A friend forwarded me an Email by a Dutch rabbi which contained a number of rabbinical opinions as attachment, as well as an overview article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A nearly identical version of the latter article (by JTA correspondent Joanna Palmer) is online here (free registration required).
The Jewish position is fundamentally pro-life (duh!) but Jewish law makes a distinction between a "goses" (lit.: a dying person) and a person who's merely severely incapacitated but not terminal. In the former category (not the latter!), it is (with certain restrictions) permitted to remove "impediments to the inevitable" (albeit not to actively hasten the process).
The latter explains why the Knesset recently passed in First Reading, with a lopsided 77-7 majority, a law permitting some forms of what is generally called "passive euthanasia" at the request of terminal patients (see extended entry). The scope of the law is limited to patients diagnosed as having six months or less to live, and the only acceptable "expressions of will" are those of the patient him/herself, or the text of a living will drafted by same. Hearsay evidence is not accepted. In cases where the patient's wishes are unclear, the practicioners are to err on the side of life. (The law is presently in committee for amendments and minor revisions. After it goes back to the plenum, each amendment is voted upon separately in Second Reading, followed by an overall vote on the resulting final text in Third Reading.)
Excerpts of the JTA article are also in the extended entry. Note that the "Reconstructionist" movement represents a very small segment of religiously affiliated Jewry in the United States, and a negligible one abroad. The term "Conservadox" refers not so much to an organized movement as to congregations that straddle the fence between Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism (the "middle-of-the-road" movement between Orthodoxy and Reform).
JPost archive entry:
Passive euthanasia bill passes 1st reading; [Daily Edition]
NINA GILBERT. Jerusalem Post. Jerusalem: Mar 8, 2005. pg. 05
Terminally ill patients will be entitled to have passive euthanasia carried out by medical staff at their request or via a living will, according to a bill approved by the Knesset in a first reading on Monday.
The bill was approved in a 77-7 vote with one abstention.
It was opposed by Degel Hatorah MKs Avraham Ravitz and Moshe Gafni and Agudat Yisrael MKs Shmuel Halpert and Ya'acov Litzman, whose spiritual leaders did not approve of the bill, even though many other rabbis did. Shas MKs voted in favor after receiving the approval of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the party's spiritual mentor.
United Arab List MKs Abdel Malik Dehamshe and Taleb a- Sanaa and Balad MK Wasal Taha also voted against.
The legislation was drafted by the government in line with the recommendations of a public committee chaired by Prof. Avraham Steinberg that was appointed in 2000.
The bill sets in law the guidelines for treating terminally ill patients and respecting their wishes not to receive treatment. It seeks to find a balance between the "sanctity of life" and the "quality of life."
A terminally ill patient is defined as a person who has only up to six months to live. Doctors would be protected from law suits for carrying out [passive] euthanasia.
Health Minister Dani Naveh said that in cases in which a patient's wishes were unclear, life would be preserved. However, if he could communicate his will not to have his life extended, the law would guarantee this right.
The patient may either express his will verbally, have a living will respected if he cannot communicate, or have the decision made by someone to whom he has given power of attorney.
He said the minimum age for requesting the procedure was 17.
FOCUS ON ISSUES
As court considers Schiavo case, Jews turn to halachah for guidance
by Joanne Palmer, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
As a federal court considers whether to reconnect Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, Jewish scholars are turning to halacha, or Jewish religious law, for guidance on the issue. Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents and husband have been battling in state and now federal courts for more than a decade, is the insensate center of a swirl of emotion and legal action.
[...]
Jews, like others caught up in the debate, have a range of beliefs, and their understanding of how to apply halacha varies accordingly. Virtually all the rabbis interviewed, though, told JTA that they did not agree with attempts by some conservative Christians to tie Schiavo’s case to the public debate about abortion.
[FB: this is to be expected. Jewish law considers abortion to be the destruction of potential life, not the taking of life itself.]
At the traditional end of the spectrum, Rabbi Avi Shafran of the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America said the Schiavo case is “straightforward from a Jewish perspective: The most important point from a halachic standpoint is that a compromised life is still a life.” “In the Schiavo case, you’re not dealing with a patient in extremis,” he said, noting that until her feeding tube was removed, Schiavo was not dying.
In halacha, there is a category for a person at the edge of death; the rules for such a person, called a goses, are complicated. “There are times when certain medical intervention is halachically contraindicated,” Shafran said. “There may be times when it’s OK not to shock a heart back into beating, not to administer certain drugs. You do not prolong the act of dying.” However, Schiavo was not a goses, Shafran said. Instead, he added, before the tube was removed, she “had the exact same halachic status as a baby or a demented person. Like a baby, she was helpless, could not feed herself and was not able to communicate in any meaningful way. But a life is a life.”
Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, the central arm of modern Orthodoxy, agreed that from a halachic perspective, the Schiavo case is straightforward. “It’s not permitted to do anything actively that would stop the process of a person’s staying alive,” he said. “In this case, that would be withdrawing a feeding tube, which is tantamount to starving a person to death.”
Like Shafran, Weinreb said the wishes of the patient or the family are not relevant. “It might have a bearing on whether new measures are undertaken, but once a person is on a support system, removing it is not possible,” Weinreb said. “Doing something to actively interfere with a person’s ability to continue to live technically is murder,” he said. “I can’t imagine a scenario that would make removing the feeding tube permissible.”
Rabbi David Feldman, who had an Orthodox ordination and defines himself as “traditional,” is rabbi emeritus of the Conservadox Jewish Center of Teaneck, N.J. “There’s a dispute here between a husband and parents, but none of that makes any difference as far as halacha is concerned,” said Feldman, author of “Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law” (Schocken, 1975) and the dean of the Jewish Institute of Bioethics. “You can’t hasten death yourself, with your own hands. If death comes, you can thank God because it’s a relief, but you can’t decide yourself that it has to be done.”
The only time it would be acceptable to remove a medical device, Feldman said, would be if “something worse would happen — if leaving it in would cause infection or more pain. “You can kill someone pursuing you, you can kill the soldier in the enemy army, maybe very cautiously you can kill if there is a death penalty, but you can’t kill an innocent person because of illness,” he said.
Rabbi Joel Roth is a member of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly’s Law Committee. In 1990, when he was the committee’s chair, the group studied end-stage medical care and accepted two opposing positions on artificial nutrition and hydration. One, by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, “would permit withholding and withdrawing” the tube; the other, by Rabbi Avraham Reisner, would not. The divide comes from how the tube that provides food and water is defined. If it is seen as a medical device, as Dorff does, it may be removed, Roth said. If it is seen as a feeding device, as Reisner does, it may not be removed.
Dorff puts a person dependent on a feeding tube “in the halachic category of ‘treifah,’ which, he argues, is a life that does not require our full protection — an animal that is treifah is one that has some kind of physical defect that will prohibit it from having a prolonged life. So he argues that a treifah is a life that does not require our full protection,” Roth said. Reisner, on the other hand, “treats these people as goses,” Roth said. “And even in the end stage,” he noted, “there is the value of ‘chaya sha’ah,’ the life of the hour.” In other words, Roth said, even when there is very little life left, that life still matters.
The Conservative movement accepts both decisions, but Roth, a professor of Talmud and Jewish law at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, sides with Reisner, and with Schiavo’s parents. “She should be kept on the feeding tube,” he said. “She’s not being medicated, and she’s breathing on her own.”
Rabbi Mark Washofsky teaches rabbinics at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, and he sits on the movement’s responsa committee.
The movement does not speak with one voice on the issue, Washofsky said, but in 1994 it issued a [responsum] on the treatment of terminally ill patients. Like the Conservative decisions, the Reform rabbis base their view of whether a feeding tube can be removed on their understanding of the tube’s function.
“We cannot claim that Jewish tradition categorically prohibits the removal of food and water from dying patients,” Washofsky said. “But we consider food and water, no matter how they are delivered, the staff of life. So what we ultimately do is express deep reservations about their withdrawal, but in the end, we say, nonetheless, that because we cannot declare that the cessation of artificial nutrition and hydration is categorically forbidden by Jewish moral thought, the patient and the family must ultimately let their consciences guide them.”
Rabbi David Teutsch, director of the Center for Jewish Ethics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, agrees that the question is how a feeding tube is defined. “If it were a form of eating, a position held by a number of more traditional halachic authorities, then you’re required to feed those who are hungry,” Teutsch said. “But if it’s medicine —a position held by Conservative authorities like Rabbi Elliott Dorff, and by me as well — then you serve the interests of the patient, which may involve not providing medicine.”
He believes that a feeding tube is a medical device, and so it can be removed, Teutsch said. “It’s pretty clear that it’s closer to regular intervention than to eating,” he said.
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