Thief, Robber, or Liar?

Or maybe all three!

The Torah famously differentiates between a gannev, a thief - someone who surreptitiously steals - and a gazlan, a robber - someone who brazenly robs in broad daylight. You might think that the latter is worse, but it’s actually a thief who receives greater punishment. Chazal explain while a robber is simply a brazen person who is not afraid of anyone, a thief demonstrates that he is afraid of people, but not of God.

But what if someone boasts publicly about having secretly stolen? Such is the situation with Yitzchok Goldknopf, leader of the “Torah” party of the ironically-named Agudas Yisrael. He is Minister of Housing Development, and last week at a charedi gathering in Beit Shemesh, he made the most extraordinary declaration.

In a speech that was filmed by a local Beit Shemesh media company, Goldknopf spoke about land allocations for apartments, of which some are designated for the charedi population, and some for the wider general population. In this context, Goldknopf uttered the following astonishing admission:

"גם מה שחשבו שיהיה לציבור הכללי - אז הוצאנו את זה מאיזה שהוא דרך לציבור החרדי, לא על כל הדברים אפשר לדבר עליהם"

Also those [allocations] that they thought would be for the general population - we found a way to extract them for the charedi population. It is not possible to talk [in detail] about such things.

So does this count as being a thief or a robber? I think it’s a new category that’s even worse. Goldknopf boasted about having secretly stolen, but only dared do so in front of a charedi audience, admitting that he has to be circumspect about what he did. He demonstrated that he is afraid of non-charedim, but is not afraid of God, and is not even afraid of losing status as a God-fearing person among his “religious” community.

It is, of course, horrifying that a person steals at all. It’s especially horrifying when a Minister, a public servant, steals from the general public for his own sector. It ought to also be horrifying that this is a man who leads a party that claims to stand for Torah, but as I noted in an important post titled When Torah Is Poison, the “Torah” of the charedi community bears little relation to the Torah with which the rest of us are familiar.

Not surprisingly, when this recording was leaked, it caused an uproar. Even some Likud ministers decided to break ranks with coalition unity and expressed outrage. And Goldknopf responded by flat-out denying that he had ever done that which he admitted to having done!

Apologizing for “the way that he had presented” his comments, Goldknopf insisted that his office has only ever acted according to the law and for the benefit of everyone. In other words, his proud declaration to his coreligionists about having secretly worked to illegally transfer resources to them, which he said he can’t go into detail about, was (allegedly) a lie.

Of course, nobody at all believes this. And it’s quite easy to prove that Goldknopf is lying about having lied. As I noted in my post on the Lottery Farce, under Goldknopf’s control, an enormously high proportion of the apartments subsidized in a national lottery - which are supposed to be distributed with a priority for soldiers, but otherwise equally - mysteriously were in charedi towns. This represents a $200 million theft from the coffers of the public, especially from those who serve in the army, to the benefit of the charedi community (over and above the vast sums of money that charedi politicans arrange to extract from the rest of the country via political deals).

So, the leader of the party that claims to represent Torah is a thief, a robber, and a liar. And yet charedim wonder why their group is despised, and accuse their critics of hating Torah!