australia, Harper Nonfiction in the UK, three houses, one book, launched at Chabad Bondi to a crowd that filled the room and included the New South Wales Premier, the Honourable Chris Minns, as well as other dignitaries and media identities. Eli's father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, sat with me and finished the final chapter Eli never got to complete, with all of Eli’s verve, passion and intent, carrying his voice forward the way only someone who loved him could. Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin checked every page against the tradition Eli had given his life to. What had begun as two friends talking into a microphone became, without either of us choosing it, a living memorial, and, I hope, exactly the kind of "radically hopeful" offering we always meant it to be, except now written in a register neither of us wanted: grief instead of just wonder, remembrance instead of just discovery. I still wear the Magen David I started wearing after October 7. I wear it now, I confess, as something closer to armour, not just a symbol of faith but a talisman against the arrows, literal and otherwise, that come your way for being visibly, unapologetically Jewish in this world. People look at me sometimes, a blonde, blue-eyed, white-passing woman, decades in the fashion industry, as though the star at my throat doesn't add up. It adds up. It has never added up more. Writing as Mitzvah I used to think writing was my form of self-expression. I understand now that it is something closer to praise; an act I perform not instead of grief but alongside it, the two woven so tightly through each other I can no longer separate them. Every word I write about Eli, about faith, about the strange mercy of nearly dying and then having to keep living, is a small candle I am lighting on his behalf, because he can no longer light his own. As the world coerces us into conformity, with peer pressure, with the flattening, borrowed opinions of a crowd that has never once had to bury someone for the crime of lighting a menorah in public – the bravest among us dare to go our own way, to follow the compass of our own wild hearts, even when, especially when, that compass points somewhere our friends and colleagues would rather we didn't go. That’s what Eli did every single day of his life, without ever making it a performance. It’s the only inheritance of his I know how to properly honour. I did not choose this fourth strand. I would give back every reader, every headline, every translation of that book into languages I don't speak, to have Eli alive and irritated with me for asking him another impossible question while he was busy, on his way to doing something else, something good. But faith, I have learned twice now, once in an ICU bed and once on a beach I used to walk past without a second thought, is not something you choose. It chooses you, when everything else shatters. And when it chooses you twice, you don't get to put it down again. So I keep writing. Not because it fixes anything; grief doesn't resolve, it just changes shape — but because Eli taught me, in the most practical and least sentimental way imaginable, that you don’t change the world with slogans. You change it with actions. A book finished. A story told honestly. A star worn visibly. A shofar that once called a half-dead woman back into her body, still calling, still asking all of us to wake up, to notice, to refuse the darkness one small, stubborn act of light at a time. That is the thread now. Four strands, not three. And it’s stronger now for the frays, rips and tears.