Javier Milei gets excited. A lot. Tears flood his eyes. It is June 2021 and, as he thinks, at the end of the previous year God himself appeared to him to tell him that he had “the mission” to get into politics.
Now the libertarian is face to face with Axel Wahnish. He arrived at the headquarters of ACILBA, the Moroccan Jewish community led by this rabbi, after in his first months as a candidate he was showered with accusations of being an anti-Semite and being a Nazi. They had been hard times for him, and a friend had recommended that he calm that pain by visiting Wahnish. In that first meeting, closed under seven keys, something very striking happened: he spoke of a kind of prophecy. “They talked for a long time and it was pointed out that Javier would lead a liberation movement in Argentina. Milei left that meeting excited,” said Julio Goldstein, the leader who had brought them together and who took him to that meeting.
Since then more than two years have passed and also some other things, such as Milei becoming President.
Now Javier is, once again, with glassy eyes. He does it while he hugs Wahnish tightly, a gesture that lasts twenty seconds on the clock and is captured by all the television channels in the country. They are in the Cathedral, where an interreligious mass has just been celebrated after the libertarian’s inauguration. There, among others, his rabbi spoke.
Wahnish is also not the same as he was when he met the economist. He went from maintaining a very low profile, in which he became engrossed even when his closeness to Milei began to be known, to showing his face to the entire society. In the last draw for Milei’s deputy salary, in December, he had participated in a live event on Instagram that millions of people watched. He now went one step further: he was one of the speakers at the mass. The rabbi made the campaign slogan his own (“victory depends on the forces that come from heaven”), drew a parallel with King Solomon (“who had the lion as his banner and who brought prosperity to his people”) and closed by making a kind of choreography with the President. “We are going to ask for what you have been asking God for a long time, you remember, right? Let’s say it together: wisdom, temperance and courage.”
Milei and Wahnish ended up reciting that sentence at the same time.
Man of faith. To understand the importance that this has in Milei’s head, we must start from a premise: for him, religion, life and politics are the same thing. Someone who would seem to understand how this logic works is Wahnish himself.
“My spiritual guide,” Milei calls him. Since they met, the relationship has become much closer, while Milei’s interest in transforming her practicing Catholicism into Judaism grew. In recent years, the libertarian passed by the ACILBA headquarters every 10 or 15 days to hold meetings with Wahnish, while the religious man sent him verses from the Torah via WhatsApp to read several times a week.
In the last part of this year the situation grew to a level that is not usually seen in the relations between rabbis and believers: it was Wanish who went to the Hotel Libertador to attend Milei and not the other way around. Something very striking also happened in that complex. Minutes after the economist learned the news that he had just become the future President, he asked Wahnish to hold a private meeting in the middle of the bunker. Nobody present knows what was discussed – and Javier had one-on-one meetings that night with only four people – but the man did come away excited.
Wahnish, a rabbi of Orthodox Judaism, will now be ambassador to Israel. It was a request from Milei himself, which raises several questions. The first is about merit: does the “spiritual guide” reach that position because of his own abilities or because of his unique relationship with Milei? It is, however, a minor doubt. A big question is how he will fall into the region. Argentina never had a rabbi ambassador, and it is a clear sign of support for Judaism in a country where several religions coexist with arduous conflicts, to which is added the President’s idea of moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
However, all this is minor. The most important thing, some in Milei’s circle think, is who will now be in charge of “containment” – a word used by several – of the libertarian after Wahnish leaves the country. Will the economist be able to lead Argentina without his guidance?
