The Most Important Negotiation Is With Yourself

We tend to picture negotiation as a contest between opposing sides — a buyer and a seller, a union and an executive, diplomats across a table. But long before we ever sit down across from an opponent, the most consequential negotiation has usually already taken place inside our own minds.

This insight is powerfully illustrated by the story of Eliya Cohen, the Israeli civilian who survived 505 days in Hamas captivity in Gaza. Abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, Cohen spent more than a year underground, enduring hunger, violence, isolation and uncertainty. After his release in February 2025, he began speaking publicly about his experience and eventually wrote a memoir titled Mufawadat — Arabic for "negotiation."

The title, he says, refers not only to the negotiations that eventually led to the hostage deal. Cohen has described his captivity as a series of negotiations: with his captors over food, water, light, bathing and other basic necessities; with God, from whom he desperately sought some indication of what he should do; and, most difficult of all, with himself. As he put it in a recent interview, he repeatedly questioned whether he should continue fighting for his life. Survival itself became a decision that had to be renewed.

That is a striking way to understand resilience. Survival, in Cohen's account, was not simply a physical instinct that took over automatically. It required an inner act of persuasion: Get up. Keep going. Eat what you can. Hold on. There is still a tomorrow. The conditions around him offered almost no reason for confidence that tomorrow would actually be better. Yet he continued to behave as though his future self was worth preserving.

Pirkei Avot asks, "Who is mighty?" and answers: "One who conquers his inclination" (4:1). Jewish wisdom teaches us that the greatest victory is not necessarily defeating another person. It is gaining enough mastery over oneself to act according to one's higher purposes rather than according to whatever impulse happens to be strongest at the moment.

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi develops this idea at length in the Tanya. He describes the human being as containing two competing spiritual orientations, the Nefesh HaElokit, the divine soul, and the Nefesh HaBahamit, the animal soul. The animal soul is not merely "evil"; it encompasses the drives associated with physical existence, instinct, self-preservation and immediate gratification. The divine soul pulls the person toward transcendence, meaning and service of God. Human life therefore involves an ongoing struggle over which set of impulses will govern one's actions.

Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, in his book Michtav M'Eliyahu, describe this inner struggle as the essence of free will. Free will, he teaches, is concentrated at a specific location he calls the nekudat habechira, the "point of choice" — the narrow place where conviction and instinct are genuinely evenly matched, where the outcome isn't already decided by habit or circumstance. Elsewhere, a person is essentially coasting: acting on settled conviction where the question is long resolved, or on entrenched impulse where the divine soul hasn't yet reached. Real negotiation happens only at that one moving point.

Cohen's account maps onto this almost exactly. He didn't need to relitigate his will to live across every part of his existence each morning — most of who he was remained intact. The negotiation was concentrated at one narrow, brutal point: whether to get up that day, whether to keep eating, whether tomorrow was worth reaching for. That point shifted daily, even hourly, as pressure from his captors rose and fell. Rabbi Dessler would say this is exactly where a person's bechirah lives, in the specific decision taken at the place where despair and hope were still contesting the outcome.

Viktor Frankl, writing from his own traumatic experience, reached a similar conclusion. In Man's Search for Meaning, he observed that nearly everything can be taken from a person except one thing: the freedom to choose one's attitude toward any given circumstance. The prisoners who endured psychologically, he noticed, were rarely distinguished by better conditions, but by having found some reason that made the negotiation with despair winnable one more day. Like Rabbi Dessler's nekudat habechira, Frankl's freedom is not global — it doesn't undo the surrounding horror. It is one stubborn point of agency inside circumstances that otherwise allow none.

Cohen's ordeal, thank God, is one most of humanity will never have to go through. But his powerful message on the importance of negotiating with yourself — and winning that argument — is one we can all benefit from. Sometimes it seems there is precious little we can control; but we can all exercise our free will, choose hope over despair, and take yet another small step toward mastering ourselves.