Lech Lecha — No, Thank You

When, as they approach Egypt, Avram asks Sarai to pretend she is his sister, he explains “so that it will be good for me and I will remain alive because of you.” (Beraishis, 12:13)

Rashi’s comment on the words “it will be good for me” – “so that they [the Egyptians] will give me gifts” – puzzled me, as they surely have many, for years. Avram, who later in the parshah (14:23) spurned even a shoelace from the king of Sdom, is concerned with gifts?

An intriguing understanding of Rashi’s words may be suggested based on what Shlomo HaMelech, in Mishlei (15:27), teaches us: “He who who hates gifts will live.”

It may be that the greatest expression of that attitude isn’t only “in theory,” in hating the idea of gifts, but in actual practice – namely, in one’s attitude toward an actual proffered gift that helps ensure life. 

And so, perhaps Avram wanted gifts to be offered to him, so that he could “hate” the fact that he was offered them… with the result being that, as he in fact continues, “I will remain alive…” – echoing Shlomo HaMelech’s words.

Interestingly, the concept of shunning gifts as bolstering life is reflected in a snippet from a 1960s folk song:

“Some people never get, some never give;

Some people never die and some never live.”

There is, Chazal teach us, “chachmah bagoyim,” wisdom among the nations.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Noach – Our (Temporarily) Un-Whole World

The word “toldos” introducing the “account” of Noach is spelled in a subtly different way than its first appearance in parshas Beraishis, where “eleh toldos hashamayim vi’ha’aretz” (Beraishis 2:4) concludes the account of the creation of the world. There, in its first usage, it is written malei, “full,” with two vavs, one after the tav and one after the daled.

Gershon Zev (William) Braude was a respected Jewish studies scholar and Reform rabbi  who befriended me, a much younger man, when my family and I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, from, roughly, the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s.

He once asserted that there are 13 places in Tanach where the word toldos is used. In only two of those places, he pointed out, is the word written malei: The first one is in parshas Beraishis, and the second, at the very end of sefer Rus (4:18), where the genealogy leading to the birth of Dovid, the progenitor of mashiach, is recounted.

Thus, Gershon Zev suggested, “wholeness,” or perfection of human history, existed at the creation of the world and will emerge again with the arrival of mashiach.

In the interim, though, as we all vividly sense, the world remains unfulfilled, imperfect, unarguably un-whole.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Provocation, Politics and Prudence

Two questions:

1) Which contemporary public provocateur poses the greatest threat to Israel?

2) Has Mike Huckabee, who has called attacks on Arabs in Yehudah and Shomron “Jewish terrorism,” thrown Israel under the bus?

The answer to the first question, I believe, isn’t Tucker Carlson or even Hasan Piker. It’s Itamar Ben-Gvir.

No, I don’t think Mr. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, is the monster many media have made him out to be. Yes, he has strong views about Arabs he sees as posing dangers to Jews. And such Arabs, and the dangers they represent, certainly exist.

But he is a politician, too, who, to impress a particular constituency, has done things like boasted of reducing food rations for Palestinian prisoners (and Israel’s high court ruled in 2025 that the prison service under Ben-Gvir deprived Palestinians of a minimum subsistence diet). And posted (though later removed) a video of corpulent, smiling Arab prisoners entering prison and then exiting as gaunt, drained creatures.

And he has also made statements calibrated, like the video, to inflame. In a more recent one, responding to Israel’s drawdown of military strikes in Gaza,  he opined that “targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night.” He added: “Not just those who pose an immediate threat – there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

Now, arguably, he meant the 30 to 40 deaths to be of Hamas terrorists. And few of us would be disappointed if the earth were no longer cursed with the presence of such murderous people.

But it was entirely predictable that media and nations (not just Arab ones but western ones as well) would understand his wished-for victims to include random Arab residents of Gaza. And, equally predictable, that those media and nations, along with countless pundits, would seize upon the “not even people” phrase as mirroring things like the Nazis’ portrayal of Jews.

Such incendiary statements provide potent ammunition to anti-Israel provocateurs like Carlson and Piker, who then gleefully feed them into their “genocide” generator. And from there, the libels spread into other parts of the populace.

As to question #2, Mr. Huckabee has been the friendliest and most empathetic US ambassador to Israel that she has ever known. And his condemnation of acts of violence by nationalist hotheads against innocent Arabs is not only justified, but also in Israel’s best interest.

He made clear that roughly half a million Israelis live in Yehudah and Shomon, and that the men responsible for “settler violence” represent “a very tiny minority” of that population, at most, “a few hundred men.”

He added that that is “a few hundred too many,” but he clearly rejects the myth that, as BDS supporter Mairav Zonszein put it a recent New York Times guest column, violence against Arab residents “is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy… [which includes] the emboldening of settler militias,” and that the “systematic destruction of Palestinian life” is the government’s goal.

Israeli Jews in outposts in Yehudah and Shomron point out that there have been many more instances of attacks on them by local Arabs than there has been violence against Arabs. And that there have been times when what seemed to be anti-Arab violence turned out to be nothing of the sort (in some cases, even fabrications). All true.

But, in the end, those cases do not justify “retaliations” against random Arab families and fields that have unarguably taken place.

Back in May, when an “activist” flotilla was intercepted by the Israeli navy, Mr. Ben-Gvir posted a video mocking captured flotilliacs bound and forced to kneel on the ground. The posting sparked (as its poster intended) outrage from abroad and even from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who call his minister’s actions “despicable.”

Mr. Huckabee’s reaction at the time was that the “Flotilla was [a] stupid stunt, but Ben Gvir betrayed dignity of his nation.”

That latter phrase said much. And still does, today.

At a time when Israel is ridiculously but widely vilified as racist and genocidal, preserving the dignity of the nation is more important than ever. And provocative anti-Arab rhetoric, not to mention violence perpetrated against Arab civilians, promote anything but dignity.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

Ha’azinu — Chain of Three

The Gemara (Shabbos 88a) quotes “a certain Galilean” as having said “Blessed is the Merciful One, Who gave a three-fold Torah [in the broad sense, Torah, Neviim and Ksuvim] to a three-fold nation [Cohanim, Levi’im and Yisraelim] by means of a third-born [Moshe]  on the third day [of separation of men and women] in the third month [Sivan].”

The stress on threes concerning the giving of the Torah, it occurs to me, may reflect the essence of mesorah itself, its transmittal. Just as the most elemental physical chain needs three links, so, too, the conceptual one. Each of us is a middle link; we must have received the mesorah and then transmitted it. And our recipients then become middle links themselves.

In parshas Haazinu, we read, similarly:  “Ask your father and he will tell you, your grandfather and he will say to you” Devarim 32:7). The threesome chain again.

And, intriguingly, the word employed for the father’s telling is “viyagedcha”, from the root lihagid — which Rashi elsewhere (Shemos 19:3) says implies harshness; and for the grandfather’s telling, the word is viyomru – whose root, omer, Rashi (ibid) characterizes as a “soft” communication.

The Torah may mean to teach here that a father must be an authority figure, and his transmittal of the mesorah more demanding, while a grandfather’s guidance is to be, well, grandfatherly, imparted with a more gentle touch.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Vayeilech – Prepared to Not Progress

Children brought to shul need to be controlled by their parents, of course. They mustn’t be permitted to disturb those gathered there to daven. But, at least from an age when they can be effectively controlled, they should be brought.

Ah, but won’t the need to control them perforce prevent their parents from focusing fully on their tefillos?

Too bad. That’s part of a parent’s job, being hindered.

The mitzvah of Hakhel, described in parshas Vayeilech, entails the gathering, in the time of the Beis HaMidkash, during the first year of the Shmitta cycle, on the first day of chol hamoed Sukkos, of all the nation’s “men, women and children” (Devarim 31:12).

The men, Rashi quotes Massechta Chagiga (3a), must come in order to study (from the portions of the Torah the king reads); the women, to absorb the words; and the children… “to give reward to those who brought them.”

Seems rather circular. Bring them because it’s a mitzvah to bring them?

It is said in the name of R’ Nosson Adler (the first rebbe of the Chasam Sofer), and also in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, that the meaning of the Gemara is that the parents’ reward is for bringing their children even though controlling them makes their fathers’ and mothers’ learning and listening difficult.

Chinuch, training children, in other words, is important enough to require parents’ discomfiture and loss of personal, even spiritual, opportunity.

The Amora R’ Yochanan (Chagigah 15b) said, based on a pasuk in Malachi, that only if a rebbe is “similar to an angel of Hashem” should one “seek Torah from his mouth.”

R’ Pinchas HaLevi Horowitz, the “Hafla’ah” (and, interestingly, another rebbe of the Chasam Sofer), suggests that, since angels are described (Zecharia 3:7) as “omdim,” “standers still,” implying changelessness, R’ Yochanan means to say that a rebbe has to be prepared to “stagnate,” to not progress personally, if that is the toll of his dedication to his students.

And parents, of course, are the ultimate rabbaim, the most influential molders of their children. They must be prepared to be hindered in their personal progress for the sake of their young.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Preposterous Pollsters

The results of its survey “should not be treated as genuine polling data,” announced Median Strategies last week.

For good reason. As the organization went on to say, the poll it released earlier, showing how well candidates were faring in several races, was fake.

Median Strategies admitted that it had fabricated the polling results as part of a “short-term social experiment” meant to expose how quickly false information could spread.

(Some creative vandal might want to try using “just a short-term social experiment” to excuse his breaking a neighbor’s home’s window and scrawling graffiti on its front door. I’m guessing it wouldn’t work out well for him.)

What the pollster at issue evidenced (though probably not the best word to use here), before the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor took place, was that Francesca Hong was leading her opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, by more than 20 percentage points.

That would have meant that the “progressive” Ms. Hong’s victory would surpass even that of fellow radical Abdul El-Sayed in neighboring Michigan’s U.S. Senate race. Which, were it reality, would surely further energize the radical part of the Democratic party.

Thankfully, Ms. Hong went on to lose, although by less than one percentage point. Six days later, Median Strategies owned up to its subterfuge.

Another “survey result” by the firm showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading her opponent Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff. Repeated inquiries by the Los Angeles Times about the methodology of that claim were what led the polling group to come clean.

And to explain that the fabricated results were intended only to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Unsurprisingly, the false polls, particularly the one from the California race, spread widely through social media. The much-maligned “major media,” to their credit, largely ignored the purported polling results, since Media Strategies did not respond to any of their questions about the supposed survey’s methodology.

Even traditional surveys conducted by experienced pollsters have gotten things wrong many times. A week before the aforementioned Michigan Senate Democratic primary election, legitimate polls showed Mr. El Sayed leading by a large margin; his victory, in the end, was a very narrow one.

But a totally phony survey released as real into the mediasphere is something new, and bound to add to public distrust of polls.

The reaction to Median Strategies’ “experiment” was predictably, and rightly, negative, with many pundits accusing the firm of election interference. And, indeed, fictitious “results” presented by pollsters can easily lead to voters either being complacent or feeling hopeless, and, in either case, not bothering to vote. It can also lead some people (and they are both many and mindless) to vote for whomever they perceive as “a winner.”

My personal reaction to Median Strategies’ is less a feeling of outrage than of puzzlement.

If there were a rating system for utterly pointless experiments, at the very top of the heap would be one designed to show “how purported… information could enter and spread through the.. information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Uh, have the folks at Median been following what regularly enters and spreads through the information ecosystem without independent verification… about Israel? Or Jews?

Like the widespread contention that Israelis celebrated (or were behind) the 9/11 attacks; or that the “Zionist war-machine” (i.e. Israel) forced President Trump to attack Iran; or that Israel seeks to exterminate the residents of Gaza. Or that shark attacks in the Red Sea were remotely controlled by Israel to harm Egypt’s tourist industry.

Or that “the Jews” created COVID-19, orchestrated the assassination of JFK and the murder of Charlie Kirk or used their “space lasers” to create hurricanes. Or that Jews were behind the wildfires that plagued Europe this summer.

And so, Median Strategies’ seeking to ascertain if falsehoods can find a fertile growth medium in the muck of the internet – the source of “information” for countless people with strong typing fingers but weak mental faculties – is a little (no, a lot) like seeking to ascertain whether apples grow on trees, hens lay eggs or the sun rises in the east.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

More Than Mere Gratitude

The very first Rashi in the Torah, quoting a Midrash, indicates the importance of Bikkurim, the first fruits offering that opens parshas Ki Savo.  Bikkurim is one of the “raishis” concepts that the word Beraishis (understood as “for the sake of something called raishis) refers to.

And Bikkurim, as evident from the words that are spoken when they are brought, is an expression of “hakaras hatov,” a truly fundamental Torah concept that is usually, though, not entirely accurately, thought of as “gratitude.”

In truth, it is something more subtle and sublime, indicated in a direct translation of the phrase: “recognition of the good.” That is why an example of the concept, as per the Gemara (Bava Kamma, 92b) is the commandment that “You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land,” in last week’s parsha. And why the maxim expressing it is “Don’t throw a clod of dirt into a well from which you drank” (ibid).

So even someone who intended you nothing good, and even an inanimate object, deserve hakaras hatov. How does that work?

My understanding is that the recognition, even while being properly expressed to a person, people or object, is ultimately to Hashem, for causing the good – in the case of the Egyptian slavery, the “purification” (kur habarzel) needed to prepare Klal Yisrael to receive the Torah; in the case of the well, its appearance when one was thirsty.  The action of hakaras hatov is through the Egyptians and through the well, but its ultimate expression is to Hashem.

I remember having negative feelings when on rare occasions I would see a certain person who in effect once forced me, without reason, to leave a position and community I loved.  But then, pondering how what resulted in the end was in fact a tremendous brachah for me and my family, I realized that I needed to feel hakaras hatov toward him.  Well, toward him, which I indeed came to feel, but only as a path leading to true recognition of the good that Hashem had bestowed.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Canards on the Quad

There was a time, dear young’ns, when academia – the world of universities and professors – was the gold standard, the go-to place for ascertaining truths. A time when scholarship was objective and reliable; and scholars, the same.

The most recent reminder that things have changed arrived recently in the sad saga of Jason Arday, one of Britain’s most prominent young academics, who, in 2003, rose to become Cambridge University’s youngest black professor at just 37.

He was renowned for having been mute until he was 11, illiterate until he was 18 and yet later completed a PhD and published widely-praised sociological research. When he was hired by Cambridge, the head of its department for education told him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

Professor Arday also wrote about running marathons, and that he ran 600 miles in six days.

Sound too amazing to be true? Well, it was.

Mr. Arday stood accused of not only falsifying his life story and academic credentials, but also of having plagiarized his PhD thesis. He canceled a series of events promoting his memoir “Great and Unfortunate Things,” and resigned from Cambridge, because, he explained, the public scrutiny had been bad for his mental health.

It clearly was, since he was discovered on erev Shabbos to have died.

Mr. Arday’s field of academic endeavor was sociology, and it wouldn’t have been wrong to characterize him as woke. In a keynote speech at the British Sociological Association, he contended that white conservative activists target black academics and are a “cancer” to be “eradicate[d] from academia.” He did not write or speak about Jews or the Middle East, but his wokeness and fabulism was very much of a kind with that of other professorial prevaricators who did.

Like former Harvard University dean of social science Claudine Gay, who famously, at a Congressional hearing, said that calling for the genocide of Jews might perhaps violate the school’s code of conduct, “depending on the context.”

Dean Gay later was later accused of, in the delicate words of The New York Times, “using material from other sources without proper attribution.” The plagiarism allegations totaled almost 50 instances spanning eight of her academic works, including her dissertation and five of her 11 published articles.

Ms. Gay resigned, saying that having “doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor” has been “distressing.” Understandably.

Back in 2005, Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, who calls Israel a “colonial” project and ignores Jewish historical ties to Eretz Yisrael, was accused of plagiarizing significant portions of another writer’s 1994 article.

While it’s interesting that plagiarizing and vilifying Israel and/or Jews seem to enjoy a cozy relationship, there are all too many academics who, even if they haven’t been caught stealing from others, are nevertheless guilty of another, even worse, academic sin: Bias.

Two Anti-Defamation League reports that just came down the pike reveal rising levels of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in university classrooms. Some instructors are assigning readings by terrorist groups and – not a joke –  offering extra credit for attending anti-Israel protests.

One of the reports cites incidents of professors presenting one-sided narratives, framing lectures around a single political view and treating contested claims as settled fact. Criticism of Israel without presenting counterarguments is worse than plagiarism; it is educational malpractice.

Stanford University, for one example, offers a course called “Palestine Across Disciplines: An Introduction” and asks in its description, “How do we talk about Palestine and Palestinian life in the midst of devastation and genocide?” Somehow, one imagines, the true genocidal actors in the Middle East are untalked about in the course.

And at the University of California, Berkeley, history students were reportedly assigned to read a book by a former spokesperson for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, alongside materials on plane hijacker Leila Khaled. (Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel” did not appear on the reading list.)

According to Gallup, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they have “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has fallen 19 points since 2015 to just 38 percent.

For good reason.

© 2026 Ami Magazine