WHOSE HEADS GONNA ROLL?

Tehran, July 5, 2026 · A mourner kicks a "wanted" banner of President Trump, crosshairs over his face and a bounty for his killing, at the Khamenei funeral processions where Graham was also named "Target 1." · Photo: Atta Kenare / Getty Images

On Saturday night, July 11, Senator Lindsey Graham died at the age of 71. His office said only that it was "a brief and sudden illness." Emergency crews had responded to a call of cardiac arrest at his Washington home. He had flown back from Ukraine days earlier and was scheduled to appear on "Meet the Press" that Sunday morning. He never made it to the studio.

Five days before he died, his face had been printed on a poster in Tehran.

During the funeral processions for the slain Iranian Supreme Leader, held across Tehran from Saturday, July 4 through Monday, July 6, regime supporters marched with placards built to look like assassination target lists. Red crosshairs were printed over the faces of American and pro-Israel figures: President Trump, Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer, Miriam Adelson, Mark Dubowitz, Peter Thiel, and Senator Lindsey Graham. Above the faces ran one line: "Sooner or later, your heads will roll." Graham was labeled Target 1. Of the seven, he had been Tehran's fiercest adversary: for years he pushed for military action against the regime, he was reported to have advised Prime Minister Netanyahu on how to persuade Trump to authorize the strikes on Iran, and he openly predicted the regime's fall. That is why his face sat at the top of the list.

When he was gone, Tehran did not hide its satisfaction. A senior anchor on Iranian state television congratulated "the great Iranian nation" that Graham, "the warmongering senator and enemy of Iran, has gone to hell." Another host said on Sunday that the news was so sweet he would read it twice. Pro-regime accounts then circulated an updated version of the funeral graphic with Graham's face crossed out in red, as if an item on a list had been checked off.

No evidence has surfaced that Iran caused his death, and the cause has not been established. Prominent voices, among them Laura Loomer, are calling for a toxicology report and a serious investigation, pointing to how strange the timing is. That question belongs to investigators. What is already on the record, out in the open, is a regime that printed a man's face in crosshairs, wrote that his head would roll, and celebrated when he was gone.

This Shabbat, the Torah has an answer.

The Measure a Man Uses

This Shabbat is Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of Vision, the last Shabbat before Tisha B'Av, and we read the weekly Torah portion of Deuteronomy. In it Moses recounts how the kings Sihon and Og each marched an army out to destroy Israel and were themselves destroyed. The Sages add that Og tore a mountain loose to crush the Jewish camp, and it came down instead onto his own neck.

This is the law the Sages call measure for measure: the measure a person uses against others is the measure Heaven uses against him. The punishment is cut from the same cloth as the crime, so that the trap a person builds for someone else becomes the exact shape of his own downfall.

King David draws the picture in Psalms: "He digs a pit and hollows it out, and falls into the pit he has made; his mischief returns upon his own head, and his violence comes down upon his own skull." King Solomon says it again in Proverbs: "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and whoever rolls a stone, it will roll back onto him."

Hold those words up against the poster in Tehran. They wrote "your heads will roll." Scripture, long before them, had already answered the question their sentence left hanging, which is whose head. The one who rolls the stone is the one it returns to.

The Army That Went to Sleep

Shabbat Chazon takes its name from the reading from the prophets, the opening vision of the prophet Isaiah, chanted to the mournful melody of Lamentations. Isaiah is not speaking in the abstract. He lived through this exact kind of moment.

In his day the great power was Assyria, and its king, Sennacherib, marched on Jerusalem, surrounded it, and declared openly that he would erase it, mocking the God of Israel to the faces of the people on the wall. Isaiah told King Hezekiah not to fear him. That night a single angel went out into the Assyrian camp. In the morning the 185,000 soldiers who had come to destroy Jerusalem were dead where they lay. There was no battle and no wound. An army went to sleep threatening the Jews and simply did not wake up. The Sages describe a death that left the bodies whole, the life burned out of them from within.

And Sennacherib himself, so sure he was the one who wrote the endings, fled home to Nineveh. As he bowed in the temple of his god, his own two sons struck him down with the sword. The king who had marked a nation for death was assassinated at his own altar, by his own children, exactly as Isaiah had foretold.

Read that against a poster in Tehran. A regime rings its enemies with crosshairs, mocks them, and swears they are finished. The prophet of this Shabbat already lived the sequel: the threatening army that does not wake, and the tyrant cut down at his own altar by his own sons.

Isaiah's vision does not end at the reckoning. It closes with a promise: Zion will be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through righteousness. The Rebbe pointed to that verse throughout these weeks, urging more Torah study and more acts of charity as the direct way to bring the redemption near. And the Chassidic masters teach that on Shabbat Chazon every single Jew is shown a vision of the third Holy Temple, the Temple of the Messianic age. The soul sees it even when the eye cannot, and the sight gives us the strength to walk out of exile.

So we reach the end of the Three Weeks holding two images side by side. One is a poster in Tehran, certain that it writes the endings. The other is the vision Isaiah carried and every Jewish soul receives this Shabbat: the enemy camp silent at dawn, and past it, the Holy Temple rebuilt. Scripture already told us how the story ends, and whose head the stone returns to.

Sources: Deuteronomy 2:26-37 (the war with Sihon, "Sihon came out toward us for battle") · Deuteronomy 3:1-3 (the war with Og of Bashan) · Berachos 54b (Og and the mountain that came down on his neck) · Isaiah 1:1 (the Vision of Isaiah, read on Shabbat Chazon), 1:15 ("your hands are full of blood"), 1:27 ("Zion will be redeemed through justice") · Isaiah 36-37 and II Kings 18-19 (Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem; the angel that struck 185,000 in a night; Sennacherib assassinated by his sons at his idol's altar) · Sanhedrin 94a (the manner of the Assyrian army's death) · Mishnah Sotah 1:7 and Talmud Bavli Sotah 8b (measure for measure) · Psalms 7:16-17 (the pit; "his violence descends upon his own skull") · Proverbs 26:27 (the pit and the rolling stone) · The vision of the third Holy Temple on Shabbat Chazon (teaching of R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev). Current events: NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, Bloomberg (Graham's death, July 11-12, 2026) · Iran International, Reuters, Daily Wire, JFeed (the funeral target-list placards, July 4-6) · Israel Hayom, Ynetnews (Iranian state-media reaction) · reporting on public calls for an investigation (July 12).