What happens when wisdom arrives in a form you never expected — and a friendship becomes a doorway to faith, meaning, and moral clarity.
I wasn’t sitting in some quiet moment of spiritual crisis, scanning the horizon for a teacher or a guide. I was a secular Jewish woman living a full, busy, largely un-religious life. I approached my religion with more nostalgia than conviction, holding my Jewish identity close, but loosely. I knew who I was. I just wasn’t especially interested in what Judaism had to say about it.
Then I met Rabbi Eli.
And something shifted. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the way that real shifts happen: gradually, then all at once, profoundly, like light changing in a room you didn’t realise was dim.
Friendship is rarely logical. You don’t plan the people who matter most. They simply appear, often at the wrong moment or in the wrong form, and something in you recognises them anyway.
In terms of my relationship with Rabbi Eli Schlanger, that was certainly the case. Rabbi Eli met me the first time when I was unconscious, in an induced coma, pneumonia overwhelming my lungs and my near-lifeless body hooked up to machines that were breathing for me. I was fighting for my life, and my husband Rowan had been told that morning to make sure all my affairs were in order – doctor-speak for things aren’t looking good. My daughter Liberty spotted a rabbi walking briskly through the ICU of Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital where they’d been keeping a bedside vigil. Before he had time to reconsider the wisdom of approaching a random rabbi, Rowan legged it across the room to ask if he’d have time to say some Jewish prayers to prepare my soul, if the worst was about to happen.
“It doesn’t matter, we’re all just Jews”, was Eli’s reply.
Rabbi Eli blew a shofar, a rams horn and an ancient tool for High Holy Days and other Jewish rituals, he whispered prayers and he went on his way, doing all kinds of good, because that was who he was and what he did every day.
Miraculously, I recovered from my pneumonia and, in time, Rabbi Eli, the miracle-maker, shofar-blower and prayer-whisperer became my friend and religious guide.
He was not who I would have cast as my spiritual mentor. I came in with all the assumptions a secular, modern woman tends to carry into a room with a rabbi — assumptions about what he would say, what he would want from me, what strict version of Judaism he would insist I return to. I was prepared, in a quiet, and if I’m being honest, defensive way, to be judged.
What I found instead was curiosity. Warmth. A man who asked more questions than he answered, who laughed often, and who seemed genuinely interested in what I actually thought, not in what he thought I should think. There was no agenda. Or if there was, it was the most disarming kind: he simply wanted to talk.
And, so, we talked. About God, yes, but also about meaning and justice and the state of the world. About why good people suffer and why systems fail and what it might look like to build a society worth living in. About what we owe each other, and what we owe ourselves. The conversations started as intellectually engaging and became, over time, something I can only describe as necessary.
Literally the first day I met Eli, still weak and sick and in hospital, he suggested we do a book together. He asked me what I did for a living and when I told him I was a journalist and author, he said in the most natural and unguarded way, “Let’s write book together”, as though that was as easy as pie. But what began as conversations, about everything, we soon agreed to formalize and I began recording them and making notes.
Conversations with My Rabbi is, on one level, a book about the Seven Noahide Laws, the ancient ethical framework that, according to Jewish tradition, was given not just to the Jewish people but to all of humanity. Seven principles for building a moral world: believe in one God, don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t have immoral sex, don’t blaspheme, don’t eat the limb of a living animal, and, perhaps most radical of all — establish courts of justice.
But if you think that sounds dry, let me assure you: in Rabbi Eli’s hands, these laws crackle with life.
The Noahide Laws are not relics. They are, as I came to understand through our conversations, a kind of moral architecture, a blueprint for how human beings might actually live well together. Not rules imposed from above, but an invitation from below. A framework for human dignity. A structure that says: you are capable of more than survival. You are capable of goodness. Here’s a map.
And what the book explores, at least what I hope it does, is what happens when those ancient ideas meet a thoroughly modern life. My questions were not polished theological queries. They were the real ones like: Why should I believe in God when the world is so broken? What does justice even look like when institutions keep failing us? How do I live ethically in a world that seems to reward the opposite?
Rabbi Eli never flinched from these questions. He entered them with me with all the joy and conviction of a man who believes in God and in goodness with every fiber of his being.
When Wisdom Arrives in a Form You Didn’t Expect
I want to say something about expectation, because I think we tend to imagine wisdom arriving in familiar packaging from people who look like us, glossy wellness gurus from Instagram, who look approachable, sound like us, confirm what we already half-believe. We’re suspicious of the unfamiliar. And perhaps especially, in our secular age, we are suspicious of the religious. We have constructed a story in which faith is the opposite of reason, and tradition is the opposite of progress, and a rabbi, particularly one who is deeply, seriously observant, could not possibly have something to say to a worldly woman like me.
That story, I discovered, was entirely wrong.
What Rabbi Eli offered was not a diluted, apologetic version of Jewish thought designed to make me comfortable. Instead, he offered the real thing, in all its depth and rigour and sometimes startling beauty, and trusted me to meet it. He believed, I think, that a serious idea deserves a serious conversation partner. And he treated me as one.
There is something unexpectedly liberating about that. When someone respects your intelligence enough to give you the hard version, you stop bracing for the sales pitch. You start listening. And when you start listening, really listening, without the armour of your assumptions, you begin to hear things that have always been there, waiting.
What Changed — and What Didn’t
I want to be careful here, because I know what some of you might be hoping I’ll say. That there was a moment of blinding revelation. That one afternoon I walked into one of our conversations with my eyes closed and walked out born again, the veil dropped and cleansed of the illusions, and suddenly I could see. If that had happened the book would have a tidy conversion arc and I’d call myself enlightened. Which I am not.
But, that’s actually one of the things that makes it honest.
What changed was subtler and, in its own way, more profound. I began to take the moral questions of my life more seriously. I started to feel the weight of the world’s brokenness differently, not as something to manage or scroll past, but as something I had a responsibility to respond to. I became less comfortable with the easy cynicism that modern life makes so available: the shrug, the irony, the conviction that none of this is fixable so why try. And most importantly, I began to re-engage with my Jewishness in a way that felt fresh and new.
Faith, I came to understand, is not primarily about certainty. It is about orientation. It’s a decision to live as if goodness is possible, as if justice matters, as if the world can be repaired — and then to act accordingly. The Hebrew word for this is tikkun olam: the repair of the world. You don’t have to believe everything to believe in that.
And the friendship? That changed too, or deepened, rather. Because there’s a beautiful intimacy that develops out of talking about things that actually matter. We live in an age of constant communication and chronic shallowness. To find a person willing to go to the real depths with you, without judgement and without an agenda, is rare. I am grateful for it in a way I don’t have words for…. Especially not now.
Why Now?
But that wasn’t the end of the story. On December 14th 2025 Rabbi Eli was about to light the first of the eight candles on a large menorah set up at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach for the “Channukah by The Sea” celebrations, an event he’d run for 18 years, when he was gunned down, brutally, mercilessly, along with 14 other souls in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil. Why was he killed? Because he was Jewish. A ghastly act of antisemitic rage that ended his all-too-brief life and left a young widow and five children in its wake.
We had recorded six out of seven conversations for this book. And rather than collapse under the weight of my grief (only a tincture of what his family endured), I decided that I had to continue Eli’s mission to bring light and love to the world.
I wrote this book because I knew that what happened in those conversations shouldn’t stay private. The world needed what Eli had to say.
The questions Rabbi Eli and I explored together, about God, about justice, about how to be a decent human being in a world that makes decency genuinely difficult, are not Jewish questions. They are human questions. The Noahide Laws, seven ancient teachings designed to provide a scaffolding for a just and humane world, are themselves are a testament to that: they were never meant only for one people. They were meant for all of us.
We live in a time of profound moral confusion, violence and social disorder. Old certainties have dissolved. Institutions have failed. The noise is deafening and clarity is hard to find. I believe — and this is what the book argues — that the ancient wisdom traditions have something urgent to say to that confusion. Not because the past was better and more rosy, but because some truths are old enough to outlast the nonsense.
Rabbi Eli taught me that. Not in a lecture. In a conversation.
That, more than anything, is what I hope this book feels like: a conversation. One you’re invited to join.
Conversations with My Rabbi is available now. If these questions feel alive to you, if you’ve ever wondered what to believe, how to live, or where to find solid ground in an unsteady world, I think you’ll find it worth the read.