As seen on
As seen on
That’s not a metaphor and it’s not the opening line of a novel I wish I’d written. It’s a Tuesday in September 2022, at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, my lungs full of fluid, my family being gently told to prepare themselves. My daughter, wandering the ward because there is nothing else to do with a body that can’t fix anything, found a man in a black hat and asked him to pray. He did more than pray. He raised a ram’s horn over a woman he’d never met, in a coma, on a floor that had already begun saying goodbye. Twenty-four hours later, I was improving. The doctors used the word miracle. Not “remarkable recovery.” Miracle.
I tell you this because I need you to know I didn’t arrive at seriousness by choice. Seriousness came for me. It kicked the door down.
I say this too because I think a lot of us are quietly waiting for that door to be kicked down for us — because we’ve stopped believing we’re allowed to knock on it ourselves.
For twenty years I made a career, and a decent living, out of a culture that ran on lightness. Wellness with a wink. Spirituality you could wear like activewear — breathable, flattering, easy to take off. I coined a few of those frameworks myself, and I’m proud of them; women needed permission to love themselves before they needed anything more complicated. But I’ve watched that industry curdle into something thinner and thinner, until “self-care” became a euphemism for “please don’t ask anything of me,” and “manifesting” became a polite word for wishing. We got very good at the vocabulary of transformation and very bad at the practice of it.
And underneath the wellness industrial complex, something else has been rotting for longer: irony. The reflex to keep everything at arm’s length, to never be caught caring too much, to meet grief and awe and moral seriousness with a raised eyebrow because sincerity is the one thing the culture will actually punish you for. I understand irony. I built a career partly inside it. But irony was only ever meant to be a scaffold, not a home. You cannot raise a child in it. You cannot bury a parent in it. You cannot, when the hour actually comes, face your own mortality wearing it as protection, because it doesn’t protect you from anything that matters.
You can see the shape of this hunger if you go looking for it. Falling attendance in mainstream churches sitting alongside rising sales of religious and spiritual texts. A boom in ancient philosophy and Stoicism, oddly led by young men who are supposed to be the least interested demographic in anything that asks something of them. Synagogues and churches here reporting fuller pews since October 7 — not because tragedy is good marketing, but because tragedy has a way of clarifying what was always going to be needed eventually. A generation raised on infinite content and no instructions whatsoever for how to sit with a hard feeling for longer than a scroll. But honestly, I don’t need the data. I only need my own inbox.
So when I say people are hungry for spiritual seriousness again, I don’t mean they want more candles or a better morning routine. I mean they want weight. They want a framework strong enough to hold a life that includes real loss, real fear, real evil — because after the last few years, none of us can pretend those aren’t on the table. I mean they want moral clarity that isn’t hedged into meaninglessness. I mean they want a language for the soul that doesn’t apologise for using the word soul.
I didn’t expect to be the person saying this. I built my name on radical self-love, on rebellion, on the idea that a woman’s fiercest act is to be unapologetically herself. I still believe every word of that. But the miracle in that hospital didn’t hand me a better vocabulary for self-love. It handed me God — inconveniently, undeniably, in a language I hadn’t studied since I was a child. It introduced me to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the assistant rabbi at Chabad Bondi, who became my study partner, then my co-author, then something closer to a brother. Over eighteen months we recorded conversations — his depth against my scepticism, his tradition against my questions — that became a book, structured around the seven Noahide laws, called Conversations With My Rabbi.
Eli believed the book would go global. I told him he was dreaming. I was wrong, and I wish more than almost anything that I could tell him so.
On December 14, 2025, Eli was murdered at Chanukah by the Sea on Bondi Beach, in the worst antisemitic terror attack this country has ever seen. He was forty-one. He left behind his wife Chaya and five children, including a son who was two months old. My last conversation with him had been four days earlier. I went back to writing the book the morning after he was killed, because I couldn’t think of anything else honest to do with my hands.
And we are lonely in the middle of all of it. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection estimates that one in six people globally suffers from persistent loneliness, and that isolation contributes to roughly 871,000 deaths a year — a hundred an hour. Nearly 80 percent of Gen Z report feeling isolated. We have never been more connected and less known to each other. We scroll past each other’s humanity a thousand times a day. That, too, is a kind of idolatry — worshipping the feed instead of the face in front of us.
The book was published in May 2026, simultaneously in the US, the UK and Australia. I have watched, in the months since, an outpouring of response that has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with hunger. People are not writing to me about the shofar or the miracle, though they ask about both. They are writing to tell me that a book built out of ancient law and a murdered man’s wisdom said something to them that four years of self-help hadn’t managed to say. That it took them seriously. That it assumed they were capable of discipline, of reverence, of sitting with a hard idea instead of being handed a soft one.
I think that’s the real story of this moment, bigger than my book, bigger than me. We spent a long time being sold ease, and ease turned out to be a poor substitute for meaning. Discipline, moral seriousness, the plain old unfashionable idea that some things are simply true and worth ordering your life around — none of that is oppressive. It’s structural. It’s the difference between a tent and a house. You can love yourself in a tent. You can only build a life in a house.
I didn’t choose to become a woman who talks about God, grief, and ancient law in the same breath as self-worth. But I’ve stopped apologising for it, because I don’t think I’m the only one who’s tired of the tent. I think a great many people are standing in the rubble of their own irony, looking for a roof. And I think that’s exactly why a book like Conversations With My Rabbi — unfashionable, unironic, dead serious about the soul — has found them.