Incoming Finance Minister believes religious observance will bring financial abundance

Religious Zionist leader Bezalel Smotrich says the ‘economic system’ Israel needs is to faithfully observe the commandments.

Bezalel Smotrich, the presumed finance minister in the next government, has suggested that the laws of the Torah will dictate Israel’s economic approach once he enters office.

In an interview with the Haredi weekly magazine Mishpacha, the far-right lawmaker was asked what he plans on doing differently from his predecessor, the secularist Avigdor Liberman.

“They’ve tried many different economic systems, right? They tried capitalism, neo-socialism, but there’s one thing they didn’t try — an economic approach called ‘So if you faithfully obey,'” Smotrich said.

He was citing the biblical verse in Deuteronomy 11:14, which reads: “So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today — to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul —  then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil.”

“If we follow the Torah,” Smotrich continued, “we’ll be rewarded with financial abundance and a great blessing. That will be my economic approach.”

He said that as finance minister he would examine “the macro and the micro, go into data and use the most professional language there is,” but stressed that above all else, “we’re religious Jews.”

Analysing Smotrich’s interview, David Rosenberg wrote in Haaretz that the religious component of the incoming government had “ gone beyond the prosaic issues of money and power and has journeyed into the realms of mysticism”.

“But if economic prosperity depends on the observance and faith of Israel’s Jews, then the country is headed into a deep recession. The great majority of Israelis aren’t Torah observant – certainly not in the way Smotrich and his ultra-Orthodox/religious Zionist camp understand it.”