Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly deep dive into one issue facing Israel and the Jewish world.

I'm Times of Israel Deputy editor Amanda Borschal Dan.

This week I'm joined by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, a leading voice in conservative Judaism,

who has served as the head rabbi of New York's Park Avenue

Synagogue since 2008. Hi, Elliot. Thanks so much for joining me. It's great to be here.

Thank you, Amanda. We're here, of course, to speak about your new book for such a time as this,

which was written with the October 7th Hamas Massacre as its skeleton, shall we say, but not only about that.

The book, to me, is a real blend of memoir of Torah study, and it's almost an anthropological

or sociological reflection on what it means to be a Jew in the diaspora today, but not only

that as well. I want to mention that you and I

met about six years ago in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and then I was

really impressed by your empathy, and in reading this book, it hit me again, and so I'll really

try to hold back the tears as we're talking. But I was so

moved in reading your book about how you're able to bring a lot of nuance from this moment and

from the many, many different sides of those affected by this moment. How did you get into the heads of so many different people?

Thank you, Amanda. And I remember that moment when we first connected in the wake of the Tree of Life

shootings, and I was there as a rabbi, you were there as a journalist, we were all there as

human beings who were shattered by the trauma of the tree of life shooting.

And that's really a way to frame some, not all, of what this book is about, because that was a

moment that we knew that anti-Semitism, animosity, violent acts against the Jewish community long preceded the horrors of October 7th.

So you had Pittsburgh, you had Poit.

You had countless incidents prior to this moment.

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