I seem to be chosen to write this tractate. ‘Chosen’ in the meaning of Torah is not chosen for some benefit; it is chosen for a responsibility unique to the chosen.
I have three insights, based on experience, that have led to my being chosen.
- The first is my lifetime of connection to the new land of Israel and
- Second, my experiences that have brought me to an understanding of the nature of modern commerce.
- The third is my discovery that primates, of which humans are a subset, are rarely able to learn new material after they reach adulthood. This last relates to the reason Moses’s children had to wander in the desert for 40 years; they were the first generation and could not appreciate the new God. For the same reason, the current generation has already stopped learning -- there is plenty of time for this tractate to reach its younger audience.
There are now two major clusters of Jews: Israelis who generally understand at a gut level the message of this tractate, and the diaspora, mostly Americans, who are attached to an outdated and erroneous socialist worldview. Both clusters have small components of the other.
There are three great prophets of the New Land. One and two are the team of Milton and Rose Friedman. The other is Bibi Netanyahu.
Our nation (Jews) has a tradition for rebellion. military and intellectual, and we are also the first nation founded on the core belief in the individual. We celebrate the Maccabees and the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. At the same time our Ten Commandments are commands to each individual. Our teaching tradition from Hillel and Shammai to this day is one of individual freedom of thought.
Our New Land grows out of our individual freedom. All of history is filled with an hereditary upper class and a social structure that ignored and suppressed individual freedom. Without recognizing unique individuals there is no possibility of meritocracy. The first great period of individual freedom and meritocracy came for the children of the hereditary class of England who escaped to live abroad in the Empire. It was in the early 1800s that technology and labor components came together with these free English individuals to create the beginnings of modern commerce. It was later in the Great Western migration in America where individual freedom and meritocracy flourished that innovation in commerce erupted. Finally, the powerful forces of modern commerce were unleashed in post-WWII America where the hereditary elite fell apart. The same time that Milton and Rose Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom.
Modern commerce brought the end of hunger, the bounties of good health and truly unshackled individual genius.
The Israel I lived in in the late 1950s was a socialist utopia governed by labor unions and oppressive East European style government. Israel had no future. Bibi Netanyahu brought the values of modern commerce to our nation in the late 1990s.
Today we Americans and Israelis live in the most prosperous of times with the greatest levels of individual freedom. This is due to the miracle of modern commerce. Free markets, meritocracy, diverse societies without hereditary elites and widespread aversion to government controls.
That is the New Land for which our nation shall become the loyal champions and proponents in the future.
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