Deconfliction Fiction

An armed and violent criminal holds a gun to the head of a hapless hostage, demanding that a third party jump off a cliff.

An outlandish but apt metaphor for what’s happening on the Iran negotiation front these days.

The mullahs are unarguably armed and violent, having murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens – aside from, through their various gangland proxies, untold numbers of Americans, Israelis and others. They are holding the U.S. hostage, with the threat of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz again (concretized by recent attacks on vessels), unless Israel – no party to the current negotiations – withdraws from southern Lebanon.

The world needs a reset here, a zooming-out to provide some perspective.

The facts: Hezbollah is a terror organization, pledged, like its patron Iran, to the destruction of Israel (and eventual Shia dominion of the world). Lebanon is barely a country and unable (despite its recent ballyhooed agreement with Israel) to control Hezbollah, which operates (read: launches missiles and drones) with impunity from its territory. Israel, to protect its citizens from their would-be murderers, has created a security zone in southern Lebanon. Iran is demanding that she withdraw and make herself vulnerable to the killers.

And, recent icing on the rancid Iranian cake came last week in the form of a media outlet linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that contended that  Iran has “no choice” but to develop a nuclear bomb.

Maybe you can make this stuff up, but only as the plot of an absurdist novel.

And now, enter the “Deconfliction Cell,” a mechanism designed to “ensure compliance with the cessation of military operations in Lebanon” outlined in the “memorandum of understanding” signed by President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Mediators Qatar and Pakistan (longtime coddlers of Islamurderers) announced the plan, to be overseen by themselves, the Lebanese government and the U.S.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah, the actual combatants in southern Lebanon, were mentioned in the announcement.

According to an informed source, the plan would “monitor and document Israeli cease-fire violations and establish a clear and rapid timetable for a full Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.” The Lebanese army, no match for Hezbollah forces, “would assume responsibility for areas vacated by Israeli forces.”

Dream on, says Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. “IDF troops in southern Lebanon,” he averred, “will have full freedom of operation to engage any direct or emerging threat to them or to the residents of northern Israel. The IDF has no restrictions in this regard.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, waxing diplomatic, said that Israelis “support President Trump’s [original] vision of ensuring that Iran no longer has nuclear capabilities, ballistic missiles or the ability to funnel money to its proxies to threaten its neighbors and maintain its regional hegemony.” But, he added, “the concept of ‘deconfliction’ is misplaced.”

The current ceasefire, he noted, was conditional on Hezbollah withdrawing to the north. “Is this agreement still binding?” he asked. Good question. Hezbollah hasn’t accepted it.

Mr. Leiter also took the opportunity to ask about how the U.S. intends to assure that the billions of dollars that Iran is granted access to in the MOA (through unfrozen assets and a “reconstruction fund”) “do not find their way to Hezbollah.”

Another good question. In 2025 alone, Iran moved $1 billion to Hezbollah, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. If currently sanctioned money is released, the terror group could recover, its weapons intact and its internal position in Lebanon only further strengthened by the very diplomacy meant to constrain it.

But Vice President Vance strives to reassure us. “Sometimes,” he told reporters, if Israel is attacked by Hezbollah, “we could have a better and more peaceful situation if Israel responds in the context of a conversation that is ongoing between Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel and other partners in the region.”

Respond to deadly missiles and drones with… conversation!

Mr. Vance has admitted experimenting with drugs in his youth, which ended only after threats from his grandmother. Has he relapsed? Unfortunately, his bubby is no longer alive to set him straight.

President Trump has said that he was “not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon” and now downplays Israel’s reaction to a plan that ostensibly binds her but in which she had no say at all. “They have a lot of respect for me,” he said, “and they do as I say.”

Mr. Vance has also warned that Trump is “the only head of state in the entire world sympathetic to Israel.”

Maybe the president and vice president’s words are mere posturing, an attempt to gain credibility with the mullahs, in the hope of getting them to truly commit to limit their ambitions. They need to realize, though, that to Iran, “negotiations” are just a stalling opportunity, a speed bump on the road to a nuclear weapon.

© 2026 Ami Magazine

Matos – Being There

At first read, the tribes of Gad, Reuvein and half of Menashe seem to be making an entirely unreasonable request of Moshe: Let us remain on the east side of the Jordan River, where grazing is widely available for our large flocks of sheep, while the rest of the tribes cross the river and fight the idolaters in Cna’an for possession of the Holy Land.

But two factors need to be taken into account. Firstly, from the moment that the waters of Egypt turned to blood, through the ensuing nine plagues, through the splitting of the Red Sea and the moving well of water and the monn – not to mention the revelation at Sinai – the first years of the Jewish people’s history were rife with miracles.

So Hashem would be the One delivering Cna’an’s inhabitants into the hands of Klal Yisrael. There was no need for the sheep-laden tribes to be involved in the conquest of the land. It could have been accomplished with only Yehoshua marching in by himself.

And secondly, it was divinely preordained that the land east of the Jordan was intended for Gad, Reuvein and part of Menashe. That is clear from what eventually happened in the end; and there are deep mystical reasons brought in various sources for that fact. So why shouldn’t those tribes just stay there?

The questions seem strong but their answer is right in the text, in Moshe’s response: “Shall your brothers go out to battle while you settle here? Why do you dishearten the Jewish people?” Bamidbar 32; 6-7).

The petitioning tribes indeed belonged where they were, and the military campaign indeed needed them not a whit. But their remaining behind would dishearten their fellow Jews. Simply by the lack of their presence alongside them.

All of us readily recognize the powerfully positive value of an encouraging word or act (and, sadly, the destructive power of discouraging ones).

But there is something else that provides people encouragement and strength, and whose absence can deprive them of the same: being there with them.

One doesn’t have to say anything or do anything. But physically being at the side of someone who is facing adversity or tragedy provides them comfort, encouragement and strength. It is a gift of the most wondrous sort.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Perfect Timing

How despondent Pinchas could have easily felt when his grandfather, father and uncles, and all of their future descendants, were chosen by Hashem to be cohanim (Shemos, 28:1). But he himself, having been born before that moment, was not among that role’s grantees.

He probably did not mind, though. Because his subsequent action (at the end of parshas Balak), the killing of Zimri and Cozbi, could only be a proper act – and Hashem confirmed its propriety – if it had been committed by an utterly selfless person. One needs a sense of self to feel slighted.

How ironic, then, is the fact that, had Pinchas actually been a cohein at the time of his violent act, justified though it was, it would have rendered him unable to serve in that special role. Because a cohein who has killed a person, even properly or accidentally, is disqualified to serve as a cohein.

And Hashem made Pinchas a cohein only after – in fact, because – of his act (Zevachim 101b). Pinchas’s ultimate status as a cohein, in the end, depended on his having been “left out” when his relatives were granted that status.

Few of us are truly selfless, and many of us are easily slighted. When we are, we do well to recall Pinchas’ experience. The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 230:5) actually states as halacha that “One should be accustomed to say: All that Hashem does is for the best.”

Sometimes we are fortunate, as Pinchas was, to come to see how that is true.

But even when we don’t, it still is.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Say It Sam

If the name Sam Harris doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because you’re blessedly not into the world of podcasts.

Neither am I, but Mr. Harris, holder of a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and a philosopher, is a popular podcaster. Although he is halachically Jewish, he is an avowed secularist, not someone who might be expected to feel any connection to Judaism or Israel.

Which is why those who consider him a highbrow of the highest caliber have been dismayed by his bucking of the Israel-hatred that has become mandatory among the imperious intelligentsia. They can’t understand how he missed the memo.

Recently, to address his dismayed disciples’ puzzlement, he wrote a 2000 word tour de force, audaciously titled “Why I won’t debate critics of Israel.” It has been widely shared.

Mr. Harris is no knee-jerk defender of any Israeli action or leader, but has no interest in “exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark.”

He is interested only in the larger picture, the one that, in a reasonable world, would obscure all else. “The ethical difference between Israel and her enemies,” he states, “remains vast.” And “the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible… the product of perennial lies and delusions.”

Strong words, made all the stronger by his elaboration.

Militant Islamists, he contends, are “essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise.”

Were the IDF ever to “morph into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields,” he fantasized, “if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom… producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv [would] condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood – if, in other words, the Israelis began to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war.”

But of course, he continues, “there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to ‘love death’ more than everyone else loves life – for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.”

Cutting sharply through all the “pro-Palestinian” obfuscation, he explains that “The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel.” It has been “jihadism… the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.”

Disentangling every strand of the region’s history is “a fool’s errand,” he further contends, “because Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.”

All that matters in the here and now, he declares, is “what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now…. What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?”

And here he cuts to the quick. While “Israel has its religious fanatics,” he writes, they are not “the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture.”

There is much more in Mr. Harris’ manifesto, but the following paragraph really says it all:

“If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution…. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.”

Words worthy of being displayed on every billboard in Europe and posted in every American university classroom.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

Chukas – Snake Eyes

The bizarre image (Bamidbar 21:9) of our ancestors gazing at a graven image – a copper representation of a snake – to end a snake-plague born of their complaining about the mon, is contextualized by a Mishneh in Rosh Hashana (29a):

“Did the snake kill, or did the snake preserve life? [No.] Rather, when the Jewish people turned their eyes upward and subjected their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they were healed, but if not, they were necrotized [by the venom].”

Which raises the obvious question: Why not eliminate the middlesnake and just look directly heavenward?

Rabbeinu Bachya calls attention to the word used to introduce the (actual) snakes in the account: hanechashim (Bamidbar 21:6). Not “snakes” but “the snakes.”  The definite article, he says, refers to the fact that these were the same reptiles that, elsewhere in the Torah (Devarim 8:15), are described as having been ever-present in the desert our ancestors wandered. 

Rav Samson Rafael Hirsch expands on that observation, explaining that gazing at the copper snake was meant to sensitize the people to the constancy and ubiquitousness of snakes around them – and to the realization that when the snakes hadn’t been plaguing them until then it was because of Hashem’s protection.

As Abba Binyamin taught (Berachos 6a), “If the eye were given permission to see, no person would be able to withstand [the sight of the multitude of] the demons [that surround  him].”

We moderns can easily appreciate the idea that danger as potentially lethal as venomous snakes and yet undetectable by our eyes is ever present all around us. And that every day that we don’t succumb to the myriad ever-present infectious dangers, every day that the immune systems Hashem gave us function, we should feel obligated to look heavenward in thanks.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Humility: The Mark of Leadership

Few contrasts are as striking as the one between Moshe, the “most humble of all men,” who had to be Divinely drafted to lead the Jewish people, and Korach, who was consumed with a desire for a leadership role.

And, like deceitful populists over ensuing millennia, Korach insisted that he was merely standing up for the masses, advocating for their democratic rights. Who needs a mezuzah (i.e. a leader) if the house is filled with holy books (i.e. the magnificent masses)?

Many contemporary leaders, some more shamelessly than others, advanced their aspirations in Korach-fashion, lusting for power while claiming to be championing the people. (A rare exception was Dwight Eisenhower, the only American president who had to be drafted to run for that office.)

In the authentic Jewish religious world, true leaders are always drafted – that is to say, “elected,” not by campaigns and misleading claims but rather by unsought public acclaim. I have been privileged to have spent time in the vicinities of several, and was deeply affected by their selflessness and modesty. My rebbe, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, was one; see https://www.rabbiavishafran.com/mr-to-us/. His yahrtzeit is Shiva Asar B’Tamuz.

And, just like Moshe was accused of sins he didn’t commit, so are Gedolim today sometimes attacked for imagined misdeeds. And not only by people lacking any relationship to Torah, but even some who are meticulously observant. Frumkeit doesn’t necessarily imply ehrlichkeit.

Ohn ben Peles, the Midrash recounts, a confederate of Korach’s, was saved from the latter’s fate by Mrs. Ohn. After plying her husband with enough wine to put him to sleep, she sat outside their tent and uncovered her hair. So when Korach’s supporters came to fetch her husband and saw the immodest woman, meticulously religious folks that they were, they turned on their righteous heels and left. 

The upshot: Even religious people can fall for would-be-dictators’ lies. 

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran