My name is Rabbi David Goldstein.

I am 56 years old.

I lead Congregation Beth Shalom in Manhattan, one of the most theologically conservative Orthodox synagogues in New York City.

I have spent 28 years guiding my community through the ancient laws of the Torah, teaching that the covenant between Hashem and the Jewish people is eternal, particular, and irreducible to any universal framework that would dilute its specificity.

I am not a man who converts.

I’m not a man who compromises.

I am not a man who stands at the tomb of a Catholic saint and weeps.

On October 12th, 1954, exactly 18 years to the day after Carlous died, I did all three.

Let me be precise about what I mean when I say I wept.

Because I want you to understand the full weight of that word for a man like me.

I had not wept in public since my father’s funeral 20 years ago.

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor.

I was raised in a tradition that understands grief as something to be honored privately contained within the specific liturggical structures that Jewish law provides for mourning.

I do not weep at strangers tombs.

I do not weep in front of crowds of Catholic pilgrims who are watching a kipa wearing rabbi with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and astonishment.

I wept and I will tell you exactly why.

I arrived in Aisi that October as a skeptic.

I arrived as an academic.

I hold a chair in comparative messianism at Columbia University and I had received a research grant to study what I privately referred to as the Carlo Accutis phenomenon.

I was interested in Carlo not as a saint but as a case study in contemporary Catholic hagography.

The process by which the church constructs and promotes figures of devotion in the digital age.

I had published papers on similar subjects.

I was, I believed, comprehensively equipped to observe and document what was happening at that tomb without being touched by it.

I believed this the way a person believes that they are immune to something they have never encountered.

What happened at that tomb at 3:30 in the afternoon on October 12th, 2024 dismantled in approximately 20 minutes something I had spent 28 years constructing.

Not my faith.

I am still an Orthodox rabbi, not my theology.

I still believe everything the Torah teaches.

What was dismantled was a wall.

A wall I had built between my tradition and every other tradition.

A wall I had justified intellectually and defended academically and experienced if I am truthful as a form of loneliness so familiar I had stopped recognizing it as loneliness.

What I am about to tell you happened.

I am a rabbi, which means I am professionally obligated to say true things.

I am an academic, which means I am professionally trained to distinguish between what I observed and what I inferred.

I will give you both what I saw and what I have concluded from it.

And I will leave you to make of it what you will.

But I want to tell you this first.

I came to Aisi to write a paper.

I left Aisi carrying a truth that has reorganized my life.

I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

The grandson of a man who had survived Ashvitz and the son of a man who had rebuilt his life around the absolute certainty that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had kept his covenant even through the ovens of Europe.

My grandfather Barak Goldstein, may his memory be a blessing, used to say that the survival of the Jewish people was itself the most undeniable miracle in human history and that anyone who needed additional evidence for the existence of Hashem had simply not been paying attention to the previous 3,000 years.

I grew up inside this certainty.

It was not naive certainty.

My grandfather had the numbers tattooed on his forearm and the nightmares that woke him three or four times a week.

and the quality of hard one faith that comes from a man who has looked into the face of radical evil and chosen deliberately and repeatedly to believe in radical goodness.

Anyway, my faith was built on his.

It was built on something real.

But it was also built on separation.

Jewish law haka establishes clear boundaries between what is permitted and what is not.

Between the Jewish people and the nations, between pure and impure, between sacred and profane.

These distinctions are not arbitrary.

They carry the weight of thousands of years of legal reasoning and theological reflection.

They were developed in part as a survival mechanism.

The Jewish people maintained their identity through exile and persecution precisely because they maintained their distinctiveness.

The wall was not merely theological.

It was existential.

I studied at Yeshiva University and then at the Jewish Theological Seminary, completing my doctorate in comparative messianism at the age of 31.

My dissertation examined Christian and Jewish Messianic claims in parallel, not in order to find common ground, but in order to demonstrate with scholarly precision why the Christian claims failed to meet the criteria established by the Hebrew prophets.

It was a rigorous piece of work.

My advisor, one of the foremost scholars of second temple Judaism in America, called it a model of engaged pmical scholarship.

I am not ashamed of that work.

I believed then as I believe now that the truth matters and that intellectual rigor in service of the truth is a form of holiness.

What I did not understand until much later was that rigor can also become a kind of armor.

That the very precision of academic argument can be deployed not in pursuit of truth but in defense against it.

I took the pulpit at congregation Beth Shalom in 1996.

We are a congregation of approximately 400 families, mostly professional class, mostly second and third generation American with a significant representation of academics, lawyers, and physicians who appreciate a rabbi who can engage with secular intellectual culture without abandoning orthodox practice.

I am known in our community and beyond it for sermons that combine Talmudic scholarship with rigorous engagement with contemporary philosophy, science, and ethics.

I have appeared on panels at Harvard and Yale and Georgetown.

I have published seven books.

I say all of this not to impress you.

I say it so you understand what kind of man I was when I arrived in Italy.

I was a man who was very good at knowing things.

A man who had been rewarded his entire professional life for the quality and precision of his knowledge.

A man whose identity was substantially constituted by his capacity to analyze, to critique, to see through the surface of things to their structural logic.

A man who had spent 28 years as the intellectual and spiritual authority for 400 families and who had without fully recognizing it come to experience the maintenance of that authority as a form of spiritual practice in itself.

When the research

grant from Colombia arrived in the summer of 2024, I was immediately interested.

Carlo Autist was scheduled to be canonized, made a full saint in the near future, and I had been following the process with the particular interest of someone who studies messianic and her geographic patterns across traditions.

The Carlo Aquus case was genuinely unusual.

He had died in 2006 at 15 years old, been beatified in 2020, and the process toward full canonization had moved with unusual speed.

He was young, digitally sophisticated, and his devotion had spread rapidly through precisely the platforms, social media, YouTube, Catholic influencer networks that traditional forms of religious promotion had failed to penetrate.

From an academic perspective, he was fascinating.

From the perspective of a skeptical orthodox rabbi, he was a perfect case study in manufactured sanctity.

My hypothesis, which I had articulated clearly in my grant application, was as follows.

Carlo Akutis represented a new model of Catholic saintm making, one that exploited the psychological appeal of adolescent mortality combined with modern digital aesthetics to create a devotional figure capable of attracting the secular digital generation back to institutional religion.

The church, I

argued, had identified a genuine cultural need among young people for spiritual figures who did not seem incompatible with contemporary life and had found in Carlo with his jeans and his sneakers and his website about Eucharistic miracles precisely the right vehicle for meeting that need.

The miracles attributed to his intercession would, I expected to find, be explicable through well doumented psychological mechanisms of belief confirmation and retrospective attribution.

I was thorough before departing for Italy.

I read everything available about Carlo in English, Italian, and French.

I read the beatatification documentation.

I read accounts of the miracles attributed to him.

I read profiles of his family, his school friends, his parish priest.

I watched videos of his mother, Antonia Salzano, speaking about her son.

I watched them with the analytical detachment of an ethnographer, noting her rhetorical patterns, her emotional appeals.

the way she constructed Carlo’s holiness retrospectively from the ordinary materials of his adolescent life.

I did not allow myself to be moved by any of it.

I departed for Rome on October 8th and drove north to Aisi on October 11th.

Arriving the evening before the anniversary of Carlo’s death, the town was full of pilgrims.

I estimated several thousand, many of them young, many international.

I moved through them with my notebook and my recorder, cataloging what I observed.

the merchandise at the souvenir stalls, the expressions on pilgrims faces, the languages in which they prayed, the ages and apparent social demographics of the devotional crowd.

I was efficient and I was thorough and I was, I believed, completely protected by the thick glass of my methodology.

On the morning of October 12th, I attended a mass at the Basilica of St.

Francis, not out of any devotional interest, but because I wanted to observe how Carlo’s anniversary was being lurggically framed by the institutional church.

The homaly was delivered by a young Franciscan priest and focused on Carlo’s synthesis of digital fluency and eucharistic devotion.

I noted the rhetorical moves the audience responses the way the priest positioned Carlo as a model for young people navigating faith in the digital age.

I was taking notes throughout.

I was doing my job.

In the early afternoon, I walked to the sanctuary of the deareri where Carlos tomb was housed.

It was 2:30 in the afternoon.

The sanctuary was crowded with pilgrims marking the anniversary.

I stood at the edge of the crowd for a time observing the tears, the prayers, the photos, the small offerings left at the tomb.

I noted the diversity of the crowd.

Italians, Brazilians, Filipinos, Americans, Poles, Mexicans, young people who looked like university students kneeling beside elderly nuns, families with small children.

I was wearing my black keepa and my tits, clearly identifiable as Jewish.

Several pilgrims glanced at me with expressions of curiosity or mild surprise.

I did not explain myself.

I moved through the crowd toward the tomb.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, I reached the glass enclosure where Carlo’s body lay.

I stood before it for a moment, recording what I saw.

a young man dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, his sneakers visible beneath the display glass.

He looked exactly as described in every account I had read, at peace, composed, preserved with what the church describes as the incorruptibility of a saint.

I noted professionally that the conditions of preservation in the display case were controlled, that the lighting was arranged for maximum devotional effect, that the positioning of the body was clearly deliberate.

I reached out and touched the glass.

I want to be precise about what happened next because I have been precise about everything else and this deserves the same rigor.

When my hand touched the glass of Carlo Aquortis’ tomb at 3:30 in the afternoon on October 12th, 2024, I felt something that I had never felt before in 56 years of life.

28 years of rabbitical leadership and three decades of scholarly engagement with religious experience across traditions.

I felt seen, not observed, not watched.

Seen in the complete sense, the sense that means the full reality of who you are is known and accepted by the one who is seeing you.

It is a feeling I had read about in mystical literature across traditions.

the Jewish concept of being known by Hashem in one’s complete interiority.

The Christian language of being beheld by God.

I had discussed it academically.

I had never felt it.

I felt it then.

Standing at the tomb of a 15-year-old Catholic boy in a Cisc on a Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by pilgrims who were praying in five languages with my notebook in my hand.

And then I heard my name.

Shalom.

Rabino Davidit.

The greeting came in Hebrew, perfect Hebrew, not the hesitant Hebrew of a student, not the accented Hebrew of a language learner, but the natural fluent Hebrew of someone for whom it is a living tongue.

The pronunciation was impeccable.

The phrasing was exactly as we use it.

Shalom.

The traditional greeting, peace be upon you.

I turned.

Standing beside me was a young man of approximately 15 years.

He was slight, dark-haired, with a face that radiated a quality I can only describe as undivided, entirely present, without the fractured, distracted quality that characterizes most contemporary faces.

He was wearing modern sneakers, jeans, and a plain t-shirt.

On the t-shirt in Hebrew letters were the words leerk hakadusha toward holiness.

I responded automatically before thought allayikum shalom.

Then thought arrived and I stared.

How do you know Hebrew? I asked.

Who are you? My name is Carlo Akutis, he said in Hebrew.

During my life on earth, I cataloged Eucharistic miracles through computer programming because I believed that Hashem whom your tradition names is uses every means available to reveal himself to his creatures.

I was born on the 3rd of May 1991 in London.

I died on the 12th of October 2006 from fulminant leukemia.

I was beatified on the 10th of October 2020.

I looked at the tomb.

I looked back at him.

My recorder was still running.

I checked it instinctively, the reflex of an academic, and then felt the absurdity of that reflex.

You are Christian, I said.

How can you use the name of Hashem? He smiled.

It was the smile of a person who has considered this question thoroughly and arrived at something beyond argument.

Rabbi David, he said, “Hashem is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom your tradition has served for 3,000 years.

I did not come to debate the differences between our paths.

I came because you are searching for truth, and your search is sincere, even when it wears the clothes of skepticism.

” “I am a researcher,” I said.

“I am here to study.

” You are here, Carlo said gently, because a wall is painful.

Even when you built it yourself, even when you believe it is necessary, even when the wall is built from true things, I was silent.

In 28 years of rabbitical counseling, I have sat with people in the deepest crisis of their lives.

I have learned that the most honest thing a person can say is often the thing they have been most successfully avoiding.

Carlo had said in two sentences the thing I had been avoiding for a very long time.

Rabino David, he continued, “During my life, I never taught that the church replaced Israel in the covenant with God.

I never thought that Jewish tradition was wrong or supersede it.

I believed that Hashem has many children and that each tradition carries a portion of the light.

The Eucharist I documented was for my tradition.

The evidence of God’s presence in a particular form in a particular covenant.

Your Torah is evidence of God’s presence in another form, in another covenant.

These are not contradictions.

They are what the cabalists callsum the contraction of the infinite into different forms so that finite beings can encounter it.

I blinked.

He had used a precise cabalistic term zim zoom the mystical concept developed by Isaac Laura in the 16th century describing God’s self-contraction to create space for creation.

It is not a term that appears in standard Christian theology.

It is not a term that a non-speist would use in this context.

You know cabala I said I know that truth is larger than any traditions vocabulary for it.

He said, “And I know that the Bal Shamtov and Francis of Aizi were both pointing at the same thing from different sides of the mountain.

” I sat down.

There was a bench nearby, and I sat on it because my legs had made a decision independent of my mind.

Carlos sat beside me.

Around us, the pilgrims continued their prayers, their photos, their quiet devotions.

No one appeared to see him.

No one glanced toward us with the curiosity that a 15-year-old boy speaking fluent Hebrew to a kippa wearing rabbi should reasonably have provoked.

“I want to tell you something specific,” Carlo said, and his tone shifted.

“Not more serious, because he had been entirely serious throughout, but more focused, the way a person’s tone shifts when they are about to say the thing they came to say.

” Tomorrow morning at 10:00, you will receive a phone call from a family in Rome.

Their name is Levi.

They have a daughter named Sarah who is 16 years old and is dying of the same leukemia that took me.

She has been asking her family for a rabbi who understands both Jewish tradition and Catholic spirituality.

She has been following my story and finds it speaks to her.

But she does not know how to hold my story inside her Jewish faith.

I was watching his face as he spoke.

There was nothing theatrical in it.

Nothing of the performing visionary.

He spoke the way someone speaks when they are conveying accurate information.

What am I supposed to do for her? I asked.

What rabbis have always done? He said, “You will sit with her in her fear and her confusion, and you will tell her the truth.

That dying young is not a punishment, and that Hashem sometimes chooses certain souls for brief lives that do more than long ones.

” You will use my story as an example of how that is possible.

And in doing so, you will discover something that no amount of academic research could have given you.

That the comfort Hashem sends does not ask permission from our theological categories before arriving.

And if I use your story for a dying Jewish girl, I said slowly, “What am I? What does that make me?” Carlo looked at me with an expression I recognized.

It was the expression of a teacher who has asked a student a question and is waiting for them to realize they already know the answer.

A rabbi, he said simply, “A rabbi who has remembered that our father Abraham received Hashem’s messengers without first asking for their credentials.

” “A silence fell between us.

” Around us, the pilgrims prayed.

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