Rabbi Eli Schlanger leaned back in his chair, sighed and grinned like a kid.
“What are you thinking?” Nikki Goldstein asked him.
“I am completely happy,” Schlanger said. “I love my wife and my children, and I am doing exactly what I am meant to be doing. I am completely on my path.”
It was a summer morning, and light rain was falling outside Goldstein’s home. Schlanger was running late for their Zoom call, but they soon fell into the rhythm of their usual winding, philosophical conversations.
She was a self-described “blonde, blue-eyed, White-passing woman” who felt ashamed at times of being Jewish. He was a bespectacled, bearded man who never went anywhere without wearing the black hat and jacket of an orthodox rabbi. Goldstein joked to him she was the only secular Jew he knew.
