Breathtaking Dishonesty

The sad saga of Slifkin

For a long time, we knew that Natan is not exactly a paragon of integrity. Despite all his blather about “intellectual honesty”, he is not known for exemplifying that trait. The examples are too numerous to list, and would have to include at least 90% of his posts.

However, Natan's latest deliberate offense against the truth takes the cake. In his most recent post, Natan accused chareidim of hypocrisy, that they engage in maximum hishtadlus regarding their own needs, while neglecting hishtadlus for the country's needs. That they aren't sincere in their belief of Divine help, but just use that claim to excuse themselves from attending to the needs of the nation. One of his proofs was the fact that chareidim call exterminators for rodent problems. In his words:

"Chareidim avoid the two most serious national obligations with a claim that they can rely on and provide supernatural assistance instead (which just so happens to be Divinely implemented by way of everyone else working hard). So when they then follow natural law and exert maximum hishtadlus for everything that they see as important to themselves and that they can’t get other people to do for them - be it receiving medical treatment, protection against pandemics (when they take them seriously), obtaining political power, avoiding missiles that are actually being fired at their towns, or getting rid of a rat plague - then yes, they are a bunch of hypocrites."

This is obviously an asinine distortion, as almost everybody recognized, even his own supporters. It requires a special type of craziness, besides just plain old anti-religion (which he has plenty of) to think that calling for pest control casts doubt on somebody’s faith.

But more importantly for our purpose now, his current unhinged theory demonstrates INCREDIBLE dishonesty. In hundreds of other posts, over many years, Natan has shown his, uh… great concern for the chareidi community, regularly commenting on how chareidim harm themselves through their lack of hishtadlus. Whether regarding their financial health, medical issues, or basic safety, his narrative has always been that chareidim expose themselves to injury through their lack of rationalism and attachment to the mystical approach. During Covid, Natan made a great ado about how the death rate in chareidi communities was 10x the rate of the rest of the country, due to their lack of hishtadlus in adherence to medical guidance.

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2020/04/who-caused-death-by-daas-torah.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2020/04/daas-torah-on-how-to-avoid-getting.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2020/04/if-they-only-knew-how-much-torah.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2020/05/ten-times.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/01/mazeltov-murder-tonight.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-chassidic-wedding-murders.html

When 45 chareidim tragically died in Meron in Lag B'Omer of 2021, while the bodies were still warm, Natan used this opportunity to introduce a new series of posts attacking the chareidi community for their lack of hishtadlus.

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-truth-becomes-clear-but-who-will.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-writing-was-on-wall.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-horses-of-chelm.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/denying-reality-of-physics.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/meron-those-responsible-and-those.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-response-to-murder.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/foxholes-and-fatalists.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-denial-of-physical-reality-is-from.html

https://rationalistjudaism.blogspot.com/2021/05/die-and-dont-learn.html

From one of the posts in that series, where he claims that chareidim don’t even believe in the laws of physics:

If you have a worldview, stressed in yeshivos and sefarim and the press (and see this example at Aish.com), that the laws of physics are a "smokescreen" which have no genuine reality (as per Rav Dessler), that they are regularly overturned by God and righteous people (as per various chassidic and sefardic groups), that hishtadlus is just a "fine" to be paid and should either be minimized or not done excessively, that one's parnasah has absolutely no connection to one's education or even to working, then the result is inevitable: unless something is of very obvious urgency (like elections), people will not take the laws of cause-and-effect seriously. 

Now this is obviously an extremely perverted interpretation of the chareidi worldview, for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain to intelligent people like yourselves. But look at the contrast to his most recent post, where he claims that actually, chareidim totally believe in maximum hishtadlus for themselves, and their entire hashkafa of relying on God is just a selfish pretense to excuse themselves from helping others (which would be laughable if it wasn’t so demented, chareidim clearly do far more actual chessed than secularists).

The fact that Natan seamlessly transitions between these mutually exclusive, distorted interpretations shows us, in addition to all his other wonderful character traits, how dishonest this charlatan is. He is about as truthful as this economy-benefitting octopus served at one of his many lavish parties:

For an explanation of what chareidim actually believe, see our previous post, or just read through the Chumash.