Fundamentalists Are Not Terrorists

To the Editors:

"Jewish fundamentalists, usually referred to by the more polite term 'Orthodox,'" writes Rita Lin, in an essay about prejudices against Islamic Fundamentalism. I'd like to introduce myself: I am an Orthodox Jew, living in Eliot House here at Harvard. I don't own a gun, I don't belong to a terrorist organization, I don't have any dreams for world domination, and I don't go around blowing up buses.

Let me tell you what some Orthodox Jews I know do with their time, and then you can judge for yourselves whether they fit the term "fundamentalists." One friend of mine spends countless hours a week volunteering for the local ambulance corps in his town. Another guy, while he was here in college, used to take the leftover food from Hillel to the local homeless shelter. I know several Orthodox Jews who spend their summers working for next to nothing at summer camps for retarded children. The list does not stop there.

I suppose that there's an opening for someone to call Orthodox Jews like me "fundamentalists" because we take the Torah--Biblical and Rabbinic law--so seriously and without emendation. Perhaps Rita Lin needs to be reminded that these laws--which we obey seriously and without emendation--include loving ones neighbor, returning a lost object and giving charity to the poor. I remember what the rabbis used to tell me in the Orthodox yeshiva (school for higher Jewish education) in Israel that I attended for a year. One rabbi there explained to me once how it was wrong to borrow someone's pen and paper without asking permission. He said that someone who takes something without asking first is committing an act of selfishness. This rabbi told us that our job in life was to be considerate, not selfish. He told us that deep belief in the Torah means being kind to other people.

I don't deny that there are some so-called religious Jews out there who don't live up to these morals. But there is no denying that these ethical principles are exactly what our Torah is all about. Just look at our prophets. Just look at our legal codes. Any Jew who is mean-spirited and cruel is in flagrant violation of the spirit and the letter of the law, and that Jew is not an Orthodox Jew by any means of classification. After all, how could one be a truly Orthodox Jew, one who loves the Torah and its Divine Author and His creations, and disregard the words of our teacher Maimonides: "There is no joy which is greater or more wondrous than gladdening the hearts of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger, for the one who gladdens the hearts of these unfortunate people is compared to God, as it is said [of God]: [He acts] to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones'" (Maimonides, "Laws of Megillah," 2:17, quoting Isaiah 56:15).

I was taught in my yeshiva to be humble and unassuming, to be reasonable and patient and above all to be respectful and pursue peace. I was not taught to hate or to destroy, and when a former member of the yeshiva was blown up by terrorists in Jerusalem, our rabbis did not tell us to go out and stage a revenge attack. And when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, may his memory be a blessing, was killed by a so-called religious Jew, a so called Orthodox Jew, the rabbis in my yeshiva all talked about how they could not sleep at night for shame. Neither could I, and neither could hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews throughout the world.

Were these lovers of peace, these religiously observant men and women who could not sleep because, whether or not they agreed with the Prime Minister's politics, they were ashamed that a "religious" Jew had brought disgrace to the Torah by spilling blood--were these Orthodox Jews fanatics?

The word "orthodox" translates more literally and accurately as "straight" than it does as "fundamentalist." And I'll tell you what we're straight about. We're straight about responsibility. We're straight about justice. We're straight about kindness. And we're straight about the ethical teachings of our ancestors: "Give everyone the benefit of the doubt...and greet people with a cheerful smile" ("Ethics of the Fathers," 1:6 and 1:15). -Benjamin A. Siris '97