A child somewhere in the crowd began to cry softly and was quietly comforted by her mother.

The October light fell through the high windows of the sanctuary in long angled columns.

There is something else, Carlos said.

during your time of silence after this encounter.

And you will have a time of silence, Rabbi David, not of mutiness, but of interior stillness.

In the weeks and months after you return to New York, it will it you will write something, not an academic paper, a letter, a letter to your congregation explaining what happened here and what it means for your understanding of Hashem’s work in the world.

This letter will be the most important thing you have ever written.

It will reach people whose names you will never know.

My congregation is Orthodox, I said.

If I tell them I was moved by a Catholic saint, tell them you were moved by Hashem, Carlos said.

Tell them that the Holy One, blessed be he, is not confined to the forms we have built for him.

Tell them that Abraham left everything he knew because Hashem called him towards something he could not yet see.

Your congregation knows this story.

They have always known this story.

You are only asking them to live it.

He stood.

One more thing, he said.

On the day Sarah Levi dies, you will be with her.

In those final hours, she will ask you to recite the shama with her.

And as you recite the ancient words of your tradition, she will close her eyes.

And you will know with the same certainty that I knew as a 15-year-old boy who was not afraid to die, that Hashem receives his children from every direction.

He stepped back.

The light around him, and I am aware of how this sounds.

I am aware that I am a man with a doctorate from Colombia, and I am writing the word light.

The light around him intensified for a moment, then settled and he was gone.

I sat on that bench for a long time.

I was holding my recorder.

I checked it.

The audio was running.

I rewound it to the moment I had touched the glass.

There was a long section of silence, then my voice saying, “Alaykum shalom, then more silence.

Then at intervals my side of the conversation, questions, responses, long pauses that I could now account for.

” The other voice was not recorded.

I sat with this for a while.

Then I began to cry, not dramatically, not with the theatrical grief of a man performing his conversion.

Quietly, with the particular quality of tears that comes when something you have been holding very tightly for a very long time is finally released around me.

The pilgrims of Carlo Autis continued their prayers.

No one approached me.

No one asked if I was all right.

I was somehow entirely alone in the middle of a crowd.

in the way that one is alone at the precise moment when something important is happening to you.

I thought about my grandfather Baruk and the numbers on his forearm.

I thought about the wall I had built and the loneliness I had successfully disguised as theological rigor.

I thought about 28 years of guiding people through their deepest struggles while maintaining beneath my rabbitical authority a private conviction that Hashem was smaller than I had been taught to believe he was.

smaller, bounded, contained within the specific forms of my specific tradition.

I thought about Abraham, who left everything he knew.

I stayed at the tomb until the sanctuary was nearly empty.

Then I walked back to my hotel, sat at the small desk in my room, opened my laptop, and began to write.

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The phone rang at 10:00 the following morning.

Precisely 10:00.

I was at breakfast in my hotel, not expecting anything, having told no one my phone number in Rome.

The number was Italian.

Unfamiliar, I answered.

A woman’s voice in Italian accented English, thin with exhaustion.

Is this Rabbi Goldstein from New York? We were given your number by I’m not sure.

Someone at the Jewish community in Rome said you were here for research.

My name is Rachel Levi.

My daughter Sarah is 16 years old and she is very ill and she has been asking for a rabbi who who understands things that we do not understand.

I held the phone and felt the floor shift slightly beneath me.

The way it shifts when a prediction is fulfilled in precise detail.

I will come today, I said.

Sarah Levi was small for 16, her dark hair thinned by treatment, her eyes enormous and clear and startlingly intelligent.

She was in a private room at the JLI hospital in Rome, surrounded by the careful clutter of a seriously ill person’s space, medical equipment and family photographs and small objects brought from home.

A stuffed animal at the foot of the bed that she was probably slightly too old for and completely undisguised about keeping.

On her bedside table was a print out of a photograph of Carlo Autis.

When I entered, she looked at me with a directness that reminded me of the gaze I had encountered at the tomb.

Not the same quality, hers was human, entirely human.

The focused attention of a person for whom time has become precious and who has stopped spending it on things that do not matter.

You’re the rabbi from New York, she said in English.

I am.

Do you know about Carlo Autis? I do.

She studied me.

Did you go to his tomb yesterday? Something shifted in her face, a loosening, a relief.

Something happened to you there, she said.

It was not a question.

I sat in the chair beside her bed.

Her mother remained at the edge of the room, present but discreet, giving us space.

Yes, I said.

Something happened.

Tell me, Sarah said, and I told her all of it exactly as I have told you now.

I told her about my skepticism, my academic hypothesis, my 34 years of carefully maintained separation from other traditions.

I told her about the touch of the glass and the young man who had appeared beside me speaking Hebrew and what he had said.

I told her about the phone call I had expected.

She listened without interrupting.

Her hands were folded on the blanket over her lap.

When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “He told you about me?” “Yes.

” Do you think she paused choosing carefully? Do you think Hashem sends the same message through different messengers? Like he said the same things to both of us through someone we could each understand? I thought about this.

I think I said slowly that the Torah teaches that Hashem spoke to all the nations at Sinai, not only to Israel.

The Talmud says that the voice divided itself into 70 languages.

I used to read that as metaphor.

I am reading it differently now.

She smiled.

It was a smile that contained the same quality I had seen in Carlo’s smile.

Not innocence, which is the absence of knowledge, but something beyond knowledge.

The peace that comes on the other side of it.

We talked for 4 hours that first day.

We talked about her fear, which was real and specific.

She was afraid of pain, afraid of absence, afraid of what she was leaving behind.

We talked about her faith, which was genuine but young and unequipped for what was being asked of it.

We talked about Carlo, his website, his sneakers, his daily mass, his absolute certainty in the face of death that was so thoroughly documented in the accounts of those who had known him.

He wasn’t afraid, she said.

No.

How does a 15year-old not be afraid of dying? I had a doctorate in comparative messianism and 28 years of rabbinical experience and I had never been asked a question that went so directly to what I actually knew rather than what I could argue.

I thought about the answer before I gave it.

I think I said that he was not afraid because he had already given himself entirely to something larger than himself.

When you have done that, when the thing you most value is not your own life, but the love that your life is an expression of, then losing your life is less like losing everything and more like.

I searched for the word, more like coming home.

She looked at me.

Is that what the shema means? She asked.

Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Is that what that means? that there’s only one thing and it’s Hashem and we’re part of it.

I was a rabbi for 28 years and I understood in that moment that this 16-year-old girl dying of leukemia had understood the shama more completely than most people who had recited it daily for a lifetime.

Yes, I said that is exactly what it means.

I visited Sarah every day for the following 6 weeks until I had to return to New York.

After I returned, we continued our conversations through video call.

Her propped against her pillows in Rome.

Me at my desk in Manhattan, her parents sometimes present, sometimes not.

She had begun a blog that she called in English, Sarah and Carlo.

Two young people, one God.

She wrote about her Jewish faith and her admiration for Carlo with a directness and clarity that was remarkable for any writer.

Extraordinary for a 16-year-old who was dying.

The blog found its audience quickly.

Within 3 months, it had been read by more than 40,000 people.

Letters arrived from around the world from Catholic teenagers in Brazil who found a Jewish girl’s faith moving.

from Jewish families in America who found Carlo’s story unexpectedly compelling from interfaith couples who were navigating the same question Sarah was navigating and who found in her blog of vocabulary for doing so.

She answered every letter personally in the careful deliberate way of someone who understands that her time is finite and who has decided to spend it on what matters.

I returned to Rome in March.

I was with her family when she entered the final phase.

In the last hours, her breathing became the slow, irregular rhythm of a body releasing itself.

Her parents were on one side of the bed, her younger brother asleep in the chair in the corner.

I sat on the other side, her hand in mine, reciting the Psalms of Tehillim in a low voice the way Jews have sat with her dying for 3,000 years.

At a certain point, her eyes opened.

She looked at me with complete clarity, fully present, fully herself.

The same enormous dark eyes I had first seen in that Roman hospital room 6 months earlier.

Rabbi, she said barely audible.

The Shama.

I held her hand and I recited the ancient words.

Shama Israel.

Adonai Elohu.

Adonaihat.

Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

She whispered it with me, her lips moving on the word I am one.

She closed her eyes.

She did not open them again.

I am writing this 3 months after Sarah’s death.

I am sitting at the desk in my office at Congregation Beth Shalom in Manhattan.

On my desk there is a photograph of my grandfather Baruk and beside it printed from Sarah’s blog.

A photograph of Carlo Akutis in his jeans in his sneakers with that expression of undivided peace.

I wrote the letter Carlo told me I would write.

I addressed it to my congregation and I told them what happened in Aisi and what I understood from it.

I did not soften it and I did not theologize it into something palatable.

I said I went to Italy as a skeptic and I came home as a rabbi who has remembered something we have always known and too often forgotten that Hashem is not the property of any tradition and that the holy one blessed be he speaks to every human heart in the language that heart can receive.

The response was not what I

feared.

Some of my congregants were unsettled.

I expected that and I respected it.

A few asked for extended conversations about the theological implications, and I had those conversations with the seriousness they deserved.

But the majority of the response was something I had not anticipated, relief, as though something that had been held tight, could at last breathe.

One woman, a psychiatrist, a member of the congregation for 15 years, whose daughter had married a Catholic man and whom she had not spoken to in three years over the religious question, came to my office the week after I distributed the letter.

She sat across from me and she said, “Rabbi, if Hashem is as large as you are saying, if he is truly large enough to work through all traditions, then is my daughter still inside his covenant even now?” I thought of Carlos speaking to me beside his own tomb in perfect Hebrew about the love of Hashem that does not

ask permission from our theological categories before arriving.

I thought of Sarah reciting the shama with her last breath and meaning every word.

Yes, I told her she is still inside the covenant.

She has always been inside the covenant.

Hashem does not stop loving his children because they take a different path to him.

They reconciled.

The daughter and her Catholic husband came to Shabbat dinner six weeks later.

I heard about it from the psychiatrist who came to tell me with the expression of a person who has received something they had stopped believing was possible.

This is what Carlo Akutus did to my life.

He did not make me less Jewish.

He made me more Jewish, more faithful to the deepest teachings of my tradition, which have always held that the righteous of all nations have a portion in the world to come.

that Hashem’s ways are not bound by human categories.

That the God of Abraham is large enough to be the God of all Abraham’s children wherever they have wondered and by whatever names they call him.

I am still an Orthodox rabbi.

I still lead congregation Beth Shalom.

I still teach Torah, observe Halasha, pray the ancient prayers in the ancient language.

None of that has changed.

What has changed is the wall.

The wall is gone.

And without the wall, I can feel what was always on the other side of it, which is not the alien or the threatening or the theologically incompatible, but simply more of Hashem.

More of the one who is, as the Shama teaches, entirely one.

Carlo Autis was a 15-year-old boy who died of leukemia in Monsa in October of 2006 and who spent his brief life cataloging evidence of Hashem’s presence in the world.

He was Catholic and the evidence he cataloged was eucharistic and I am not Catholic and I do not believe in the Eucharist.

These things are true and I do not erase them.

But I was at his tomb on the 18th anniversary of his death and he spoke to me in Hebrew and he sent me to a dying girl named Sarah Levi.

And I held her hand while she said the shama and I know with a certainty that no academic argument can touch.

The certainty of a man who has witnessed something that the holy one blessed be he arranged all of it.

Baruk Hashem.

Blessed is God.

Baruk Hashem.

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