Rabin Assassination Highlights Dilemma for Religious Groups : Terrorism: Some fear extremist rhetoric encourages believers to use violence in God’s name. Repudiation of such tactics is urged.

Few words could be more chilling to people who believe religion offers a pathway to peace than those of the confessed assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: God ordered me to do it.

The murder adds one more violent act to the atrocities committed in the name of religion, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland, from India to the Middle East.

If there are indications of hope in a growing interfaith movement for peace, Rabin’s assassination is another sign of the difficulties people of faith face in stopping extremists within fundamentalist groups from invoking God’s name to justify terrorist acts.

Although there was nearly a universal condemnation of the killing, religious groups, particularly those on the far right, are now being pushed to go further, to examine their own rhetoric to see whether they contributed to the climate of hate that made such an act possible.

“A single condemnation is not going to be enough,” said City University of New York sociology professor Samuel Heilman. “We have to talk about a different way of teaching about the value of human life.”

Among Israel’s Jews, opinion has been almost evenly split over the efforts of Rabin’s government to make peace with the Palestinians and Syrians.

Right-wing extremists have gone furthest to denounce the peace accords; at a rally in Israel in September, demonstrators waved drawings of Rabin in a Nazi uniform. And in the week following Rabin’s death, tributes to his assassin were painted on walls in downtown Jerusalem.

Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry,” said that because of the assassination and the murders last year of 29 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron by a right-wing follower, religious groups need to look at the consequences of the way they sometimes vilify their opponents.

Recently, before Rabin’s death, Heilman said, a prominent rabbi said the killing of Rabin would be allowed under Jewish law, and his peers did not take him to task or condemn him, but treated the statement as a matter of legitimate debate.

“You are kind of providing a theological basis for this kind of act,” he said.

Rabin’s widow, Leah, has accused his political foes in Israel of fostering the climate of hatred that made his death possible with their “violent” denunciations of the peace process and tacit approval of previous threats made by his detractors.

In the week since Rabin’s assassination, Jewish leaders from all branches of the faith stepped forward to condemn the act.

“We reaffirm the principle that a crime in the name of God is a heinous crime against God and a despicable desecration of his name,” said Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the interfaith Appeal of Conscience Foundation.

Some Orthodox leaders also strongly denounced the killing.

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“Violence and murder are anathema to our Torah’s teachings, as they are to all civilized people,” said a statement from the ultra-orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement. “The moral leadership of the world must not tire in its efforts to eliminate fanaticism and extremism of any kind.”

Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, said: “No matter what a Jew’s views may be about the current peace process or the sitting Israeli government, violence is not a Jewish option, and murder remains the ultimate sin against another person.”

It may be too late to change the minds of extremists who believe they are agents of God’s plan unfolding in history, but condemnations of terrorist acts by conservative religious groups--in this case, Orthodox Jews--may reduce their drawing power, according to R. Scott Appleby, a history professor at Notre Dame University and co-editor of the five-volume Fundamentalism Project.

“The one area of hope is this can erode the recruiting process for these radical groups,” Appleby said. Rabbi Herbert Schaalman of Chicago, a member of the board of trustees of the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, said it is unclear to what extent religious fanatics can be controlled.

“This is one of the enormous risks and the dark side of religious systems: that they are likely to breed the passion and the authoritative certainty of what is right and wrong,” Schaalman said.

He said the challenge in Israel is to tone down the rhetoric, and for Jewish people worldwide to examine their own understanding of how God wants them to live their lives.

“It’s really in a very strange, but immediate sense a test for the soul of Israel,” he said.