I was walking somewhere one morning this winter with Argentina’s President Javier Milei’s Davos address at the World Economic Forum playing in my ears. He had been on the stage before every head of state and central banker who matters, and as his remarks drew to a close, he said something I did not expect a sitting president to say on that stage.
“Finally, I would like to leave you with a reflection on this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Bo.”
I stopped walking.
What followed was serious exegesis. Milei named Pharaoh “the symbol of the oppressive power of the state” and read the final three plagues of Egypt, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn, as a diagnostic sequence: economic ruin, then moral confusion, then collapse. The West, he told the room, had “begun to turn its back on the ideas of liberty.” Wokism, he said, was socialism in its most hypocritical form. And yet he had come to Davos with what he called good news. The world was beginning to awaken. The Americas, he said, would be the beacon that reignited the West. Then he closed the way he always closes. Viva la libertad, carajo!
It takes a certain kind of mind to do this. Not a performative one. A trained one. Javier Milei, an economist and philosopher, has spent years studying the Hebrew Bible with his rabbi in Buenos Aires, much as he once studied Rothbard and the Austrian School. He reads the parsha every week. He reads Maimonides. He writes speeches that fold the three traditions he has named as the foundations of the West, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian values, into a single argument about liberty.
This morning, on his third state visit to Israel in two and a half years, the president of Argentina arrived at the Western Wall and wept in the arms of his ambassador, Rabbi Shimon Axel Wahnish, the man who taught him Torah in Buenos Aires before being sent to Jerusalem to represent his country.
Milei stands full of emotion before the Western Wall
Tears are the rarest currency in modern politics. Milei spent some this morning.
I have watched many heads of state visit this Wall. I have not seen one stand here as Milei does. The distinction is intellectual. He has spent the years leading up to the visit earning the right to that emotion.
There is a lineage in Argentine thought of gentiles drawn with unusual seriousness to the Jewish tradition. Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest mind his country produced, devoted his career to the Kabbalah. He wrote “A Defense of the Kabbalah.” He corresponded with Gershom Scholem. He wove the Sefirot and the letter-mysticism of the Hebrew alphabet into his most enduring fiction. He was not Jewish. He was Argentinian, which, in the literary imagination of that country, was apparently close enough.
Milei stands in that lineage, and he has made it operational. Where Borges wrote stories about Jewish texts, Milei is writing foreign policy out of them.
His self-understanding is not messianic. In a 2023 television interview, he said that his sister Karina was Moses, and he was merely Aaron, the brother who speaks for the prophet. He broke down saying it. In an era where most heads of state tend to exaggerate their own importance, Milei stands out by publicly acknowledging his sister’s superiority. This is the psychology of a man who has read Exodus closely and understood that Aaron’s role is sacred, too.
Wahnish said it before anyone else. “The true revolution of Milei in Argentina was not really economic and political. It was cultural and spiritual.”
Today, in Jerusalem, that revolution has been signed.
In a joint declaration released this afternoon, Milei and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the formal launching of the Isaac Accords. The document names its signatories and invitees as “the descendants of Isaac and the nations of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” It commits them to the defense of freedom and democracy, the fight against terrorism, antisemitism, and drug trafficking, and the containment of Iran’s expanding terrorist networks across the Western Hemisphere. It credits President Donald J. Trump’s Abraham Accords as its inspiration. It names Milei, in its words, as “a leading voice for freedom and hope in the region.”
Most coverage will describe the initiative as policy. A Western Hemisphere sequel to the Abraham Accords. A framework for trade and technology. That framing misses the name.
Stan Polovets, who chairs the Genesis Prize Foundation that seeded the initiative with the $1 million award Milei directed away from himself, said it plainly months ago. “Isaac carried forward Abraham’s legacy.”
Abraham made the covenant. Isaac inherited it. Today’s declaration is not a sequel. It is a succession.
The architecture is already in place. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed last August on a joint US-Israel working group on Latin America. That group convened in Jerusalem in February with a senior State Department official present. Ambassador Mike Huckabee stood beside Milei and Netanyahu at the launch and delivered President Trump’s blessing for the project. This is an American-Israeli-Argentinian undertaking, operating at the speed of a presidency that believes time is short.
Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica first. The declaration explicitly invites other like-minded nations of the Western Hemisphere to join. Others are expected to follow.
There is a line from Isaiah that the State of Israel was founded on: Or la’goyim, “a light unto the nations.” When Milei received a Torah-shaped plaque in Miami, inscribed with that verse, two years ago, he posted it on his social media the next morning. He knows what the phrase means. He knows what it costs to live up to it. At Davos in January, he said the Americas would be the beacon that reignited the West. Today in Jerusalem, he signed the document that begins that work.
Milei came to the Wall on Sunday morning in tears. He came in truth. The rest of the world has been so long without either truth or tears that we now mistake the sight of both for theater.
Viva la libertad, carajo!