I hate packing. Vacation is great, but before you leave, you have to spend so much time picking out the right clothing combinations that will fit your specific needs. That’s especially complicated when the weather can be blazingly hot during the day and bitterly cold at night.

Then there’s the travel medication. In addition to any regular meds, you need to anticipate every inevitability: pills for pain, creams for stiff necks and dry toes; sleeping capsules, antibiotics (always be prepared!), meds in case of nausea, opioids if everything goes totally sideways.

Now, try packing all of that when you don’t know if war is going to start up again while you’re abroad and your flight home could be canceled.

Prudence dictates you should double or triple up everything. That, at least, was our experience overpacking for what should have been a quick jaunt to Cyprus for a four-night stay at the Secret Forest, the popular Israeli-run kosher resort.

My wife, Jody, and I started planning the trip in January. But when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran and the regime responded in kind, we didn’t feel comfortable finishing our booking not knowing if we’d still be at war. People were hoofing it to Taba or Amman or Sharm el-Sheikh to make their international flights.

When it looked like the ceasefire seemed to be holding, we got back in touch with the resort. They were just two seats left on the El Al flight to Paphos (the Secret Forest takes care of accommodations, board and flights for one price), so we had to act fast. Not succumbing to our typical days-long debate, we let whim guide our decision and grabbed those spots.

The very next day, the headlines blared, “U.S. preparing to restart war in coming days.”

Oy, what had we done?

But this was to be my first trip overseas since my CAR-T cancer treatment, and I didn’t want to miss out.

We also desperately needed a break from the frequent trips to the bomb shelter, the constant checking of the “Can I Shower Now?” app or waiting for the scritch-scratch alarm on our phones indicating that a siren would likely sound shortly.

When no missiles had landed on Israel by the morning of our trip, we headed to Ben-Gurion airport and hoped for the best.

Part of the allure of Cyprus is it’s so close to Israel. But when you factor in transport time to Yitzkak Navon station in Jerusalem, then the train to the airport, check-in, security, passport control and grabbing a bite to eat (since short flights don’t serve food), followed by picking up your luggage and boarding the bus for the 40-minute ride into the mountains, it’s actually close to the same as the drive to Eilat.

The Eilat comparison proved apt. The Secret Forest makes for a bizarre combination – a cross-section of Israel transported into the Cypriot mountains.

The resort is 100% Hebrew speaking. All of the lectures, guided meditations, yoga and Pilates instructors, the evening entertainment, the experiential “reversing” seminar and, of course, all 200 guests were Israeli. The kosher food (dairy and pescatarian) attracts a significant percentage of observant guests.

With Hebrew the linga franca, there was no feeling we were getting a taste of another country’s culture. Other than the waiters in the restaurant or the shuttle drivers, we could have been in Hadera or Holon (where half the guests seemed to be from).

If there’s a Cypriot favorite food, it wasn’t offered at the expansive farm-to-table brunch buffets. But there were two kinds of shashuka and a plentiful supply of smoked fish and fresh breads, mainstays at any respectable Israeli hotel spread.

The views eerily resembled the hills of the Upper Galilee; utterly familiar, still beautiful.

My point is: If one is looking for an escape from the Israeli pressure cooker, the Secret Forest aint it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth going. The grounds are gorgeous – the place was an established retreat before Yoni Kahane, an Israeli tourism entrepreneur and Chabadnik who owns and manages other kosher properties in Cyprus and beyond, acquired it in 2023. His vision was to refashion the Secret Forest as a comprehensive, adults-only wellness retreat.

The staff encourages guests to tuck their phones in their suite safes or at least not to follow the news back home too closely.

There are no chocolate treats waiting on your bedroom pillow; rather, each room has a full supply of nuts and fruits. Throughout the resort, wine and cocktails are free (no soft drinks allowed). Before brunch, which starts at 10:00 am, unlimited strawberry and mango smoothies are available. The honey in the dining hall buffet was so fresh, it was still attached to the comb.

Rinat, who performed two of the four nights we were there, was less an Eastern Mediterranean troubadour than a classic Israeli erev shira (Hebrew for sing-along) cheerleader. The one night when there was a local Greek band, they davka had learned a few Hebrew hits to throw into the mix.

Much dancing and merriment ensued.

The highlight of our time was a hike to the neighboring village of Miliou. The foliage-friendly dirt path parallels a brook that babbles absently. I was surprised by how out of breath I was during the at times steep climb (I’m still working on accepting my post-cancer “new normal”), but I did it, which made both Jody and me feel proud.

As our time in Cyprus drew to a close, we began the seven-hour return home. Upon landing at Ben-Gurion, nothing seemed to have changed.

“As Iran talks stall, Israel and U.S. prepping to renew war as soon as next week,” one headline announced.

I unpacked all the extra clothes and medications we’d stuffed into our already overweight suitcase, all the while wondering if this, too, has become a new normal.

I first wrote about packing during wartime for The Jerusalem Post.

Here’s something your doctor will probably never ask you: “Do you want this potentially life-saving treatment? Or would you rather die?”

But what if the question were phrased differently?

“There’s a 30% chance the medicine won’t do anything to keep you alive. Moreover, if it does help, when you come out the other side, you won’t be the same person you are now. But we can’t actually tell you what your quality of life will be. Every person is unique.”

What might have seemed a clear-cut choice now seems muddier, right?

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my decision to opt for what was behind Door Number One – the life-saving treatment – and yet these questions still loom large.

The treatment in question, CAR-T, which transforms your own T-cells into cancer-chomping Pac-men, worked for me. In two weeks, it had knocked out the lymphoma from which I’d suffered for some seven years.

That said, I am definitely not the same person I was before.

A few months before my cancer transformed into aggressive DLBCL, my wife, Jody, and I had been hiking the hills of Lisbon and Porto. By the end of that year, I had lost a kidney, was deep into the one type of chemo I’d desperately hoped to avoid, and had lost my hair, my stamina and my appetite.

I was six weeks in the hospital getting my CAR-T, during which time I was barely able to get out of bed without help; just taking the daily recommended stroll around the ward was an exercise in embarrassment.

Eventually, I was released, cured for now, but incredibly weak, with my bladder lining so decimated from all the drugs and radiation that every pee felt like a sushi chef’s jujitsu knife at play.

This was not the body I knew.

But slowly – very slowly – I started to get stronger. I returned to my exercise routine and added back yoga. I was able to put aside the cane and could get up the stairs without clinging to the banister.

I was feeling so positive, I planned a cruise for our entire family. The logic was, if I was especially tired one day, I could just hang back and enjoy the endless buffet and heated pools while the rest of our party went out and explored the local scenery.

Then, without warning, my blood counts crashed.

My platelets, which normally should be at a minimum of 150,000, hovered around a paltry 20,000. My neutrophils were in the toilet, as was my hemoglobin. My doctor reassured me this is not unexpected after CAR-T, but it was another unanticipated gut punch.

I wound up needing to take three different injections a week just to keep my levels at a bare minimum. I became a regular pincushion at the nearby blood lab. Every month, I haul myself to Hadassah for IV infusions to boost my IgG levels. I take 15 pills a day.

My son, Amir, commented that the entire process had aged me by 10 years. I might be 65 chronologically, but I feel and act more like 75. Nor has it been gradual aging. I went from 65 to 75 seemingly overnight.

All of which makes me wonder, if I were to require more treatment – if the cancer were to come back or something new cropped up – would the question my doctor never asked a year ago become relevant this time? 

I think about bioethicist and author of Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel’s famous assertion that, at age 75, he wouldn’t do anything to prolong his existence. No chemo, no colonoscopies, no cardiac stress tests.

Had I reached that point – just 10 years earlier than expected?

And yet, my mind remains clear. I am able to pontificate as lucidly as before, whether in my writing or at the Shabbat table. I’m learning new things, like how best to employ AI. While I do forget a few things here and there, that probably is age-related!

In the first months after I was released from the hospital, I’d regularly ask Jody, “Why didn’t you advise me to say no to the treatment? You knew I wouldn’t be the same.”

It’s a good thing she didn’t. “I want to live,” I now say with a faint smile.

My hematologist tells me that every time I’m at Hadassah for a checkup, she tells her team, “Here comes my walking miracle.”

Optimism has, for the moment, won out. Perhaps that’s why I just put a deposit down on another trip – a 20-day excursion to Vietnam and Cambodia for Jody and me.

It’s not for another year – early 2027 – by which time I hope I will have regained enough of my strength that we can explore the streets and waterways of Hanoi and Hoi An and Ha Long Bay. (I made sure we can always cancel and get our money back.)

I’ve even started to keep a gratitude journal. Every night, I write down one good thing that happened that day. Playing with the grandkids. A satisfying meal. A compelling TV show.

Psychologist and Atlantic contributor Arthur Brooks has a different approach: He keeps a log of his regrets and disappointments.

Whenever he writes something down, he leaves two lines blank underneath. Then he makes a note to look at it in a month, and again in a month after that. The original complaint – the feelings, thoughts and emotions around it – invariably seem smaller, he claims.

Science has a name for this: the Fading Affect Bias. While roughly 60% of unpleasant experiences lose their emotional sting over time, only 42% of the pleasant ones fade. This creates a gap of nearly 20% — an inclination towards positivity that edits the narrative of our lives.

That works for me. In the meantime, who wants to meet next year at Angkor Wat?

This article first appeared in The Jerusalem Post.

I have always tried to be honest about my health. Still, it’s difficult to share about one particular malady that’s been vexing me these past months.

One of the treatments I had in the last year – most likely the chemo I received prior to the CAR-T that knocked out my cancer – did a real number on my bladder.

The toxins in the chemo apparently damaged my “GAG layer.” That’s the protective boundary that keeps the acidic urine from irritating the bladder wall itself. (To amuse myself with this new terminology, I will sing the “gag me with a spoon” line from Moon Zappa’s 1982 epic, “Valley Girl.”)

When I went to my urologist to complain about the constant burning and urgency “down there,” he ordered the bladder operation I wrote about in a previous column.

The pathology showed no cancer, but it did point to severe inflammation of the GAG layer. And by severe, I mean the pain has become unbearable. It’s a Catch-22 situation. The better hydrated I am, the less concentrated the urine and the less pain it causes. But the more I drink, the more the urgency dominates.

“Most people just live with it,” my urologist told me, in that blunt Israeli way.

“I’m not most people,” I shot back.

We first tried a low-dose course of steroids – the same prednisone I had left over that may have saved young Ethan’s life during the High Holidays.

Steroids were not my urologist’s first choice – he didn’t even know the dosage to give me or for how long. I asked my “shadow doctor”: AI. When ChatGPT supplied what seemed like a non-hallucinatory answer, he readily agreed.

The pills, unfortunately, didn’t work. Worse, it resulted in “rebound” pain more intense than when it all started. That left us with Plan B: hyaluronic acid (HA) instillations directly into the bladder.

HA is a molecule found in the body that helps hydrate skin, lubricates joints and cushions tissue. Since it’s very effective at holding water, HA is commonly used in eye drops, fillers for wrinkles and as an aid for healing wounds and tissue regeneration.

HA is naturally present in the GAG layer, so adding extra HA can fill in any missing patches to shield the underlying tissue from irritants and bacteria. Exactly what I needed.

Sadly, there’s only one way in. I was so hoping the steroids would work, but given that my symptoms were making it difficult to be more than ten seconds from a bathroom – not helpful if you’re playing in a typically toilet-less Israeli park with your grandkids or stuck in your seat during an airplane’s final approach – I decided to instill the bullet, so to speak.

It was to be the ultimate acid test (minus the Ken Kesey psychedelic antics).

HA installations are quick but must be repeated every week for eight sessions – that is, a full two months – and you don’t usually feel relief until about three-quarters of the way through.

Something to look forward to every Monday morning.

I’ll skip to the good news first: The instillations weren’t as bad as I’d imagined. Tal, my initial HA nurse, grew up partly in Chicago, so he was able to explain what he was doing in fluent English, which already put me more at ease. Of the three nurses I worked with over the course of the treatment period, only one spoke no English.

The nurses use a “baby catheter” – the thinnest one available – and lots of numbing lidocaine gel. Getting the lidocaine in there was actually the most painful part. Once the local anesthesia kicked in, I barely felt the baby catheter.

Next comes the HA itself. As the fluid filled me up, I felt a not inconsiderable amount of pressure, like I had to pee right then and there (which of course I couldn’t with a one-way catheter blocking any exit).

The whole process, thankfully, takes less than three minutes.

When the instillation is done, the catheter comes out and the hardest part begins: You’re not allowed to use the bathroom for at least an hour. Of course, that’s all I wanted to do. I hobbled around the hospital corridors and eventually shoehorned myself into the car to drive home.

Would I have preferred to be knocked out by general anesthesia so I wouldn’t feel a thing? Sure, but total body sedation for such a short procedure would have been both overkill and cumulatively dangerous.

HA is not covered by Maccabi, our local HMO, so you have to buy it from the manufacturer; if you have private insurance, which thankfully we do, you’ll get reimbursed.

However, my doctor recalled that I had done several rounds of radiation to reduce my tumors in the past. Is that what caused my GAG layer damage? Hard to say, but Maccabi’s regulations say if the inflammation may have been due to radiation, the hyaluronic acid is free.

The only thing worse than the HA instillation itself is the weekly anticipation. I’d rather be looking forward to a nice hike or one of the brisket sandwiches from Bruno (the best sandwich shop in Jerusalem). Moreover, I sleep poorly as a general rule; knowing you’re going to get a spritz of acid followed by a wobbly afternoon does not engender a restful night.

I’m writing this at the end of my eighth week doing HA. It seems to be working a little but not fully. It can take a while to really settle in, apparently, so I go back now for monthly “maintenance” sessions. I’m hopeful that, in the end, three minutes of discomfort to dislodge months of misery will be a bargain worth taking.

In the meantime, I’ll do my best to gag any layer of complaining.

I first wrote about my acid experience for The Jerusalem Post.

GAG layer image and Ialuril from the ProPharma website.

Why does so much of the liberal West seem to despise Zionism? Why has the term, which simply means the belief that Jews have a right to have a state of their own, become such a pejorative in progressive circles and some right-wing ones, too?

Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet, says it’s envy – not of the Jews, per se, but of the nation-state of Israel.

In a 6,000-word tour de force, “Zionism for Everyone,” Newhouse claims that a rudderless, identity-emaciated Western world sees the success of the Zionist nation-state and wants its societies to be more like Israel. But since those Westerners can’t articulate such longing out loud (and probably not to themselves, either), as so often happens with jealousy,  Zionism has been twisted into a placeholder for all the evils of the world.

I know: To say that the world envies the Jews risks playing into age-old tropes of antisemitism – the Jews are smart and powerful; we control everything, including the U.S. administration. Newhouse is aware of that, but her critique starts from a different place, thousands of years in the past, before there were even Jews.

As soon as human beings developed agriculture and began to settle into non-nomadic groups, the nation-state became the best way to defend against outsiders and, more importantly, to define a sense of belonging amongst individuals who might not have that much in common.

In that sense, a nation-state may be best described as a country or place “where political borders align with a shared sense of peoplehood, comprising identity, culture, language or history.”

The nation-state has since become the defining structure for human society, through kingdoms and empires to the modern era, always providing a key tool for cohesion and coherence.

Then came the Holocaust, which, Newhouse claims, destabilized the existing order.

“As the rebuilding efforts began, alongside them came an ideological and philosophical reckoning,” Newhouse quotes Swedish writer Annika Hernroth-Rothstein. Rather than accepting “that seemingly normal people under extraordinary circumstances can do terrible things, [instead] Europe decided that the villain was ideology itself.”

As a result, “thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre [and] Albert Einstein” began to describe the nation state as a key cause for this moral and political danger and began “advocating for global humanism,” Newhouse writes. “And so, a war-damaged continent, having just come out of a global conflict over borders and identity, decided to do away with borders and identity altogether, assuming this would be the road to lasting peace.”

Gradually, Western societies lost confidence in their own particularism. Here’s where Zionism comes in: It has, against all odds, created a successful and lasting nation-state, one which is not disintegrating into post-modernist confusion.

As the West gives up the “privileges of self-determination,” Newhouse writes, it becomes “possible to imagine that Israel is somehow getting away with what no one else can.”

There are four main pillars to why Newhouse calls Israel “a blueprint for human defense and flourishing.”

1. Israel maintains demographic continuity. Our child replacement rates are way above OECD countries and Israel’s citizens still want to build a future here.
2. Israel has a strong sense of collective responsibility. When called to defend the country, nearly everyone shows up; our soldiers may not like doing hundreds of days of reserve duty, but they still come.
3. Israel preserves identity and community. When they’re given a weekend at home, Israeli soldiers gladly gather together on Friday nights with family or friends.
4. Israel has produced a cohesive, capable population that looks to the future. We don’t pine for an imaginary past. There’s a reason there are so many game-changing startups in this small nation.

So, when the post-modern West looks at Israel, the nation-state, they see an outlier they subconsciously aspire to. Zionism has become “a target because it represents what Westerners on the Right claim to desperately want but are unable to attain, and what Westerners on the Left wish to define as impossible,” she writes.

But in the midst of a confusing and fast-changing world, with high-tech innovations fueling cultural and political instability, the world is at a pivot point. Yet, instead of grappling with those complex challenges, the public fixates on Israel and Zionism because they’re a simpler target: In the public’s warped thinking, there’s a clear villain and a clean moral narrative people can rally around.

Zionism has become the symbol onto which people project all their frustrations about their rapidly changing lived reality. Anti-Zionism gets bundled with anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism. It’s not about the Jews, Newhouse stresses. Israel has become a test case for delegitimizing the entire concept of national identity, which so many believe has failed them.

Newhouse largely downplays antisemitism as the primary driver for hostility to Zionism. She doesn’t deny that it exists, just that blaming anti-Zionism primarily on antisemitism misdiagnoses the phenomenon. The main cause, in her view, is structural, not prejudice.

The Zionism = antisemitism argument is based on the idea that hatred of Jews has shifted from religion and race to the nation-state of Israel. For Newhouse, Zionism has become a target because of what it represents, not because Jews are Jews. Attacks on Zionism are based on projection – blaming others for what’s being lost – and, again, envy: resentment of the non-functioning national models in their own countries.

So, when students on campuses chant slogans like “from the river to the sea,” it’s not about antisemitism; it’s about the West struggling with itself.

Newhouse’s analysis doesn’t include any practical steps for fighting anti-Zionism; it’s more a philosophical thought piece that contextualizes this fraught moment in Zionism as “a technology for national renewal that could, conceivably, be used by anyone.” In that respect, it has helped me better see why it’s worth living in Israel, especially when missiles fly and sirens wail.

I first wrote about Alana Newhouse’s article for The Jerusalem Post.

The first thing Pharaoh noticed was that Moses had stopped trembling.

Egypt’s tyrannical ruler had been in the middle of his customary amusement. Moses — the stammering Israelite who kept appearing in his throne room with the same absurd demand — was fumbling through an opening sentence while his brother Aaron stood beside him, ready to speak the words Moses could not manage.

Then Moses seized. It was brief and violent — he staggered, hit one knee and Aaron dropped beside him with a cry. When Moses rose, something behind his eyes seemed to have rearranged itself.

Aaron opened his mouth to continue. Moses put a hand on his arm and stepped forward alone.

Pharaoh tilted his head. Nobody spoke. Then Moses made his demand.

“Let my people go,” he commanded. No stammer. No dropped syllable.

What had entered Moses was a new consciousness. A “visitor,” in the parlance of future historians, had been sent backward through time and deposited into an appropriate “host.”

The need for the intervention was clear to those living 3,000 years from Pharaonic Egypt: The Exodus as we know it never happened. In that unaltered timeline, the Israelites remained enslaved for another four centuries, neither biblical Israel nor priestly or Rabbinic Judaism developed in the ways we know today; the foundational Judeo-Christian ethical covenant that would eventually seed Western concepts of human dignity and democratic governance simply never crystallized.

Future historians would deride this as the “Pharaoh Constant” – a civilization of unbroken empire, universal slavery and global misery.

Moses’s first encounter with the future came when he encountered the bush in the desert. But it was not burning. Rather, it was a matter-transference beacon. The core “visitor” technology could send consciousness backward into hosts but not matter like objects or machines. Rejiggering Moses’s staff took several hundred years of future engineering to solve.

The voice Moses heard was an automated instruction routine embedded in the object the portal deposited: a rod, carved to look like wood but made of 60% carbon nanotube composite and containing unimaginable future technology.

Moses picked up the stick and walked to Egypt because something told him to. Was it God…or a recording?

The next morning, Pharaoh’s servants found the Nile red. Moses had dropped nanobots, pre-loaded in a dissolving capsule contained within the staff, into the river at dawn. The nanobots triggered a massive, accelerated bloom of iron-oxidizing bacteria. It’s a known natural phenomenon today but it looked like magic to the ancient Egyptians.

The frogs came next. The staff’s ultrasonic emitter broadcast at 800 hertz — a frequency that triggers mass displacement behavior in amphibians — driving every frog in the delta inland.

The lice that followed resulted from an accelerated hatch cycle, compressed from weeks to a single night by a second-generation nanobot released to target soil-level flea eggs.

The locust swarm was pheromone-activated: forty billion solitary desert locusts triggered by a chemical signal dispersed from the staff’s hidden canister. A miniaturized atmospheric pulse then nudged an existing pressure system to call the eastern wind. When Pharaoh finally begged him to stop, Moses reversed the signal, and the swarm turned west towards the sea.

Darkness was the one that truly broke the people. It was facilitated by a drone swarm. Each tiny unit, the size of a grain of sand, was deployed from the staff in a cloud that looked like a fast-moving shadow, creating a coordinated canopy over Egyptian-inhabited quarters. Israelite neighborhoods, by contrast, were treated with a countersignal and thus remained in full daylight throughout the three days.

The final plague — the one that now visitor-Moses had hoped to avoid by obtaining Pharaoh’s early acquiescence — was a heavier-than-air aerosol that sank in unprotected homes at night. It carried a pathogen targeting a genetic marker statistically concentrated in the non-Israelite population. The blood painted on Israelite doorposts contained a reflective compound that told the aerosol sensors which homes to pass over.

The aerosol degraded by dawn; Pharaoh, nevertheless, woke to find his son among the dead.

Moses’s sister Miriam, always the smartest among her siblings, had figured out who – or what – her brother had become already by the second night.

“You’re not him,” she said plainly.

“He’s still here,” the visitor replied. “I only borrowed him.”

At the shore of the Sea of Reeds, with Pharaoh’s chariots closing from behind, Miriam understood what was about to happen a moment before it did — and she grabbed her timbrel and started to move.

The resonance device in the staff triggered a “wind setdown,” a known geological phenomenon, documented by researchers like Carl Drews millennia later as physically plausible at this exact location. What nature might have taken hours, the visitor compressed to minutes – “a miracle,” the authors of the Torah later called it.

Moses turned to the people. “Walk,” he ordered. “Now!”

Miriam was already playing. Never one to wait for permission, her music started before anyone’s feet were even wet.

Behind them, Egyptian chariots entered the corridor. Moses reversed the resonance pulse. The water returned at once and the threat was vanquished.

According to protocol, the visitor was required to leave the host as soon as the mission was complete. Moses would remember nothing.

When he woke on the far bank, he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He tried to ask Miriam what happened. He stammered twice before he got the sentence out.

Thousands of years later, the mission would be recorded as successful. The timeline had been changed. Democracy and freedom now prevailed.

Moses never stopped stuttering. But he never stopped walking forward, either. He carried with him, for the rest of his life, a strange sense of certainty he could not explain — like a word stuck on the tip of his tongue that he could never quite say.

With loving respect to the Netflix TV show “Travelers.”

Images from Unsplash

I first shared my sci-fi rendering of the Exodus at The Jerusalem Post.

It’s become practically normalized these days that ignorant influencers and populist politicians abroad will regularly proclaim that Israel dragged America into the war with Iran; that the Islamic Republic didn’t pose any “imminent threat” to the U.S.; that the war is illegal.

These armchair analysts claim that President Donald Trump has no idea what he’s doing – it’s all to cement his reputation as an international bully – and that the war will bring nothing but higher gas prices and soaring inflation to the U.S., all to support another country, Israel, which is pulling the strings.

What these pundits fail to realize is that there are actually two chessboards in play. It’s easy to see just the smaller one – the one where Israel had been threatening to go after Iran’s missiles and launchers and conclude that the U.S. had no choice but to join the fight, since U.S. assets in the region were going to get hit anyway.

But there’s a bigger chessboard here, and it involves China and the future of global hegemony. It’s where “the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out,” writes Haviv Rettig Gur, who opened my eyes to the two playing spaces, in The Free Press. It’s about “whether the American-led global order survives or whether China displaces it. Every significant American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars…is ultimately a move on this board.” It’s undoubtedly top of mind for Pentagon war planners and most likely for Donald Trump himself.

The war, from this perspective, is not really about Iran. Rather, Iran is the “most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.” China’s control of Iran gives the Asian giant power over vital shipping lanes, with potentially only oil intended for China making it safely and consistently through the Strait of Hormuz.

Gur himself only internalized the China connection during an hour-long conversation he had with China expert Melissa Chen, managing director at Strategy Risks, on his podcast, Ask Haviv Anything. Gur, who started his journalism career in 2005 at The Jerusalem Post,

then summarized that conversation in a second, 30-minute podcast, which he subsequently wrote into the article that appeared in The Free Press.

Dozens of publications, from The Wall Street Journal to Foreign Policy, have since followed his lead to highlight the China-Iran connection.

The idea in a nutshell: Due to sanctions, Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline. Iran today sells 90% of its oil to China, often through clandestine means – with, as the BBC reports, barrels of oil allegedly relabeled as “Malaysian” to disguise their origin. The oil revenue covers around a quarter of Iran’s total budget, much of it allocated for military purposes.

In return, China provides the technology that runs Iran’s Internet and communications systems. Iran switched from the GPS used in most of the world to China’s BeiDou system. Rights groups have alleged that Iran’s brutal crackdowns against protesters have been fueled by Chinese facial recognition and surveillance tech, the BBC notes.

China was also reportedly in the process of supplying to Iran sophisticated anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3, engineered to evade the defense systems deployed on American carriers.

In this way, Gur writes, Iran “has made itself utterly dependent on China.”

Taking Iran down a notch – or ultimately enabling some sort of regime change or regime “alteration” ala the Venezuela model – would break China’s hold on Iran, and with it, Iran’s ability to test new Chinese equipment and to supply China with the oil it so desperately needs.

Will Israel be a beneficiary of this war? Of course. But when Iran began to rely on China so much, “it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s,” Gur emphasizes.

Yes, the Iranian mullahs have presided over a murderous regime that’s killed thousands, both directly and via proxies. And yes, the Islamic Republic’s slogan – “Death to America, Death to Israel” – is not mere words, as Iran has aptly proved in the wars to date. And yes, every day since Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025, Iran has been aggressively building more and more missiles to the point where defensive interceptors like the THAAD, Patriot or Iron Dome would simply have run out of projectiles.

But even for all that, this war would not have happened if the leadership of the U.S. were not fully briefed on the two chessboards.

The most surprising development in the war so far has been the fact that China has not come to Iran’s aid, “leaving its closest Middle Eastern ally to burn,” Gur writes.

Philip Shetler-Jones, from the Royal United Services Institute in the U.K., argues that Beijing is not “a superpower on the same level” as the U.S. “It is not equipped to protect its friends against this kind of action, even if it wanted to.”

“China does not view its ‘alliances’ in the same way the West does,” adds BBC China correspondent Laura Bicker. “It does not sign mutual defense treaties and will not come rushing to its ally’s aid.”

Ultimately, that abandonment “is a blow to Chinese soft power that no diplomatic offensive can easily repair,” Gur notes. America and Israel, on the other hand, have demonstrated they have “the will and capability to act decisively when [their] core interests are genuinely threatened.”

However the current war plays out, this imbalance may be the most important outcome. “America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon,” concludes Gur. “The loudest voices in the debate,” he adds, “are still arguing about the smaller chessboard. [But] the war is being fought on the larger one.”

I originally wrote about the Chinese component to the war in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

There was something surreal in Israel’s bomb shelters this past Shabbat. Many residents, especially in Jerusalem, are Sabbath observant. And yet, a good number of them had their phones in their hands. They weren’t just waiting to hear when they’d be released from the shelter but were actively monitoring the steadily incoming news alerts. Perhaps some were even distracting themselves with Facebook reels that had little to do with the day’s devastating developments.

Saturday, February 28, 2026, was, of course, the first day of the current war with Iran, run jointly by the U.S. and Israel. The morning attack was a surprise both for the Iranian leadership and for the Israelis who received an alert on their phones at 8:13 am while at the same time sirens blared outside. That first alert, however, was not a command to descend to our garage-level shelter: It was an announcement that the war had started, and we should be prepared.

The actual alert that missiles were on their way didn’t come until two hours later, during which time, remarkably, I fell back asleep. It was only then that halacha (Jewish Law) collided with modern technology. And in this case, missiles “trump” halacha.

The rules were set in place years ago but became especially relevant after Hamas’s invasion on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate instructed every synagogue to have at least one cell phone left turned on. Many shuls, including ours, went one step further and advised each and every congregant who was able, to carry a phone with them. At home, you could tune your radio to a “silent channel” that would only broadcast when there was something that needed immediate attention (like a soon-to-arrive missile).

The halachic rationale for all this was pikuah nefesh, the proscription that the preservation of life overrules every other Jewish Law. Although I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include doomscrolling TikTok and Instagram.

Once our shelter had filled up and the door had been closed, there was a knock from outside: Our niece Yona, who lives in the neighborhood and was praying at a nearby congregation, ascertained that our shelter was the closest.

And oh, “Can we join you for Shabbat lunch?”

That triggered another Jewish Law: hahnasat orhim – welcoming guests. Fortunately, we had ordered in for lunch from “Ron Makes Shabbos,” a wonderful weekend delivery service with a diverse menu, run by the eponymous Ron, a former IT logistics worker who decided he preferred making chicken poppers and BBQ long-cooked asado short ribs. He’s based in Beit Shemesh but delivers to us in Jerusalem, as well as to Modi’in and the Gush Etzion areas.

As we started to set the table with dips and drinks, the phone rang. That was odd: We’ve texted propitiously during previous missile emergencies, but we’ve never received a voice call.

It was our dear friend Sam who has, for the last week, been hospitalized in Jerusalem’s Sha’arei Zedek hospital to treat debilitating migraines.

“They’re kicking me out,” she intoned breathlessly into the phone. “They’re evacuating everyone who’s not a life-or-death case or who’s about to give birth.”

That made sense: The hospital had a clear need to make more beds available in case of a mass casualty event. Plus, they needed to move patients from the higher floors to the underground level where Sam was housed. Birthing, I learned later, took place in the parking lot.

“Could someone come and get me?” Sam cried into the phone.

Our 28-year-old son Aviv immediately volunteered.

“Do you want me to come, too?” I asked my wife, Jody.

“No, I’ll go,” Jody replied. “It’s better if there’s a woman there.”

Pikuah nefesh again: Jody never drives on Shabbat and Jewish holidays. Using her phone in an emergency was one thing, but getting in a car?

Sam’s situation was tough. Not only had they not gotten to the bottom of her headaches yet, but she was high as a kite from all the ketamine they were pumping into her body. As the nurse disconnected her IV, Jody asked her how Sam was supposed to deal with this sudden, unanticipated withdrawal. The nurse shrugged her shoulders. That was beyond her paygrade, apparently.

We tucked Sam into the guest room bed with the lights off and the window shades closed. I made kiddush (the blessing over the wine) for her in the makeshift home hospital room we’d set up, and Jody brought her some of Ron’s food. We then sat down for our own much delayed Shabbat meal.

We managed to get through the entire meal without another siren.

Tel Aviv wasn’t so lucky.

On one of the WhatsApp groups for our neighborhood, a former resident commented that she’d had to run down to her shelter 12 times already – essentially staying there the whole day. She then added, “I’m Shomer Shabbat [Sabbath observant]. What am I doing on my phone checking news updates anyway?”

But by this point, we all knew: pikuah nefesh.

Shabbat eventually ended, and the halachic considerations of using our phones evaporated at the 25^th hour. As for the rest of the week, I couldn’t tell you: This column was due on Sunday.

We know that in the first hours of the war, much of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were killed. There were missiles launched at Israel all night and into the next morning, and we spent many more hours in our bomb shelter. Will the war be over in a few days? Will the Jewish holiday of Purim be downgraded, if not canceled entirely, while Israel and the U.S. continue to decimate the strategic assets of the former the Persian empire?

All I can report is about this very strange, yet Jewishly empowered Sabbath, where the rules of engagement were dramatically different than nearly anything we’d experienced before.

I first posted about our first Shabbat of the Second Iran War in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash

In many of my jobs I’ve held over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to interview executives, mostly not Jewish, overseas, on the phone or via Zoom. I would do my best not to indicate where I was based, other than the restrictions on my working hours that might not seem exactly 9-to-5 Eastern time. My being in Israel was not something I was embarrassed about; it just wasn’t a topic I needed to insert into an interview about, say, the classified advertising business.

From time to time, though, an interviewee would ask me where I lived, and I wouldn’t hold back. “Israel,” I’d reply confidently. The inevitable next question, given that they could tell I didn’t have a Hebrew accent, was what brought me to the Holy Land. My usual answer: “Zionism.”

Now, though, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable answering like that. Zionism has become a pejorative in many international circles.

That doesn’t mean I’m no longer a Zionist. On the contrary, I believe deeply in the right of the Jewish state to exist. But it got me thinking about what’s happened to the concept of Zionism over the past few years and how that impacts what I can and should say.

A recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) found that only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in ten say they support Israel’s right to exist.

That confused dichotomy clearly stems from the misperception that being a Zionist means you must support whatever actions Israel’s current government takes.

That’s not the case at all. I, like most of my friends and peers, strongly oppose the policies of the Netanyahu-led gang of thugs, crooks, incompetents and racists. This government is beholden to its most extreme elements, and that’s contributing to a poisoned discourse.

Yet, at the same time, I support this country with all my heart. It has been my home for 31 years and has indelibly shaped my identity, even if my language skills never pulled their weight. There’s that old saw that in the Diaspora you have to spend most of your time “doing” Jewish – our Jewish life in California revolved around synagogue activities – while in Israel, it’s all about “being” Jewish.

In Israel, my wife, Jody, and I have been able to raise our family in an enveloping Jewish structure – calendar, school, language, culture. I value the way Israelis are always ready to help each other, even when they’re yelling; the way we came together after October 7 to fill in the gaps of an absent polity.

You don’t have to search for your Jewishness – as a majority, it’s all around you. Nor are we obsessed with the issues that animate Diaspora Jewish life. “You’d really have to scour the Israeli Hebrew press to even find mention of the word ‘genocide,’” wrote Shalem College’s Daniel Gordis on his Substack, referring to one of the hot topics of American vs. Israeli disquisition.

This confusion about Zionism dovetails with the ad paid for by Robert Kraft that aired during the 2026 Super Bowl. In it, David, a Jewish teenager, is taunted by his peers who place a “Dirty Jew” yellow sticker on his backpack. He is ultimately “saved” by Bilal, a Black student, who places a blue Post-it note (a reference to Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance) over the yellow stickie.

This depiction of the Jew as victim is wholly out of sync with the Zionism we Israelis feel. We may get rockets lobbed at us (all too frequently), but we see ourselves as strong, tough, possessed of agency.

Liel Leibowitz, writing in Tablet magazine, proposed an alternative ad. In it, we’re shown Hezbollah agents getting blown up by pagers, Israeli Air Force planes over Tehran, news reports on the deaths of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar. A little on-the nose? Absolutely. I wonder how it would have played among Super Bowl viewers?

“We have the honor of being hated by an axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incredibly stupid,” said Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and one-time editor of The Jerusalem Post, at this year’s State of World Jewry talk in New York.

Zionism “was never supposed to make Jews comfortable,” noted Adam Scott Bellows, the CEO of the Israel Innovation Fund, in The Jerusalem Post. “It was supposed to make Jews durable.”

Joel Swanson, a scholar of modern Jewish history at Sarah Lawrence College, emphasized in another Post article that Zionism is not a static single-use symbol for believing Israel should exist. There are many types of Zionism: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, revisionist Zionism.

“To say ‘Zionism’ without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity,” Swanson wrote.

He pointed to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, a committed Zionist who emigrated to Palestine. But, Swanson added, “He also advocated for a binational state, shared by Jews and Arabs…today, if you espouse Martin Buber’s views…without an emphasis on maintaining a Jewish voting majority, you are labeled an anti-Zionist.”

Nevertheless, I find Swanson’s thesis the most compelling: Zionism is multifaceted. I’m living proof – when I first moved to Israel, I was firmly in the religious Zionism camp. Over time, I became more of a secular, cultural Zionist. But I always had a place to fit in.

So, when I’m asked these days, “Why do I live here?” I will continue to answer, “Because I’m a Zionist.” I may have to explain a bit more; it’s not a simple one-line response anymore. But I’m not ready to give it up.

I first explained what Zionism means to me in The Jerusalem Post.

I was interviewed by Simon Anstey of ChaiFM in South Africa about what’s turned the term Zionism into a pejorative. You can listen to the podcast on his show The Homerun here:

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Psychotherapist Dr. Russ Harris was looking forward to welcoming his first child. But it wasn’t long after his son was born that he realized something wasn’t quite right. As the baby grew, he didn’t walk but scooted on his tush. He was barely verbal. By the time his son was two years old, Harris had a diagnosis: autism.

Harris descended into a deep depression – surprising, perhaps, given that Harris is a world leader in explaining ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to the layperson. ACT weaves the practice of mindfulness into cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). I devoured his first book, “The Happiness Trap,” which has helped me on numerous occasions.

But Harris is also human, and his initial reaction was entirely understandable.

Harris wrote another book, this one about on his experience with his son. It’s called “The Reality Slap” and it’s based on a term that powerfully identifies what so shook Harris: The reality he expected for his life did not match the actual reality he now faced.

“The reality slap takes many different forms,” he writes. “Sometimes it’s so violent, it’s more like a punch: the death of a loved one, a serious illness or injury, a freak accident, a violent crime, a disabled child, bankruptcy, betrayal, fire, flood or disaster. At other times, the slap is somewhat gentler: that sudden flash of envy when we realize someone else has got what we want; those sharp pangs of loneliness when we realize how disconnected we are from others; that burst of anger or resentment over some sort of mistreatment.”

The concept of the reality slap spoke to me as soon as I read the line, “a serious illness.” It has since helped provide context as to why the last year has been so tough.

My “expected reality” was that I would be healthy well into my golden years; that my wife, Jody, and I would, as empty nesters, travel the world; that we would hike the Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu; that we would be able to hoist our grandchildren into the air, if not effortlessly than effervescently.

Instead, I’ve spent the last 12 months first in declining then slowly improving health, ever since my cancer surged and eventually sent me to the hospital for six weeks until the miraculous CAR-T treatment knocked the cancer out.

Now that I’m feeling stronger – as I like to phrase it “trying to live a normal life in an abnormal body” – and I look back at the previous year, I realize that my own reality slap was made more personally painful by my inability – or perhaps my unwillingness – to accept that it had occurred in the first place.

That makes sense: For seven years, I was reassured I had an “easy cancer.” It was slow growing and, while I’d need treatment every once in a while, I “wouldn’t die from it but with it.” That all changed when it transformed from indolent Follicular Lymphoma to aggressive DLBCL.

I could no longer “watch and wait,” as I had been doing for most of those years. If it wasn’t treated quickly, I would most certainly die.

Reading Harris’s book, it’s clear that while “sometimes the slap quickly recedes into memory – a passing moment, a brief ‘rude awakening’ – at other times it knocks us senseless and leaves us wandering in a daze.” And the slap is just the beginning. “For once the slap wakes us up, we then face the gap.” And it can persist for a lifetime.

Indeed, one of the learnings I’m trying to integrate is not to expect that I’ll ever get back to 100% but to be OK with just 70%, while at the same time living with the uncertainty that, any given morning, I could wake up feeling 50%…or 80% of my old self.

“What do we do when we can’t close that reality gap?” Harris asks. Or when we can close it, “but it’s going to take a long, long time to do it. How do we cope in the meantime?”

For Harris, the answer is all about how to put the principles of ACT into practice. Using the framing device of a reality slap, he presents a variety of principles.

• “Defuse” from thoughts like, “It will never get better” or “My life is ruined.” Shift from “I’ll never cope with this” to “I’m having the thought that I’ll never cope” (a classic meditation and ACT technique).
• Focus on values: Given this life, this body and this situation, how do I want to live? Small actions, like a five-minute phone call, a short walk or a grandchild’s smile (even when you can’t roughhouse) can help. If you can’t get back to 100%, those values become the most important.
• Expect setbacks and “re-slaps.” The reality gap will never fully close. You’ll have days when it feels hopeless. Relapse is the rule. Can you still build something meaningful within the changed landscape?
• Someone exhorting you to “just be grateful” is never helpful. You need to grieve, then ask: What kind of person do I want to be in this reality?
• Your reactions are normal human responses to loss and threat. They’re not signs of failure.
• Acceptance is about making space for unpleasant experiences so you can move your life in directions that matter. It doesn’t mean saying, “I’m fine with the reality that I’m sick or weak.” Instead, tell yourself, “These limitations are here whether I like them or not. So, how can I treat my body, my partner and my friends in ways I won’t regret?”

“The Reality Slap” has given me new tools to cope with my own gap. I hope those tools will be helpful for you, too. I didn’t expect the last year – heck, I didn’t expect the seven years before that, either – but I survived. Harris’s framing of the slap has helped me to better understand what to do if I’m faced with another life-changing reality gap.

I first wrote about my reality slap for The Jerusalem Post.

ChatGPT has taken over my life – in a good way.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to use AI tools like those from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for an increasingly wide variety of tasks. Some are fairly straightforward – queries about TV show plot twists, translations from Hebrew to English – while others are more radical.

The most unusual: I record my therapy sessions, use a transcription tool to output the result to text, then plug that into ChatGPT with the prompt “summarize this text while highlighting any psychological insights.” Since ChatGPT knows and remembers me, it can generate helpful spins that complement (and sometimes exceed) the therapy itself.

But where I’ve been spending most of my artificially intelligent computer time has been with my writing. Not to actually write a complete article, mind you, but if I want sources on, say, “For how long can one use expired medications?” a ChatGPT query can surface answers and links remarkably fast.

Yes, you do have to check it, as AI chatbots are famously known to hallucinate, making up answers to please the prompter, but the more details I feed into my queries through follow-up iterations, the more accurate the response becomes.

That led me to wonder whether AI could help me with a massive ghostwriting project I’ve been working on. My client and I have been Zooming regularly for close to a year to brainstorm ideas for a business book. We’ve accumulated over 600 different topics comprising an intimidating 1,000,000 words.

That has, understandably, quite overwhelmed me. How could I ever make sense of so much data?

AI to the rescue.

Google’s NotebookLM product (LM stands for “large language model”) is designed for exactly that sort of task. You feed it your source data, and with the right prompts, it will spit back a coherent organization and order.

It took some tweaking: There’s a limit of 50 sources per project (I had twelve times that many) and, being a Google product, it refuses to accept files from archrival Microsoft. But once I’d taken care of grunt work, the project began to take shape – and to make sense.

NotebookLM suggested ways to tie the opening and the conclusion together. It chunked all those topics into a manageable dozen chapters. It wrote sample text. Eventually, I was able to generate a two-page executive summary to share with my client.

He loved the result. And why not? From his end, it was all familiar from our Zoom meetings. But from where I was sitting, it was a towering stress reducer.  Now, I could simply follow the blueprint created by AI – and write.

Still, I worried that, when I sent that summary to my client, he might think to himself, “Gee, why do I need Brian? I’ll just let AI finish the book for me and save the hefty ghostwriting fees.”

Indeed, notes Lulu Meservey, former VP of communications for Substack and current CEO of PR firm Rostra, AI will be “very good at writing and the improvement could come very quickly.” We need to “prepare ourselves for that to happen.”

Newsweek is already getting ready. The magazine says it “is experimenting with AI-based tools to help journalists work faster, smarter and more creatively. But such tools must be used in an ethical way and under the full supervision of journalists.”

I assumed – erroneously, it turns out – that my newspaper colleagues would be writing purists, adamantly against any use of AI in their craft. A quick survey found that they all are using AI to one extent or another, from translating copy from other languages to writing and structuring interview questions.

I decided to try an experiment: I’d ask AI to actually write a chapter-by-chapter first draft of the book. It did a passable job but subsequently required hundreds of clarifying queries and substantial post-prompt editing. I’m happy to say that it was still my writing in the end; if I had submitted an exclusively AI-written book, it would have been embarrassingly mundane.

Can AI work for fiction? I’ve been noodling for years now on a science fiction book idea. It, too, has overwhelmed me.

Dr. Tuhin Chakrabarty, a Columbia University computer scientist, trained several large language models on the writing of a particular fiction author Han Kang, a Nobel laureate. Chakrabarty uploaded all of Han’s work, then fed the AI a description of a certain scene from Han that Chakrabarty had not included and asked the AI to generate it in the author’s style.

Chakrabarty next tasked several creative writing graduate students to complete the same mission. When he challenged a second group of students to compare the versions in blind tests, they “universally preferred the AI version to the imitations their peers had come up with,” The New Yorker’s Vauhini Vara reports. In another test, the readers “preferred the quality of the AI output in almost two-thirds of the cases.”

That gave me the courage to ask ChatGPT to brainstorm with me on my science fiction proposal. The AI came up with new story arcs and compelling plot twists. It suggested additional characters and even a love interest for my protagonist. Will I ask it to write a first draft? I haven’t decided yet.

But the bottle has clearly been uncorked, and the genie is not very quietly leaking out. While this may mean some people will find their employment trajectories severely curtailed, for all of us, our jobs will certainly change with the ascendency of the prompt. For writers, intensive editing will become as important as any initial out-of-the-box composing.

I decided, as a final task in my exploration, to ask AI the role it envisioned for itself in all this. “AI may never be a true ‘friend,’” ChatGPT demurred, “but it can be a real creative partner.”

That retort is no hallucination.

I first wrote about how I use AI for writing in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash