Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Efrat, speaking from Manhattan: “Yesterday morning, I was sitting in a NY office, explaining that the evils of this century - first Nazi fascism, then Stalinist Communism - began against the Jews, and then continued against the rest of the world. I had just said that the third scourge of the century is Islamic fundamentalism - which today is against Israel and tomorrow will be against the entire free world - and then, as if on queue, someone opened the door and told us about the explosions in the World Trade Center, and then a few minutes later about the Pentagon, and that was the end of our meeting… There is a tremendous sense of American vulnerability. Americans, and the Jews here as well, have always thought of the U.S. as being invulnerable. Just as the shofar is a wake-up call, this was too - and to the American government as well. I don’t think that we’ll hear anymore about even-handedness or [Israel’s] overreacting and the like; I think that this will wake everyone up to realize that we must destroy terrorism wherever it rears its ugly head, whatever it takes to do so - otherwise the world will be overtaken by Islamic fundamentalists, by the core of the most evil thing imaginable.

[Regarding the Messiah and Gog-and-Magog] I must admit that this was my first reaction when I looked out the window and saw the smoke billowing, and people jumping out the windows, and the terror on the faces of all the high-powered brokers, etc. Undoubtedly it is a clash of two cultures, one that trains its youth to study and to live in freedom and to revere life, and another culture that trains its youth to become suicide bombers. The first understands compromise, and the other only believes in fanatical all-or-nothing. This is very frightening. I will speak about this in Israel next week, but in short: The world that G-d created is not yet complete, and our task, Israel’s, is to perfect it. To some extent, we are the litmus paper of where the world stands, as I alluded to at the beginning [regarding the century’s three scourges]. Our job is to act against these evils, because otherwise, we leave the world open to the worst forces of evil unimaginable. Our belief is that once we - primarily the Jews, and also all freedom-loving peoples - take the requisite steps, then G-d will complete the process. We hope that yesterday’s unspeakable events bring the U.S. and Israel closer [to this end].”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2001 and is filed under documents.