IS OLD AGE A DISEASE?

It is for this reason that the responsum can usefully be stud­ied as a form of literature, a genre of writing. In this study, the posek is perceived as, among other things, a writer, the author of a text; and his responsum, like any other text, is a literary perfor­mance. Through his choice of words and style, his description of the facts of the case, the arguments he uses and does not use, and his arrangement of those arguments, the posek effects a literary creation, a world that lives within the confines of his text. The text is no mirror of reality; it is rather a rhetorical reconstruction of it, an effort to persuade its readers to view the subject under considera­tion in the way the author views it. In our case, a literary evaluation of Rabbi Feinstein’s work'® would focus on his decision to invoke the declarative style, to frame his answer as though it is not at all a matter of doubt. It would judge the success of his rhetorical effort by imagining the alternative: how would these decisions have read had their author chosen to write them in the discursive style that characterizes most of the responsa literature? What sources, it would ask, might he have cited on the way to reaching his pesak’ Do these texts naturally yield a single and coherent legal message, as Feinstein’s univocal style implies? Or is that coherence a product of the posek’s construction, his combining of the materials in such a way as to remove—or ignore—contradiction, difficulty, and alternative interpretations?

The literary approach will show us that the latter is the case. There are other plausible and persuasive ways of constructing the message of Jewish law on allocating life-sustaining resources, and it is not necessarily true that the elderly have an equal claim to those resources. The goal here is to point out these alternatives in some detail. I do not intend to argue in favor of any one of the al­ternatives; I will leave that task to the authors of future responsa.

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