This Normal Life — All about "normal" life in Israel

One year since I nearly died

by Brian on May 15, 2026

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.

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Dripping acid

by Brian on May 10, 2026

in Cancer,Health,Science,Technology

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.

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Is envy driving anti-Zionism?

by Brian on April 18, 2026

in In the News,Only in Israel,Politics,The Old Country

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.”

Israel maintains demographic continuity. Our child replacement rates are way above OECD countries and Israel’s citizens still want to build a future here.
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.
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.
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.

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Rewriting the “Pharaoh Constant”: A sci-fi re-imagining of the Exodus

by Brian on April 5, 2026

in Jewish Holidays and Culture,Just For Fun

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.

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The Iran war is about China, not Israel

by Brian on March 22, 2026

in In the News,Politics,War with Iran

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

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