It seems like another eccentricity of someone who exhibits extravagances; a touch of snobbery emulating several notable leaders of the world. It could be the superstitious belief in miracles of someone considered miraculous by millions of people.
But it can also be something more serious than that: a search signal announcing a significant change.
Pilgrimage twice in a few months to the tomb of the Lubavitch Rebbe in a cemetery in the New York district of Queens may be announcing a personal turn or a facet submerged and ignored by society that would be emerging in Javier Milei.
That Rebbe (Hassidic teacher), revered in and beyond Judaism, implies a view on humanity that had never been publicly exposed by the president-elect.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson was, essentially, a disseminator of goodness, empathy, gentleness, compassion and conscience. The Hasidic community that he led and enlarged, Chabad Lubavitch, points with his name to a place of origin and guiding principles. Chabad is the ordered sum of the Hebrew words Homah (meaning “inspiration”), Bina (understanding), and Daat (consciousness).
In Lubavitch, a Russian village in the Smolensk oblast, the center of dissemination of the Chabad was established for a century, a movement that languished until Menachem Mendel Schneerson came to lead it and expanded it, expanding its influence and philosophy throughout the world.
He used that influence to spread the humanist values of the Chabad, to create education centers and to spread teaching and the love of reading in children. That is why her name is also synonymous with the fight for education, to the point that James Carter established the date of her birth as National Education Day in the United States.
That democratic president, a clear exponent of the culture of dialogue and social sensitivity of North American social democrats, admired the Rebbe. Just like John Fitzerald Kennedy, the great promoter of the Civil Rights that Luther King fought for, and of capitalism with social equity.
By the way, there were also Republicans admiring Schneerson. None other than Ronald Reagan, for example.
But that among the first statesmen who admired the work of the Rebbe in its beginnings was Franklin Roosevelt, it is significant because he was the president of the New Deal, a policy that rescued capitalism from the deep crisis of the ‘ 30 turning to the economic thought of John Meynard Keynes.
Milei began his media activism by hating Keynesianism. She went through many programs describing the English economist as the worst of evils and placing him in the camp of socialism.
During his time as a media activist, the president-elect exhibited a volcanic personality that radiated intolerance, political violence, fury, traits of misogyny and fundamentalism with the economic theories of radicalized aspects of liberalism. Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek and Murray Rothbard always appeared in his media discourse. Never the Stuart Mill of the stage of the turn towards social liberalism. In the liberalism expressed by Milei the thoughts of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin do not appear. Even less is the liberalism that understood justice as equity that John Rawls promoted.
To anyone who pointed out the reductionism of the Austrian school of a vision that, before being economic, was philosophical and humanist, Milei vomited hatred and called him ignorant. The intolerance of criticism and different views that Milei aggressively radiated is contrary to the teaching of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. But her hitherto unknown dazzle with that Hasidic sage is a good sign, in case it was not an act to change her image.
In contrast to the “rabid toy” who, during his time as a media activist, shouted at women who displeased him on a television set, Menachem Mendel Schneerson gave priority to women and urged them to lead thought and teaching. In the polar opposite of the economist who, staring at the camera with wild eyes, expressed dark and viscous contempt, like a “fucking lefty,” the Lubavitcher Rebbe was a disseminator of understanding and acceptance of the other.
The venerated rabbi to whose tomb statesmen have made pilgrimages since his death in 1994, contradicted Judaism as a passive experience to propose it as humanist activism and, in the psychedelic ’60s, looked with sympathy on hippieism and other youthful rebellions of that decade of cultural revolution. world scale. “These young people prove that conformity is not the pinnacle of life…they are melting the iceberg of America,” he wrote.
The great promoter in the world of the Chabad of Lubavitch taught that all people, from the wise to the ignorant, could be spreaders of kindness and compassion. And that spreading kindness and compassion is true greatness, true transcendence.
The economist who attacked Keynes and hit Alfonsín’s photo now has something in common with the Keynesians Roosevelt, Kennedy and Carter. That is a sign of openness and moderation, unless the pilgrimages to New York are a pose, the symptom of a messianic delirium or the desperate search for miracles that will help him defeat Argentine evils such as the militias of Judas Maccabeus, for counting on With the help of “the forces of heaven”, they defeated the Greek invaders in the 2nd century BC who wanted to Hellenize the Jews.
If what it shows is an internal change, this new phase of Milei is a positive sign. But if she’s looking for miracles, like so many who visit the grave in Queens, Milei is wrong. She was taught by the very rabbi she venerates.
To those who asked him about miracles, the Rebbe, considered a “tzadik” (just and pious person), responded by explaining that “the true miracle occurs when you change your life to approach the path shown by the Torah.”
