Nikki Goldstein doesn’t remember the first time she met Rabbi Eli Schlanger. Afterall, she was in a coma at the time.
The Sydney journalist had battled chronic lung disease for years, and hospital stays were not unusual. But this admission in 2022 was different. At some point the head of the ICU came to her bedside and told her that without intubation within the hour, she would be dead. She had just enough time to send “I love you” texts to her mother, daughter, and sister.
Her husband and daughter kept a bedside vigil as the situation worsened. Then her daughter spotted someone across the ward.
“She nudged her dad and said, ‘Hey Dad, is that a rabbi?’” Goldstein recounted to Chana Weisberg on Chabad.org’s Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories series. Her husband crossed the ICU and began speaking to him.
The man they met that day was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, assistant rabbi at Chabad-Lubavitch of Bondi. Schlanger wore many hats, and one of them was a hospital chaplain.
“My wife is in trouble,” Goldstein’s husband told him, “but she’s Jewish, and she would really appreciate it if this is her last day that you could say some prayers.”
Schlanger came to her bedside and prayed, reciting the Psalms associated with healing and salvation. Being that it was the Jewish month of Elul, and in the weeks leading up to the High Holidays, the rabbi was also carrying a shofar. He explained to the husband and daughter that it acts “like a spiritual defibrillator,” and blew the shofar. The rabbi then spent some more time with the family, before moving on to other patients.
About 24 hours later, Goldstein’s lungs began to improve. Her doctors called it a miracle. She was brought out of the coma, and her first words to her husband, before she even knew a rabbi had been there, were: “I could feel the prayers. It was like a net holding me.”
‘You Survived!’
Days later, recovering in a ward, Goldstein was on the phone with one of her doctors when Schlanger appeared at the door, threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, “You survived!”
He pulled up a chair, and within minutes of meeting her and discussing her career as a journalist, told her he wanted to write a book together.
“I laughed,” she recalled to Weisberg. “I said to him, ‘If I had a dollar for every person at a dinner party who said they had a book in them, I’d be a millionaire by now.’” Schlanger was undeterred, responding “No, I really mean it. I’ve always thought I would do a book.”
That was how their relationship began, leading to their book, Conversations With My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World, available now from Harper Influence in the United States, HarperCollins Australia and Harper Nonfiction in the United Kingdom.
Over the following two years, Goldstein, a veteran journalist and author who had begun her career at Vogue and had lived most of her life in a “very non-Jewish area” of Sydney with non-Jewish friends, found herself on regular phone calls with a rabbi, talking about G‑d.
“I believed in something,” she said of her spiritual life before that hospital stay. “I think I would say I was always a seeker.” She had studied Jung for three years, explored Eastern philosophies, and looked elsewhere for meaning. G‑d, she said, “was not something we ever discussed” in her family.
But the terror attack of October 7, 2023, she said, made her aware she was a Jew “in a way that I had never before.” Schlanger kept showing up, deepening her relationship with her Judaism. He sent matzah before Passover, and shook the lulav and etrog with her on her deck. They shared long phone calls, delving into the meaning of faith, morality, Judaism and G‑d.
The Holder of His Words
Their recorded conversations eventually took shape around a book structure that Goldstein, the journalist, had found: Schlanger was developing a project called Project Noah, aimed at bringing the Seven Noahide Laws to a broader audience. Seven universal principles, seven chapters.
He was certain the book would find a wide readership. She was more skeptical.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she remembered telling him at one point. “It will probably sell a hundred copies to your congregants.” He kept insisting it would go global. “He had to drag me along,” she said. “It’s like he had a sort of sixth sense about what would happen.”
Their last recorded interview was on December 10, 2025. Schlanger told her then about “Chanukah at the Sea,” an event he had organized for 18 years at Bondi Beach. It would be a proud celebration of Jewish pride on the iconic Sydney shoreline, he told her. But Goldstein wasn’t able to make it.
Four days later, on December 14, two terrorists turned the event into a massacre. Fifteen people were murdered. Among them, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was only 41 years old.
Goldstein and her husband were home after a long day when they began hearing news of the attack. Police wires reported nine dead, then 15, and they saw the alerts: “Jewish community attacked.”
“At that point I screamed,” she said. “It just came out of me.”
Her husband urged her not to jump to conclusions.
“I knew,” she said. “I really knew that he was gone.”
By the next morning, a journalist from her former newspaper was calling to talk to her about Schlanger, and the article became a full piece about their relationship. From that point, Goldstein said, she understood what she had to do.
“I couldn’t collapse into my own grief because I was the holder of his words,” she said. “I knew what he wanted to say to the world.”
She got back to writing the day after the massacre. Schlanger’s father-in-law and mentor, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, wrote the final chapter with her—on establishing courts of justice—only two weeks after the massacre.
Released simultaneously in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom on May 26, the book is structured as an ongoing conversation between Goldstein and Schlanger.
The work is drawn directly from their real-life discussions and retains the candid, searching tone of two people exploring profound ideas together. Drawing from across Torah literature, each of the seven universal principles is understood as far more than its terse biblical wording alone might imply. The command “Do not worship idols” sparks a broader discussion between the two about defining G‑d, the miracle of existence, belief and skepticism, and the modern forms of idolatry found in celebrity culture, ego, and materialism.
Similarly, the prohibition against eating the flesh of a living animal opens into a deeper exploration of self-restraint, the meaning behind food consumption, and human compassion.
Like any genuine and free-flowing conversation, their discussions frequently branch into related themes and ideas, including the responsibility of charity, the ethics of gratitude, what it means to be “created in the image of G‑d,” and the perpetual search for meaning in modern life. Along the way they explore some Jewish ones as well, like Shabbat, Kabbalah and kosher slaughter.
Goldstein said she came to understand Schlanger’s relationship with G‑d through his deep connection with his faith.
“His goodliness—I would interpret his goodliness as G‑dliness,” she said. “He was a wonderful example of what it means to live completely immersed in G‑d. I think when you meet somebody who is so completely aligned with G‑d, it’s a profound meeting that had an amazing effect on me, and also many other people. You just don’t meet people like that very often. It exerted a beautiful invitation for me to look more deeply. And then the looking became engaging and coming closer to G‑d myself.”
Schlanger, she said, told her early on that there are two ways people come to G‑d: through joy, or
through pain. “Pain was my gateway,” Goldstein said. “But it’s transformed since then.”
She describes the personal faith she has found since losing her rabbi and friend.
“It’s not containable. It’s not frameable. It’s something very sweet. It’s a sweet invitation, and it’s now very present with me.”
When asked what his message to the world would be now, she recalled a question she once put to him directly. “'’Eli, what’s your mission?' And he said, ‘To bring light.’”
At the book’s launch in Sydney, Goldstein told the crowd she wished her co-author could have been present. Rabbi Ulman responded, saying, “I promise you, that he is here today with us.”
Conversations With My Rabbi is available now from Harper Influence in the United States, HarperCollins Australia, and Harper Nonfiction in the United Kingdom.
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