The following article, titled “Milei’s Bible is missing entire chapters”, was written by Gabriel Levinas (brother of my friend Salo Levinas) and published in the Argentine newspaper Perfil. It is a brilliant analysis of Javier Milei’s ethical failure and dangerous corrosive political methods. In my view, it applies with equal force to Donald Trump.
By Gabriel Levinas (@X and @Instagram):
Tradition has it that Hillel was asked to summarize the entire Torah while his challenger stood on one foot. Hillel replied: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study.”
Rabbi Akiva said something similar: “Love your neighbor as yourself” was, for him, the great principle of the Torah.
It doesn’t seem overly complicated. The other exists. That is a good place to start when talking about Javier Milei’s first thousand days.
The President frequently uses the Bible, the Torah, and Jewish tradition to explain his understanding of freedom, economics, and even the moral order. That is his right. What is strange is that, after so much Torah, he seems to have lost track of the neighbor. Not a marginal verse. It is the central point.
Milei finds property, individual responsibility, and freedom in Jewish tradition. Anything that can comfortably sit down and talk with Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard appears immediately. It takes a bit more effort to find in his reading the poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, the indebted, the obligations toward those who have less, and the limits imposed on the creditor.
You don’t need to forge a book to misrepresent it. It is enough to tear out the inconvenient pages. And perhaps that is one of the most constant mechanisms in Milei’s thinking: choosing a truthful part and presenting it as the whole.
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