NEW YORK (VINnews/Rabbi Yair Hoffman> – On the morning of March 20, 2026 — with Iranian ballistic missiles still being intercepted nightly over Israeli cities — the Jerusalem District Court received a formal indictment against Raz Cohen, a 26-year-old Jewish reservist from Jerusalem who had served inside the Iron Dome air defense network. The charge: passing precise, classified information about that same system to Iranian intelligence, in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Cohen did not betray Israel out of ideology. He was a young Jewish man who answered a message on Telegram that offered easy money — and from that single act of engagement, step by inevitable step, arrived at transmitting GPS coordinates of Iron Dome batteries and the names of unit commanders to Iran, while Israel was fighting a war with that very country.

He confessed immediately. “I was stupid,” he told investigators. He said he had even read news articles about other Israelis who had been caught doing precisely this — and answered the message anyway.

The public reaction in Israel has been outrage and calls for the harshest possible punishment. But for those who study Torah — this story carries a resonance that goes far deeper than treason, because the Nachash ran this exact play in Gan Eden. The Sforno explained the mechanism. And the laws of chometz further reflect the idea.

The Sforno: How the Nachash Won Without an Argument

The Sforno’s commentary on Bereishis 3:1 opens with what might seem like a simple observation about the nachash’s strategy — but it is, according to Rav Henoch Leibowitz zt”l, in fact, a complete manual for how the yetzer hara operates in every generation.

The serpent was smart. He knew exactly what he was doing. Had he walked up to Chava and said bluntly: ‘Go ahead — eat from the forbidden tree,’ she would have dismissed him instantly. Hashem had commanded them not to eat from it. No argument, however clever, was going to succeed if it came out like a direct invitation to sin.

So the Nachash didn’t do that. Instead, he opened with a question — a seemingly innocent one. “Did Hashem really say you can’t eat from any of the trees?” His tone was friendly, even concerned. He wasn’t pushing sin. He was just… asking.

The Sforno explains that this was entirely calculated. The serpent’s real goal was to get Chava talking, to slowly pull her toward a conclusion she never would have reached on her own. Once she was engaged in the conversation, he moved in with his real argument:

“You won’t die! Hashem knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like Hashem — and that is why He told you not to eat it.”

He reframed the prohibition not as a protective command from a loving Creator, but as a selfish restriction from someone who didn’t want competition.

The Sforno is describing the operating manual of the yetzer hara — the evil inclination that lives inside every human being. Here is the yetzer hara’s golden rule: it never comes to you as the enemy. It never knocks on your door and announces itself. Instead, it comes dressed in the clothing of something reasonable, something logical, something that even sounds virtuous.

It starts small. A minor compromise here. A slightly questionable decision there — one that seems, on the surface, perfectly justifiable. Before long, it has established a firm foothold inside a person’s heart, and from that foothold it begins to pull him further and further from where he should be.

 When the serpent first approaches Chava, she actually pushes back. She tells him: “From all the trees of the garden we may eat — but Hashem said we may not eat from this tree, and we may not touch it, lest we die.”

In that moment, Chava was doing exactly the right thing. She was not entertaining the serpent’s logic. She was not weighing his argument. She was restating Hashem’s command and shutting the conversation down. She was refusing to grant the yetzer hara even the smallest foothold.

The tragedy is that she didn’t hold firm. Rashi points out that she added the prohibition of touching the tree — something Hashem had not actually commanded. The serpent seized on this addition: he pushed her until she touched the tree, and then said — “You touched it and nothing happened. So you can eat from it too, and nothing will happen.” Because she had added to Hashem’s words, she now had no response. The foothold had been granted, and the rest followed.

The Vilna Gaon, in his commentary to Mishlei (7:14), observes that a person being drawn toward sin does not feel like he is chasing sin — he feels like he is doing something reasonable, even righteous. The yetzer hara grants itself a foothold not through open temptation, but through the back door of apparent virtue. And the moment a person begins constructing a sophisticated philosophical argument for why a questionable action is actually permitted — that is precisely the moment to stop, step back, and recognize what is really happening. You do not negotiate with the yetzer hara. Negotiation is how it wins.

It is the same with Iran.

Iranian intelligence, operating what officials call “Mivtza Kesef” — Operation Money — does not begin by asking Israelis to commit espionage. Investigators describe the process in almost clinical terms: a Telegram message arrives, offering a small payment for something that seems entirely harmless. Photograph a street corner. Take a picture of a product in a supermarket. Record a short video of a public location. The tasks are designed to be, in the words of one investigator, “harmless on their face.”

This is the nachash’s opening question – a small, friendly, apparently innocent request. The Iranian handler is not saying: “Spy for us and betray your country.” He is saying: “Does the goverment really say you can’t earn a little easy money? We’re just asking for something small.”

Once the target answers — once he does the first small task and receives the first small payment — the foothold has been granted. The yetzer hara is now inside the conversation. And just as the serpent moved seamlessly from his innocent opening question to his real argument once Chava was engaged, the Iranian handler moves seamlessly from harmless tasks to genuinely dangerous ones.

The recruit is no longer deciding from a position of moral clarity. He is now rationalizing from inside a compromise that has already been made. The argument sounds reasonable each time. Because the nachash always sounds reasonable.

Raz Cohen told his investigators: “I had read the news articles about others who were caught doing this. I knew what it was.” He knew. And he answered the message anyway.

Once he engaged — once the conversation began — the rest followed with a terrible and familiar logic. By the time he was passing GPS coordinates of Iron Dome batteries to Iranian intelligence during an active war, the yetzer hara had long since taken up residence.

Chometz: The Torah’s Zero-Tolerance Policy Toward the Yetzer Hara

As we approach Pesach, a remarkable feature of halacha comes into sudden focus — and it illuminates this entire dynamic from a completely different angle.

In the ordinary laws of kashrus, a forbidden substance that falls into a permitted mixture is nullified if the ratio is at least 1 in 60 — bitul b’shishim. This rule governs the overwhelming majority of issurim. But chometz on Pesach is fundamentally different. Chometz on Pesach is not nullified at all, even if it falls into a mixture of a thousand parts of permitted food. Even the most infinitesimal trace — renders the entire mixture forbidden and may not be consumed.

Why? Of all the Torah’s prohibitions, why does this refuse the ordinary mechanism of nullification?

The answer lies in what chometz represents. The Zohar (Shemos 40b) states it directly and without elaboration:

Chametz is the Yetzer Hara.

Rabbeinu Bachye, in his Kad HaKemach on Pesach, develops this identification with precision. The word chometz shares a root with the pasuk in Tehillim (73:21) — “ki yitchametz libbi” — when my heart becomes leavened: the swelling, the puffing up, the rising of pride and desire. It is the symbol of a desire that, once given even the smallest opening, fills all available space.

The Mechilta (Pesicha 5) makes the connection explicit: the reason the Torah commands us to distance ourselves from chometz during Pesach is to train us to turn our hearts away from the yetzer hara. And the Arizal, quoted in Zohar Ki Seitzei (282), states that one who is careful to guard himself from even a speck of chometz on Pesach is guaranteed protection from the yetzer hara throughout the year.

 The reason chometz cannot be nullified — the reason the Torah insists on zero tolerance  is that it represents something that, by its very nature, cannot be safely given even the smallest foothold. Other forbidden substances can, in theory, be contained by dilution. The yetzer hara cannot.

This is not metaphor. This is the precise halakhic encoding of the psychological principle the Sforno identified in Bereishis 3. The moment Chava engaged with the nachash’s question — that was the mashehu. A trace.

National Security Is No Different

Israel’s  security establishment has watched as Iran has systematically applied the nachash’s playbook to recruit agents inside Israel. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli authorities have filed more than 35 espionage indictments involving nearly 60 defendants. The range of recruits is startling: a 13-year-old boy from Tel Aviv. A doctor approached during overseas travel. Russian-speaking immigrants from the Krayot suburbs of Haifa. Residents of East Jerusalem. And now, a Jewish reservist from inside Iron Dome itself.

Not one of them was recruited by a direct appeal to betray their country. Every single case began with something small. Something that was given a foothold.  .

The lesson of eino batel translated into national security doctrine is this: there is no safe “first task.” There is no answer to the Telegram message that stays small. Once the foothold is granted — once the conversation begins, once the first payment is accepted — the same logic that operated in Gan Eden operates in every subsequent step.

Raz Cohen is the most recent and most damaging example of what happens when a Jewish soldier — a man entrusted with the defense of Eretz Yisrael during an active war — grants the nachash its first foothold.

His case is a tragedy. It is also a teaching.

The Remedy: Bedikas Chometz as a Life Skill

Bedikas chometz — the search for leavening by candlelight on the night before Pesach — is, at its deepest level, a practice in zero tolerance. We do not look for large loaves of bread and burn them. We search every corner, every crack, every hidden recess of the house, for the smallest trace. We take a feather and a candle and we go into the dark places. Because the whole lesson of Pesach is that the mashehu matters.

The Nesivos Shalom teach that bedikas chometz is simultaneously an outer and an inner practice. We are searching not only the house but ourselves — for the places where a small compromise has been quietly residing, where a “harmless” conversation began that should have ended immediately, where the nachash was given the answer it needed to establish its foothold.

The brachah recited before the search is “al biur chametz” — on the destruction of chametz, not merely the finding of it. Because the goal is elimination.

This is what the Torah asks of us every Pesach. And, as current events remind us with painful clarity, it is what every soldier, every citizen, and every Jew asked to guard something holy must practice every day of the year.

Raz Cohen sits in detention in Jerusalem, awaiting trial. The legal process will run its course. From the perspective of Torah, the most significant detail in his case may be the simplest: he confessed immediately, expressed genuine remorse, and said “I was stupid.” Those three words are not a legal defense. But they may be a beginning.

May we all have the clarity to recognize the nachash’s opening question for what it is — before we answer it. May those who stand guard over the State of Israel be granted the wisdom to shut down the conversation before the foothold is given. And may we all enter this Pesach having done genuine bedikas chometz — in our kitchens, in our minds, and in every corner of our lives where the yetzer hara has been quietly rising, waiting for just a little more space.

Rabbi Yair Hoffman can be reached at [email protected]