Daniel Albert

Israel votes Tuesday. I can't vote. You can. Here's why I'm asking you to vote for @netanyahu . I don't live in Israel. I won't run to a shelter when the sirens go off, and my children won't be called up. So I won't lecture you. But I've watched from the outside for three years, and I'll tell you what the world sees. Benjamin Netanyahu is not perfect. He's stubborn. He's divisive. He's made real mistakes. It doesn't matter. You're not electing a saint. You're electing a wartime Prime Minister, and the war is not finished. October 7 erased the old arguments. Every poll, every grudge, every talking point from before that day expired that morning. It changed every Israeli and every voter. It changed Bibi too. "He's been there too long." That's not an argument. That's boredom. You don't replace the surgeon halfway through the operation because you're tired of his face. "October 7 is his fault." October 7 is Hamas's fault. Israel failed to stop it, and those failures deserve a full investigation. But the moment you say "Bibi did October 7," you're repeating Hamas's script. "There's no state commission." There should be one. After the war. You don't hold the autopsy while the patient is still on the table. "He's on trial." Let the courts do their job. Your ballot answers a different question: who keeps Israel safe for the next four years? "Israel is isolated." From whom? Europe was against you when you were winning, losing and doing nothing at all. The ally that matters, the United States, is closer to Israel than it has been in a generation. "The Haredim and the extremists run him." Every Israeli coalition depends on somebody. Without Bibi, the opposition's math still runs through Arab parties or the Haredim. Haredi service is changing because October 7 changed it. Under Bibi, it will change without tearing the country apart. "Eisenkot can do it too." Eisenkot is a serious man who paid a terrible personal price. But commanding an army isn't leading a nation before the world. Bibi has stood in Congress, at the UN and across from presidents for thirty years. Now look at what's within reach. The IRGC, the head of the snake, is being dismantled. Hezbollah has been broken. Hamas is next. Finish them, and Israel can expand and secure its borders for a generation. Then come more Abraham Accords, from Riyadh outward. Then come waves of investment into a country already beating Wall Street. In 2025, during a multi-front war, the TA-35 rose more than 50% and topped global indexes. Bill Ackman, who bought into the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange during the war, says a trillion-dollar company is coming out of Israel. Security brings peace deals. Peace deals bring capital. Capital brings strength. That's how Israel becomes ten times stronger. And Trump has two years left to help make it happen. What does Israel need right now? • Experience • Military understanding • A voice the world listens to • Real power in Washington • A vision for security and growth Others have pieces of that list. One man has all of it. You don't have to love him. Just decide who you want holding the line when the next missile comes. Israel: on Tuesday, vote. Bring your parents. Bring your neighbors. Let him finish the job. 🇮🇱

In my first year of cardiology fellowship, I learned to read echocardiograms from an older attending who had looked at more hearts than anyone I knew. The training was simple and relentless: find what’s wrong. The leaking valve. The thickened wall. The segment that no longer contracts. Normal findings barely make the report; abnormal ones are the whole job. Within months I could spot a defect in seconds. Then I noticed I had brought the machine home. At dinner, I saw the dish that was overcooked. On my child’s report card, I saw the B before the five A’s. In a friend’s story, I heard the weak point in his logic before I heard his pain. I was becoming very good at finding what was wrong, and steadily worse at being happy. What changed me was watching how that attending delivered bad news. He would explain the damage plainly. Then he would turn the screen toward the patient and point. “Now look at this wall. See how it moves? That muscle has beaten for seventy-eight years without a single day off. It is still fighting for you.” I watched patients cry, not at the diagnosis, but at being seen whole. Once, walking back to the reading room, he said: “Any machine can find the defect. A healer finds what’s still alive.” The Mishnah in Avot (5:19) describes two kinds of people. The students of Avraham have an ayin tovah, a good eye. The students of Bilaam have an ayin ra’ah, an evil eye. We tend to imagine the good eye as naïve, a soft refusal to see problems. The Torah teaches the opposite. Avraham knew exactly what Sodom was. He did not pretend the city was righteous. Yet when God revealed its coming destruction, Avraham began searching: fifty good people? Forty-five? Thirty? Ten? He scanned the darkest place on earth the way my attending scanned a failing heart, looking for the wall that still moved. Bilaam was hired to do the reverse. He climbed mountain after mountain to find the breach in Israel’s armor, the flaw through which a curse could enter. Here is the astonishing part: when he truly looked, the words that came out were Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov, “How good are your tents, O Jacob.” The good was there all along. Even the evil eye, forced to see honestly, could not deny it. So the difference between Avraham and Bilaam is not what they could see. Both saw the same world, flaws and all. The difference is what they were searching for, and why. Bilaam searched for weakness in order to curse. Avraham searched for life in order to save. The Mishnah says Avraham’s students “eat in this world.” I understand that now. The person who hunts for flaws goes hungry at every table. The person who hunts for life finds nourishment everywhere: in a tired spouse, a struggling child, a stranger on a screen, even in himself. Tonight, before you name what’s wrong with someone, find one wall that’s still moving. Point to it. Say it out loud. That is how a curse becomes a blessing. May all your "curses" become blessings in your life. #shabbatshalom