By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC Australia
20 August 2026
There’s a little ritual I perform before I begin to read a new book. I first turn to the back and look at the acknowledgements. It’s a habit that reflects my desire to know who shaped the person whose words I am about to immerse myself in. When I sat down with Conversations with My Rabbi by Rabbi Eli Schlanger and journalist Nikki Goldstein, I did what I always do and went straight to the back. That’s where I remained for a long time.
Rabbi Schlanger was one of the fifteen people murdered on the first night of Chanukah by the Sea, a celebration hosted by the Chabad of Bondi, on 14 December 2025. He was just 41 years old and left behind five children, including a two-month-old baby. His wife and baby were both injured in the attack.
Rabbi Schlanger did not live to see the book to completion — more on that in a moment — and so whereas acknowledgements usually pay tribute to friends and family whose support and wisdom made the book possible, in this case what appears are heartfelt, and heart rending, tributes from those closest to him. Among them is a note from his eldest daughter, 17-year-old Priva: “I will carry everything you’ve taught me for the rest of my life and will be forever grateful that I am your daughter.” There are also tributes from his widow, Chaya, who is now raising their five children alone, and from his eight siblings.
The premise of Conversations with My Rabbi is simple enough. The book collects a series of conversations between Rabbi Schlanger and Goldstein, structured around moral-theological questions and organised according to the seven Noahide laws. But the book is not just an exercise in ethical reflection; it is also the story of an unlikely relationship forged in extraordinary circumstances.
Goldstein describes herself as Jewish by birth but largely disconnected from religious practice. She was not conscious when she first encountered Rabbi Schlanger in September 2022. She was in a medically induced coma in an intensive care unit at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. The doctors said she only had days to live. Her husband, who is not Jewish, was at her bedside when noticed Rabbi Schlanger visiting another patient. He called him over, explaining that his wife is Jewish, critically ill and needed prayers.
Schlanger prayed for Goldstein and blew the shofar — which he later told her was a “spiritual defibrillator” — as it was the period leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Over the next few days, Goldstein began to recover and her friendship with Rabbi Schlanger developed. They began meeting regularly to discuss Judaism, faith and what it means to live a moral life in the modern world.
Conversations with My Rabbi is written for a general audience, for Jews and non-Jews alike, and does not require prior knowledge of Jewish law or philosophy. Instead, it explores how to live an ethical life through conversations about how to build a moral framework that applies to all humanity. As Goldstein writes:
Rabbi Eli was passionate about the Noahide Laws because he saw them as an enduring symbol of civility, morality, ethics and connection to God. He fervently believed they offered a way to restore order and balance to a chaotic world. As modern humans, overwhelmed by division, noise and moral relativism, the Noahide Laws offer something rare: clarity.
Indeed, the book is strongest when Rabbi Schlanger insists on the ethical weight of ordinary life. “Prayer is not weakness”, he tells Goldstein at one point. “It is the ultimate act of courage.”
For all this, Goldstein does not shy away from the moments when she found these discussions difficult. Their conversations about sex and marriage proved particularly challenging. “At this point, I was acutely aware of the differences between our life experiences. I fell in love and chose my non-Jewish husband”, writes Goldstein. “Out of all our conversations, this was the one where Eli and I disagreed the most. That said, Eli was never judgemental in his tone.”
Goldstein repeatedly expresses her appreciation for Rabbi Schlanger’s ability to engage in these complex discussions with kindness:
Eli treated everyone the same. He embraced my husband Rowan with the same love and affection as he would any brother-of-the-blood, with intense warmth and ferocious interest in him as a human being and as an aspect of God in human form. That’s why everyone loved him.
Yet what ultimately gives the book its emotional force is the knowledge that Rabbi Schlanger had been murdered by the time it was published. The reader is always aware that these are not simply conversations between two living interlocutors, but a dialogue interrupted mid-creation and completed in his absence, after his life was cut short.
Goldstein turned to Schlanger’s father-in-law and head rabbi of Chabad of Bondi, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, seeking guidance about how to finish the book. “Rabbi, I know that your life has been turned inside out and upside down”, she says the first time they sit together. “This last Noahide law — establish courts of justice — lands very differently after what happened on December 14.” Ulman, deep in his grief, took the conversation in stride. “I hope, at the very least, that in this case [if found guilty] they will give the Bondi gunman life without parole — that he will never be able to use any legal avenue to come out.”
But rather than trying to replace Rabbi Schlanger’s voice, Ulman encourages Goldstein to finish the book by allowing the conversations she had already recorded with Schlanger to speak for themselves. In the aftermath of his death, Goldstein also begins to understand her conversations with Schlanger differently. By the end of the book, Goldstein has not suddenly become religious, and she does not pretend that Schlanger answered all her questions. And yet the conversations they had become part of the way she thinks about faith, morality and the purpose of life.
Goldstein writes at one point about the sequence of events that encompassed her friendship with Rabbi Schlanger — the illness, the encounter, the friendship, the writing of the book, his murder — as something she cannot fully understand. She describes it as a kind of synchronicity that resists rational explanation, something that feels to her “so potent … I can only assume God designed it this way”. Perhaps the book’s central achievement is the way it does not insist on belief from its readers as it explores how meaning can be found within events that can seem chaotic, senseless or painful.
For me, what lingers long after reading Conversations with My Rabbi is not so much the content of the conversations but the feeling of proximity to an extraordinary friendship between two unlikely people, who spent time together trying to understand how to live a moral life without knowing that one of them would soon have their life cruelly snatched away.
Once I finished the book, I returned to the acknowledgements and found that I was reading them differently. Having gotten to know Rabbi Eli Schlanger through his conversations with Nikki Goldstein, the words of the people who loved him stood now as a reminder of everything the reader was also deprived of — the chance to hear more of his voice, to learn from his insight, to watch the life he was building with his young family take shape and grow. I found that Nikki’s grief had become my own, but through this grief a deeper wisdom could be found: the preciousness of life, the fragility of faith, the beauty of friendship.