SUICIDE, ASSISTED SUICIDE, ACTIVE EUTHANASIA

halakhah), the proximate cause remains the same. Yet not all deaths are the same in our moral accounting. We recognize some deaths as untimely, and others as natural.

Death by violence is culpable not because the death is intrinsically different from a natural death but because of the agent and the untimeliness. Death by famine and disease(not caused by specific human design) is intolerable but not culpable because the agent is"an act of God" but the death remains, in our minds, untimely. Death of old age is neither intolerable nor culpable since it is timely and attributable to the nature of our creation. The permission granted in the Torah for a physician to heal, according to the primary midrash of(rapo yerape) is, in the first instance, granted with regard to injuries in the firs. category. Of healing in the second category there existed some debate; perhaps these afflictions should be taken to be God’s will, but Jewish law and tradition ruled firmly that here, too, we are required to act to the extent of our ability. The third category was never before susceptible to our ministrations. Nor is it evident that it should be or ever will be meaningfully within our ken. This, ultimately, is God’s calculation. This, it seems to me, is the theological rationale behind removing impediments to death- and not primarily the relief from pain(which is the rationale behind praying for death). We try in all our dealings, including healing and including death, to act in that way which corresponds to God’s will.

The diagnostic problem remains. How do we determine that a particular death is"natural" and timely, according to God’s will and plan? The answer must reside within medicine.

If timely death- the ultimate death of God’s choice- will not be meaningfully affected by our ministrations, we need only see if our medicine is able or futile. Here is the law of treatment of the dying rephrased. By doing everything possible medically, biologically, to treat the life systems of the critical patient, while removing impediments to death, items or procedures that interfere with the natural shut-down of the body’s major systems in death, we allow ourselves to see if, indeed, God has ordained the closure of this life, while we do not cede at all our roles as healers and nurturants. Avram Israel Reisner"A Halakhic Ethic of Care for the Terminally Ill", Conservative Judaism , Vol. 43,#3, 1991 pp. 58-59.

41. Dworkin, op. cit. p.199.

42. Reform Judaism accepts brain death criteria, see Walter Jacob ,"Euthanasia ", American Reform Responsa, New York , 1983, p. 272. There is an ongoing argument in the Orthodox community See Fred Rosner , Modern Medicine and Jewish Ethics, Hoboken , 1986 pp. 241-254.

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