Why did the New Yorker publish this story?

Author named Yosef Yerushalmi, unknown to me, has a story in the current New Yorker - bio note says he is recently deceased and was a professor of Jewish studies at Columbia - perhaps this posthumous publication is his first fiction and first appearance in the New Yorker, and I would say he's been recognized too late to do him any good, but his story, Gilgul, is about reincarnation of the soul, so who knows? I want to be charitable toward this story, but honestly, my patience is strained here. I'll tell you the plot: A middle-aged scholar visiting in Tel Aviv goes with a friend to see a fortune teller "witch" and she pronounces some banalities and then indicates she can foretell his death - but he doesn't want that information. A few years later, post-divorce, clinically depressed, he feels compelled to return to Tel Aviv (Jaffa, actually) and find her again; she remembers him, and this time gives him a long story about a soul that has wandered through many lifetimes, and some spell that would release the soul from its wanderings. She tells him he is not the wandering soul, however. Then she leaves him alone in her apartment. He leaves, walks on the beach, wonders what it was all about. Hey - me, too! I can accept a story about a prophet or seer, though it's a pretty cheap device - the author is of course the "god" of the story and can make the prophecy come true, or not. The quality of the story depends on surprise, wonder, on how the prophecy informs or dominates the person's life - think, in a way, of Beast in the Jungle (self-imposed prophecy, but still) or the story of Appointment in Samarra, or most powerful of all of course: Macbeth. In this story, the prophecy has no particular bearing on his life, it doesn't change the main character at all, at the end, he wanders along a strand of beach. Why did they publish this story? Is it some editor's homage to a favorite professor or something? There's nothing especially wrong with it on the literal level - his writing is excellent - but I kept hoping, waiting for, expecting something more, and all I get here is a rambling monologue from a seer who may or may not have psychic powers - we never know because the story contains too little information.