David Isaac

“Moderation in all things.” That famous saying from classical antiquity is attributed to Cleobulus, one of the seven sages of Greece. But even he would have had his patience worn thin by the Jews’ immoderately moderate response to Muslim terror.

We see it here in this country. Attend a mainstream Jewish event, say a Federation fund-raiser or simply the Shabbat morning service at the local reform temple, and bring up the subject of Islamic extremism. Almost inevitably, some well-meaning, if not deep-thinking listener will pipe up that, “Yes, but most Muslims are moderate.”

When assaulted by a group who wishes your annihilation, who blows up your women and children and hasn’t given your brethren a moment’s peace since they returned to their biblical inheritance after 2,000 years in exile, the healthy response is not to say, “Well, they’re not all bad.”

It’s not difficult to see why someone would say that. It’s hard for a normal person to cope with the sort of naked evil our enemies have embraced, and it’s intellectually offensive to most fair-minded men and women to hear an entire religious group labeled as extremist. The point is not that we should paint all Muslims as murderous madmen but that we should adapt a way of thinking that intellectually equips us to fight the madmen among them. One thing is certain. Resorting to the trope that most are moderate is not cutting the mustard.

When the U.S. went to war against the Nazis we didn’t wring our hands and go out of our way to say most Germans were decent, law-abiding people who wanted to live quiet lives, if for no other reason than such statements were beside the point. They are equally beside the point today as we fight our Muslim enemy.

Is there a proper approach to thinking, talking and dealing with a determined and radicalized foe? This writer proposes that it’s not the Greeks who best equip us for this war, but our Jewish tradition. Our predecessors have faced extremism before. Their solution was to dig in, fortify their position and resist.

As the greatest Jewish philosopher Maimonides said, if one wishes to escape one form of extremism, one should adopt its opposite. His famous Iggeret Teman or Epistle to Yemen is a good example. As the Jews there faced forced apostasy, Maimonides wrote to them to strengthen their community.

“My Brethren! Hold fast to the covenant, be immovable in your convictions...With regard to what you reported, that the adversary seeking your apostasy seduces people by trying to show that several words in the Torah can be explained as alluding to the rise of Mahomet, and that in the same book even his name is mentioned, you may rest assured that this theory is not only untenable and preposterous, but supremely ridiculous.” Maimonides added that Judaism differed from Islam “as a living man endowed with the faculty of reason is unlike a statue which is ever so well carved out of marble, wood, bronze or silver” and that while they modeled their religion upon “ours in order to glorify themselves” their “counterfeiting is an open secret to the learned” and “consequently they become objects of derision and ridicule…”

Though these words are hardly conducive to interfaith dialogue, they had a profound effect on the Yemenite community and fueled their resolve to resist their oppressors. It’s also clear that Maimonides chose his words carefully for the crisis.

As Abraham S. Halkin, a former professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, notes in his introduction to one translation: “Although Maimonides counted the belief in the advent of the Messiah as an article of faith and restated it in his legal code, his view of the Messianic age is rather sober. He regards it merely as a period of peace and of the ingathering of the exiles… But in The Epistle to Yemen his entire attitude changes. Perhaps as a result of the difficult condition of the Jews or of the critical situation in Yemen, he manifests greater excitement, warmth, and typically Jewish piety.”

Today there is no such adjustment by the Jews or their leadership. One can only imagine what Israeli President Shimon Peres would have written to Yemen’s Jews had he lived at that time. Perhaps it would have gone something like this. “To my dearest brethren in Teman: We are discovering that all the things we are fighting for are not so important. It’s a changed world and you are out of date. The old enemies have disappeared or will disappear, since they don't have a future. The world has changed completely. It is only you in Teman who do not know this. What counts is not the intentions of the Muslims. What counts is the confrontation between two realities. All known solutions are dead ones. The art of negotiation is to invent and create and not to hang from the cliffs of yesterday. Listen, we have to take a chance. Those who don’t dare are not realists. Remember, I may not know what you want but I know what is good for you. P.S. You are all fascists. Ich bin ein Bayer.*”

If we are to win we ought to change our way of thinking about what it takes to fight extremism. Tom Paine said: “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” And lastly remember that were Maimonides alive today to write letters to the editor no one would print them.

David Isaac is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
*All the above (apart from the references to Teman) are actual statements by Shimon Peres.