PETER KNOBEL

single human life takes precedence over Shabbat™ then taking a human life requires more that a casual reason. If saving one human life is equivalent to saving the whole world® and taking a human life is like destroying the whole world, extreme care must be taken if we are to approve positive actions to bring life to an end.

The medical technological revolution has changed both the definition of death and the way in which we think about it.“

Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying... shows how important it is that life end appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we want to have lived. We cannot understand what death means to people- why some would rather be dead than existing permanently sedated or incompetent, why others would want to"fight on" even in terrible pain or even when they are unconscious and cannot savor the fight, why so few people think that whether they live or die once they fall permanently unconscious does not matter to them at all- we cannot understand any of this, or much else that people feel about death, unless we turn away from death for a while and back to life."

It is the aggadah, the sacred narrative of a person’s individual life, that plays a significant role. The responsa literature is composed of questions and answers about individual cases. While the responsa have precedential significance, and describe the specific conditions under which the decision has arisen, no two cases are identical and the specifics of a particular case under consideration are determinative. If this is true, then the halakhah ought to be a crystallization of the aggadah. A covenantal approach to halakhic decision-making must understand the spiritual biography of the individual.

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