Perhaps the most unusual of all the Temple services was the Yom Kippur ceremony of Azazel, sending off a goat into the wilderness, symbolically carrying away the sins of Israel. No other Temple offering was treated in such a fashion. Even more surprising, immediately after describing the Yom Kippur service, the Torah warns, “And they will stop sacrificing to the demons who tempt them” (Lev. 17:7). The text implies that the goat sent to Azazel is the sole exception to this rule, in apparent contradiction to the fundamental principles of the Temple service. Was this unusual ritual a “sacrifice to the demons”?
The Highest Form of Forgiveness
In order to understand the meaning of the Azazel service, we must appreciate the nature of the forgiveness and atonement of Yom Kippur.
The highest level of forgiveness emanates from the very source of divine chesed. It comes from an infinite greatness that embraces both the most comprehensive vision and the most detailed scrutiny. This level knows the holy and the good with all of their benefits, as well as the profane and the evil with all of their harm. It recognizes that all is measured on the exacting scale of divine justice, and that the tendencies towards evil and destruction also serve a purpose in the universe. Such an elevated level of forgiveness understands how, in the overall picture, everything fits together.
This recognition creates a complicated dialectic. There is a clear distinction between good and evil, truth and falsehood, nobility and debasement. Absolute truth demands that we confront the paths of idolatry and evil, in deed and thought; it opposes all repulsiveness, impurity and sin. Still, in its greatness, it finds a place for all. Only an elevated understanding can absorb this concept: how to combine together all aspects of the universe, how to arrange each force, how to extend a measured hand to all opposites, while properly demarcating their boundaries.
The forgiveness of Yom Kippur aspires to this lofty outlook, as expressed in the Azazel offering. Azazel is the worship of demons — the demonic wildness and unrestrained barbarity to be found in human nature. For this reason, the offering was sent to a desolate cliff in the untamed wilderness. The elevated service of Yom Kippur is able to attain a level that confers a limited recognition even to the demonic evil of Azazel. At this level, all flaws are transformed and rectified.
Sent Away to the Wilderness
The abstract knowledge that evil also has a purpose in the world must be acknowledged in some fashion in our service of God. This acknowledgment occurs in the elevated service of Yom Kippur. In practical ethics, however, there is no place for this knowledge. Heaven forbid that evil should be considered good, or that the wicked should be considered righteous. Therefore, the goat for Azazel was sent to a desolate, barren place — a place uninhabited by people. Human society must be based on a just way of life, led by aspirations of holiness and purity.
(Gold from the Land of Israel, pp. 200-201. Adapted from Olat Re’iyah vol. II p. 357; Shemonah Kevatzim IV:91, V:193)
Some of the best issues of my email newsletter (which you can subscribe to while also getting my free eBook Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Health Care at the same time) are my responses to crazy people.
Today’s peek into the ol’ mailbag yields some correspondence from a fellow who isn’t crazy, but who thought “the financial crisis was caused by deregulation” might be an argument I hadn’t heard before.
He sent me a number of such emails, so I’ll have plenty of fodder for my list in the coming days.
Let’s start with the first one. He asks:
Why are Libertarians and conservatives sympathetic to the economics of Hitler and Generalissmo Francesco Franco? Corporate power has never been stronger, and the right to work laws hinder workers abilities to organize. Me personally, you are not a Libertarian, I think your view of economics is quite clear. Traditional Libertarians were anarcho communists and socialists and believed strongly in labor unions, education, and healthcare. I would consider it a honor if you respond to me.
After the Financial Crisis of 2008, I don’t think you can use Thomas Sowell, Walter E Williams, Hayek, as reliable sources anymore. We deregulated the economy, industries were gutted, CEO pay is out of control, our democracy is destroyed of which unions are essential to democracy, so if you plan on using the frauds and phonies like Hayek as sources you would be making a big mistake.
PS. I’m sorry for speaking so aggressively to you, I really am, but I learned by researching the prelude of the Spanish Civil War, strength is the only thing your people understand. Surprisingly, the communists were the first people to argue that negotiations were hopeless against people like you and force was the only way.
Please tell me why your sympathetic to fascist economics? Supply side economics have not worked since the turn of the 20th century.
I take that back: the guy probably is crazy.
“Negotiations were hopeless against people like you and force was the only way.”
Yes, he thinks the Spanish Civil War was fought between leftists and libertarians, and that the only way to deal with people who believe in peace and nonaggression is “force.”
So: why are libertarians sympathetic to fascist economics?
This is like asking why the Atkins diet is so heavy on carbs.
He asks me this, I might add, after I posted a lecture just weeks ago in which I walked my audience step by step through the anti-capitalist economics of Hitler.
Fascist economics involves the creation of state-supervised cartels as a way of countering the so-called dog-eat-dog competition of the free marke, and imposing some kind of state control over what would otherwise be an anarchy of production.
So no, we don’t favor that.
Hitler — that big supporter of capitalism — wrote of Stalin: “One had to have a unqualified respect for Stalin. In his way, the guy was quite a genius! His…economic planning was so all-encompassing that it was only exceeded by our own Four Year Plan.”
Yeah, that sounds like something a libertarian might say.
Our friend then lists Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and F.A. Hayek as discredited economists. It’s as if he’s just chosen three economists at random here. Much as I love Sowell and Williams, they are not Austrian School economists, so they’re not my go-to people on the financial crisis (even though I’m sure they have plenty of sensible things to say, and Sowell cites my 2009 New York Times bestseller in his own book on the housing boom and bust).
Regarding Hayek, there is zero chance our friend has read or any of Hayek’s economic works. (In fairness, even most libertarians don’t read Hayek’s purely economic works.) I would say there is a three percent chance he has read any of Hayek’s works on any subject. I have no idea what he thinks Hayek’s views of the causes of the financial crisis would be, or on what basis he would reach such a conclusion about Hayek.
As for “deregulating the economy,” subsequent emails make clear that our friend believes deregulation caused the financial crisis.
What deregulation would that be, exactly? Letting banks set interest rates on savings accounts? Permitting interstate branch banking? You’d think things like that would, if anything, promote stability.
The “partial repeal of Glass-Steagall,” which folks like this guy point to when painted into a corner, simply meant that the same holding company could now control both a commercial bank and an investment bank. But every other country in the world had already been operating that way, without incident.
But in any case, did the crisis of 2008 actually involve institutions like that? Nope.
Even the Washington Post had to concede the irrelevance of Glass-Steagall to the crisis. Generally, the problems came from standalone investment banks and standalone commercial banks, and even the odd exceptions of J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo resisted the infusion of government capital and could well have emerged on the other side without it.
Here’s a good question: which repealed regulation would have prevented the crisis?
::crickets::
Not to mention: it is naive and uncomprehending to expect that there might be some way, once the Federal Reserve has generated an artificial boom, to “regulate” our way out of it.
The fact is, banks had always been allowed to extend no-doc mortgages, or securitize loans, or whatever else they did during the crisis. What happened was that the banks did a poor job of performing a traditional banking activity: extending mortgage loans.
Why should they suddenly have done such a poor job? Why, greed, of course, say the anti-capitalists.
If “greed” is the answer, why did the crisis occur when it did? Were people uniquely greedy only in certain years?
In Meltdown I lay out the full explanation, which has plenty to do with the Fed as well as government policy. Private actors were bit players in a much larger drama.
There’s so much more to reply to in the guy’s email, though. By the end he’s switched to talking about “supply-side economics,” as if this is interchangeable with Austrian economics. Like the supply siders I certainly do favor lowering top marginal tax rates, as do all civilized people, but unlike them, I am not at pains to demonstrate how much of the lost revenue will be made up by increased economic activity.
Note, too, what is missing in his email: the Federal Reserve. This is always missing. Without the Fed in the picture, we can pretend “capitalism” just spontaneously produces housing bubbles, and that in the 21st century we Austrians have everything we want! A purely deregulated, laissez-faire economy!
Imagine being a person who looks at the American economy and thinks it’s been “deregulated.”
Here is a chart of the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations over the past four decades:
This is what he calls “deregulated.”
Meanwhile, in terms of financial regulation – and if there’s a more regulated sector in the entire economy than the banking sector, I’d like to know what it is – since 1980 the budget for the relevant regulatory agencies has increased by a factor of three, even accounting for inflation.
At the time of the crisis, there were no fewer than 115 state and federal agencies tasked with regulating the financial sector. He expects us to believe that if only we’d had 116, everything would have been all right.
This superstitious reverence toward regulators is really beneath a free people, especially given how clueless those regulators were in the years leading up to the crisis. The Fed itself is supposed to be the overall regulator of the banking system, and I can share dozens of idiotic things Fed officials said about the economy and the housing market in those years.
As Robert Higgs says of regulators, without our friend’s naivete, “Had they been given even greater powers, budgets, and staffs, what enchantment would have transformed these ostensible guardians into smart, dogged champions of the public interest, rather than the time-serving drones and co-conspirators with the regulated firms that they have always been?”
More to say in the coming days as I hit more of this fellow’s emails, but in the meantime, I refer you to the libertarian’s daily antidote to bad thinking: http://www.TomsPodcast.com
“There is no government regulation, no matter how plausible it initially appears, that will not eventually be applied by some bureaucrat in a way that defies common sense.”
For a regulation that makes considerable sense, it may take months or even years for the right bureaucrat to come along. But not always.
Last Friday evening, my wife returned from a trip to California. On Saturday, she began to unpack her bag. Not bags — just one relatively small one. It actually fits in an overhead bin. For the sake of this report, I’m glad that she didn’t do that with this bag.
She noticed that the edge of the bag was torn. I thought this might have been the work of the famous gorilla in the old American Tourister luggage TV commercial. But then she said, “the lock is broken.” I told her: “It’s probably the new flight security rules that went into effect on January 1. The inspectors broke the lock and got into the bag.”
She opened it. Sure enough, she found a slip of paper. I reprint it here.
Transportation Security Administration
Notification of Baggage Inspection
To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage. As part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected. Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection.
During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag, which was resealed with a tamper-evident seal.
If the TSA screener was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the screener may have been forced to break the locks on your bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, and has taken care to reseal your bag upon completion of inspection. However, TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.
As for the slash in the bag, who knows? The gorilla left no note of explanation.
You had better calculate this travel expense into the budgets of your flights from now on.
Upstairs in the terminal gates, the security people make searches of passengers. Searches are required to be random, for to go after some of Ann Coulter’s famous “swarthy men” would be to violate people’s rights on a racial basis, which is not allowed, rather than violating people’s rights on a non-racial basis, which is required by law. So, to maintain the illusion of randomness in a world of surveillance cameras, government data bases, and other profiling technologies, they have to conduct random searches.
During World War II, the British cracked the Germans’ military code. The Brits knew the times and routes of the oil tankers that were to supply Rommel’s forces in Africa. To keep the Germans from figuring out that their code had been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane, which would make itself visible to the men on the tankers, and then run for cover. The plane would send a message announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The Germans on the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from the air. What bad luck! If they radioed home, they would tell the command that they had been spotted. Then a British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never did alter the code.
The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception. So are the random searches of passengers and bags. They are to provide camouflage: (1) from voters who demand action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise initiate lawsuits on behalf of their swarthy clients — on the basis of racial profiling. Anyone who really expects searches like these to protect airliners is so abysmally dense that he might as well be a Congressman.
The other purposes of the new surveillance system relate more to controlling average people than catching terrorists.
BROKEN LOCKS
It is obvious that it’s time to sell your high-priced Samsonite luggage at a garage sale and use the money to buy a replacement bag at the local Salvation Army. If you don’t, then don’t lock the bag. If you have a really secure bag, it’s going to be a target. The airline baggage handling systems have been under fire from Congress. So, in order to prove that they’re on the job, the security people are going to have their lock picks and lock clippers in full-time use.
The public will probably roll over and play dead. To complain would be to call into question the Homeland Security program and the steady jettisoning of the right of privacy. The agents of the government are becoming invasive on the official basis of protecting us from terrorism. Yet the enormous security state that had been created after World War II proved incompetent with respect to 9-11. So, it is being rewarded with larger budgets and more power.
In the name of protecting us from invaders, our privacy is being invaded by the protectors. There is not much doubt that the voters accept this rationale. Men have been assured by governments down through history, “An honest person has nothing to hide.” Are we also to believe that an honest person has no need for locks on his luggage?
It’s not just luggage locks. It is also locks on our communications, such as our e-mail. A vast surveillance system already exists. Cameras located on highways monitor automobile licenses. The city of London is about to launch a major experiment : photographing the license plates of the 250,000 cars that enter the central part of the city every day, comparing these images to a data base of car owners who have paid a five pound per day entrance fee. We know that the technology exists to monitor faces in stadium-size crowds. In airports around the world, video cameras survey faces and match them with a data base of suspected terrorists and criminals. Don’t call it profiling. Call it mug-shotting. The world portrayed in the recent movie, “Minority Report,” where private and public eyeball-recognition software is universal, is already here in terms of the absence of legal restraints. Iris-recognition technology now exists in an early form. An initial market is airport security.
As the price of anything falls, more of it is demanded. In this category place surveillance. As the price of anything rises, less of it is demanded. In this category place privacy. At some price, it’s available, but the price is too high for most people. The very rich use these techniques. Criminals use them. Tax-evaders use them. But innocent people don’t.
So, what do we learn from these two laws of economics? This: the new technology will lower the surveillance-per-victim cost. This technology will be used on innocent people. When organizations buy this equipment, they will use it. They must justify the expense. But to put this equipment to use, the managers must re-define what constitutes suspicious behavior. That which used to be regarded as unsuspicious — at the older, higher price of surveillance — will now be defined as suspicious.
This is not mere theory. It is happening now. Every time we go into an airport, we can see the future.
We are told by officials that we need a national identification card. We already have one: a driver’s license with a photo image. Try to get onto an airplane if you don’t have one. Did this system prevent 9-11? Of course not. But it gets Americans to line up. This is the desire of every bureaucrat: to get people to line up. If scarce resources are not allocated by price, they must be allocated by standing in line. Bureaucrats don’t allocate by price — at least not in public.
MONEY TRANSFERS
Americans think they can hide money in foreign accounts. With the steady erosion of banking privacy in international markets, it is becoming expensive and difficult to hide the movement of digital money. I think it is close to impossible, especially since 9-11. This is why Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups don’t use wire transfers. Islam has an ancient system of credit-transfer that is not digital. The system is called hawala. There is a complex body of law governing the exchanges.
The acknowledged masters of foreign exchange are Jews who are involved in the international diamond trade. All transactions are in cash. All are sealed by verbal contracts. There is an industry-wide court system. No member of the guild ever takes a compatriot into the civil courts. Violations mean exclusion from the guild. This system has been operating for a thousand years. Magna Carta? Late-comers!
If you use cash, you forfeit interest payments. But at 1% per annum, this return may not be worth forfeiting the use of currency. The price of remaining in currency is falling. The benefits in terms of privacy and buying things at a discount are rising. We do not see this, but we can surmise on the basis of economics that it exists on the black market. This is a market without taxes. The average guy isn’t in this market. The main participants are poor people, working-class immigrants, and rich people who are involved in illegal or unreported trades.
That’s why the average Joe is the real target of all this recent clamp-down in security. The system is aimed at him because it’s cheaper to aim it at him. Like the drunk who searches for his dropped key in the area close to the street lamp, so is the government’s new system of surveillance. The drunk won’t find his lost key, but at least he won’t risk tripping in the dark. Bureaucrats don’t get into trouble for not finding keys. They risk hitting a brick wall in their careers when they trip in the dark. Their goal is to install more lampposts.
At a small outpost on Har Chevron, Shabtai Kushlevski and his dedicated crew are raising sheep fit for korbanos to be ready when the Beis Hamikdosh is rebuilt.
Kushlevski says that today’s sheep are generally invalid for korbanos for a number of reasons, including the tags inserted in their ears almost the day they are born.
To cover costs, Kushlevski has arranged for sponsors. For $4 monthly, they will have a sacrificial sheep available the moment Beis Hamikdosh is rebuilt.
