‘I had a treasure in my hands’: Nikki Goldstein on the book she co-wrote with Bondi victim Rabbi Eli Shlanger

The man was London-born Rabbi Eli Shlanger. Minutes later, he was standing beside Goldstein's bed, reciting prayers over her near-lifeless body. He asked if he could blow the shofar; in a ward filled with unconscious patients, there was little danger of disturbing anyone.

As he prayed, something in Goldstein shifted, and 24 hours later, her lungs began to improve.

A week later, Rabbi Eli returned to the hospital and found her alive.

"You survived; that’s a miracle," he told her, and doctors agreed.

It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship. Goldstein, a secular journalist, and Rabbi Eli, a Chabad rabbi, spent hours discussing faith, God and life's biggest questions. Their families got to know one another, and Goldstein experienced some of Rabbi Eli’s Orthodox world. 

Goldstein in the ICU in 2022 (courtesy)[Missing Credit]

During one of their first conversations, upon learning that Goldstein was a writer, Rabbi Eli told her he had always wanted to pen a book. Before long, he suggested they write one together and Goldstein proposed the format of a conversation between them. He thought she would bring the love, and he would bring the light. 

Nearly four years later, speaking during publication week over Zoom from her Sydney home, Goldstein, 60, and the author of 16 books, was animated and full of energy as she discussed Conversations with My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World. It is a book that, in many ways, is about her own survival against the odds.

But despite its life-affirming message, a glittering book launch and its beautifully printed edition, its publication is haunted by a tragedy that shook the Jewish world.

Last Chanukah, Rabbi Eli was among the 15 people killed in the Bondi Beach attack, when a Chabad celebration he had organised was targeted by father-and-son gunmen.

Witnesses say that, in his final moments, Rabbi Eli tried to reason with one of the attackers and persuade him to lower his weapon.

He was 41 years old and the father of five children with his wife Chaya. Their youngest, a baby boy, was just two months old at the time of the tragedy.

The Schlanger family. Their youngest, a baby boy born two months before the rabbi's murder, is not pictured (Photo: Chabad.org)[Missing Credit]

Learning of his death, Goldstein collapsed into her husband’s arms. Rabbi Eli had saved her life, she believes – and now he was gone.

She was grief-stricken, and locking the book away would have been an easy decision, but, Goldstein said, “I realised I had a treasure in my hands,” and finishing the work took on a new urgency.

"It would have been a cowardly act to say it was too hard and shelve it. I would never have forgiven myself."

Structured around the Seven Noahide Laws, the book explores principles that the Talmud says were given as part of the covenant God made first with Adam and then with Noah. Largely unknown outside observant communities, for Rabbi Eli, these were a spiritual toolkit for a chaotic world, and his words usher in the contemporary relevance of the millennia-old doctrine.

The book's front cover evokes the white sand and blue sea of Bondi Beach (Published by Harper)[Missing Credit]

With him gone, the rabbi’s mission to use the seven questions to “bring light, love and moral clarity to the world” was more necessary than ever.

Goldstein and Rabbi Eli had completed six of these seven conversations about the laws before he was killed. 

For the final chapter, she turned to Rabbi Eli's father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, chief adviser to Sydney's Beth Din. Rabbi Eli would undoubtedly have sought his guidance on the seventh law, which concerns the establishment of courts of justice.

"He put aside his own grief, which was significant, to finish what Eli started," Goldstein said.

Finishing the book also became a way for Goldstein to work through her own grief, as she stepped more fully into the narrative than she ever had before.

"I had never felt so stripped bare. Thirty years as a journalist, you never insert yourself into the story.

"Before Eli died, my voice wasn't very present in the conversations. That only happened afterwards. It was a kind of catharsis. I needed to write contemporaneously about what was happening.”

Now, she sees the book as part of a larger mission to carry on Rabbi Eli's work: "to combat antisemitism by building bridges between people".

"He pre-prepared me to be his foot soldier," she said.

Goldstein and Rabbi Eli Schlanger celebrating Sukkot (courtesy)[Missing Credit]

Good deeds were central to Rabbi Eli’s philosophy and he would tell her: "If we only helped one person, that would be enough."

But his dream was always larger, and he believed the book could reach a wide audience.

"He always said to me, 'This book is going to go global,' and I would try to talk him down," Goldstein recalled. Now, with the book being read around the world in his memory, she believes he would have been "over the moon".

Though not religiously observant, Goldstein is deeply spiritual. Much of her journalism has explored questions of faith, and during her illness, prayer groups across the world rallied around her, including Christian and Buddhist.

Her conversations with Rabbi Eli deepened a connection to Judaism that had been growing for years, and she describes herself today as "an accidental mystic Jew".

"I have a direct relationship with God that I didn't have before, and Eli facilitated that.

"In a way, I wrote the book for me. How many Jews have questions and have never met a rabbi? I just happened to have one. I wanted answers. It turned out we were seeking many of the same answers, but he had a depth of knowledge that I didn't have."

Writer Nikki Goldstein is carrying on Rabbi Eli Schlanger's message (Photo: Nick Cubbin)[Missing Credit]

For Goldstein, the book is a way of preserving Rabbi Eli's legacy, but her connection with him extends far beyond its pages.

"It is not just corporeal, it is spiritual. I have felt him in the room. The bond we have transcends life and death."

Conversations With My Rabbi is available now from Harper Nonfiction.