MARK WASHOVSKY

are aware of the processes of"reasoning" by which Feinstein reaches his conclusion. Confronted by important halakhic sources which support the opposing lenient position, Feinstein simply declares that those sources do not exist. The one, he claims, is a scribal error, the other a forgery.* This rabbinic tour de force brought a stinging rebuke from R. Eliezer Waldenberg, a leading champion of the more lenient view, who notes that to erase inconvenient evidence in such an arbitrary fashion is an unacceptable form of halakhic argumentation.’ In considering the Feinstein-Waldenberg exchange, liberals might point out to all who are interested that even rabbinic giants are not immune from the occasional temptation to bend the basic standards of scholarly

integrity until they break.

Indeed, Waldenberg himself does not enjoy such immunity; witness his responsum condemning the practice of in vitro fertilization(test-tube babies). The posek, widely regarded as the leading authority on medical halakhic issues, bases his opposition largely on the grounds that the husband cannot fulfill the mitzvah of procreation through a child conceived in this manner. His argument is derived from the Mishnah in Kiddushin 69a, which declares the offspring of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother to be a Gentile. In an unprecedented interpretation of this passage, Waldenberg asserts that the reason that the child does not follow the father’s status is that the conception occurred in an unnatural place, outside the womb of a Jewish woman, where no relationship is possible(makom sheein hityahasut). Since test-tube fertilization also takes place outside the womb of a Jewish woman, we must conclude that the child is not related to the semen donor. He does not stop there: it is also doubtful that this child is related to its mother. After all, Maimonides in Moreh Nevukhim, I, 72; holds that a human organ separated from the body ceases to be truly human; once the ovaries are removed, they no longer belong to the woman, and neither does the child conceived therein. This

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