MARK WASHOFSKY

comes down to a choice between the old and the young, therefore, this principle does not provide us with one obviously“right” answer: we are not, after all, living in the world of B. Horayot 13a, and we lack anything approaching societal agreement over any similar scale of priorities that might serve us in its stead. But that text and the broader ideals that we liberals might find within it may well empower us to make that choice.

TOWARD AN ANSWER

My goal in this paper has been to consider options rather than to offer conclusions. I am in this setting more interested in thinking about how“the” answer is arrived at than in what, specifi­cally, that answer might be. I have thus tried to sketch a series of alternative approaches available to the halakhist. Given that these alternatives exist in and are attested to by the sources, the hala­khist’s task is to locate the“best” answer, that solution that most accurately expresses the religious and moral standard to which we believe Torah and Halakhah as a whole would have us aspire.

How, then, do we go about identifying that answer when more than one plausible response or approach seems available? On the question before us, the allocation of medical resources and the place of the elderly in our decision making, we find three such approaches. We can frame the issue, as does Rabbi Feinstein, as one that has primarily to do with the principle of equality, so that any decision of allocation or of patient selection must adhere to our belief that all are equal, that no person’s blood is“redder” than another’s. On the other hand, we can hold that the essential halakhic consideration here is the mitzvah of piku’ah nefesh, or the teaching that decisions concerning the saving of life might be made

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