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Eighteen months ago, over Zoom, I watched my rabbi sit in his office in the Bondi Chabad, papers everywhere, while we argued gently about a book neither of us knew would become one of the most urgent things I’d ever write. We were building it around seven laws — ancient, largely forgotten, given, according to Jewish tradition, to Noah after the flood. Rules for how to live when the world has just been destroyed and needs rebuilding from nothing. Rabbi Eli Schlanger believed those laws were the blueprint. I believed it too, but I didn’t yet understand how literally we’d need them.
On December 14, 2025, Eli was killed at the Chanukah candle-lighting he’d run on Bondi Beach for eighteen years. Two gunmen opened fire on a crowd of families celebrating the festival of light. Fifteen people died, including a ten-year-old girl and an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor. Eli was forty-one. He left behind his wife, Chaya, and five children, the youngest just two months old.
I still had one chapter to record with him. Chapter Seven. “What Does Justice Look Like?” We never got to have that conversation. I wrote it anyway, along with his father-in-law Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, using every word he’d already given me, because the book — Conversations With My Rabbi — was never supposed to be a memorial. It was supposed to be a map. Now it’s both.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: that a set of laws written for a post-flood world forgotten by time, would feel like they were written for this one.
The Seven Noahide Laws are not exclusively Jewish. That’s the point of them. Encoded in the Talmud and reawakened for the modern age by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, they were given, tradition holds, to every descendant of Noah — meaning all of us. Don’t worship false idols. Don’t blaspheme. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Don’t commit acts of sexual immorality. Don’t eat the flesh of a living animal. Establish courts of justice. Seven lines. No footnotes, no fine print, no committee to interpret them for you. Eli used to say, “God doesn’t need us to be perfect. God just needs us to be engaged”.
The Anti-Defamation League’s latest Global 100 survey found that 46 percent of the world’s adults, roughly 2.2 billion people, now hold significantly antisemitic attitudes — the highest level recorded since the survey began. Younger respondents, the generation supposedly raised on tolerance, score worse than their grandparents: 40 percent of adults under thirty-five believe Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars, compared to 29 percent of those over fifty. One in five people worldwide has never heard of the Holocaust.
Here in Australia, where I live and where Eli died, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents in the twelve months to September 2025 — verbal abuse, stickers, graffiti, vandalism, arson. Almost five times the annual average before October 7, 2023. Synagogues firebombed. A childcare centre attacked. Our government has since confirmed that a foreign state had a hand in some of it. In January, the federal government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, led by the Honourable Virginia Bell, to investigate what led to this happening and how we stop it from happening again. It has received more than 20 thousand submissions, and its interim report in April made fourteen recommendations to strengthen how we respond to hate before it turns to violence. Its final report is due on the first anniversary of Eli’s death.
None of this happened in a vacuum. It happened inside a culture that had already talked itself out of moral certainty — where “your truth” and “my truth” had quietly replaced any shared sense of the truth, where cruelty online gets rewarded with clicks instead of consequences, and where it became fashionable to treat conviction itself as the problem. Moral relativism didn’t cause a massacre on a beach. But it built the permission structure that let hatred go unchallenged for long enough to become lethal.
I share these numbers not to frighten you, but because I think they explain something bigger than antisemitism alone. They describe what happens to a civilisation that loses its moral floor. When the First Noahide Law says don’t worship idols, it isn’t only talking about golden calves. It’s talking about the ideologies, algorithms, and grievances we now bow to instead of any shared truth. When it says establish courts of justice, it’s naming a world where accountability has become optional and cruelty has become content.
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.
This is what I mean when I say I didn’t expect ancient wisdom to feel this urgent. I expected Conversations With My Rabbi to be a spiritual memoir — the story of how a rabbi blew a shofar over my unconscious body in an ICU and somehow called me back to life, and the friendship that followed. I did not expect it to become a survival manual for a fractured world, written in real time, finished under the weight of the very hatred it was trying to answer.
But that’s exactly what these seven laws are built for. They don’t ask you to be religious. They don’t ask you to be Jewish. They ask you to decide, again, that human life is sacred, that truth is not negotiable, that justice is not optional, and that the person on the other side of your screen is not an avatar to dehumanise but a soul to reckon with. Eli used to tell me the laws weren’t a cage. They were scaffolding — something to build a self on when everything else feels like it’s collapsing.
I wish he were here to see the book land in readers’ hands. I wish, more than anything, that he were here at all. But I’ve come to believe that grief and purpose can sit in the same chair, the way Eli and I once sat across from each other, arguing our way toward something true.
If the world feels unmoored to you right now — fractured by violence you can’t explain, noise you can’t mute, and a loneliness you can’t quite name — you are not imagining it, and you are not alone in feeling it. Ancient wisdom is not a retreat from that world. It’s a way back into it, with your feet under you again.
Eli would want me to end here with light, not grief. So I will: whatever your tradition, or none at all, the invitation is the same one he gave me. Choose engagement over despair. Choose one small, ordinary act of justice today. It restores more than you know.
May his memory be a blessing — and may it keep lighting the way.
Nikki Goldstein is the bestselling author of 16 books, including Conversations With My Rabbi (Harper Influence / HarperCollins Australia / Harper Nonfiction, 2026), co-written with the late Rabbi Eli Schlanger