IS OLD AGE A DISEASE?

A good liberal responsum on the she’elah before us would follow this royal road of Halakhah , the way of conversation, per­suasion, and argument. As such, there is no way that I or any other observer can predict with certainty just what the conclusion of that responsum might be. All I can say with confidence is that the sources to which we look for guidance offer a variety of approaches and directions for our thought and that we, who seek to understand these texts from the perspective of our own religious world view, are quite capable of taking this discussion to new levels of meaning and profundity. We have, in short, much to argue about; let the argument, therefore, begin.

Notes 1, This is the language employed by John F. Kilner in Who Lives? Who Dies?(New Haven : Yale , 1990), xi. He prefers“patient selection” as a neutral alternative to such terms as“triage” or “rationing,” which carry military or utilitarian connotations that might imply a bias in the criteria for decision making.

2 See Kilner, 77-79, and the literature cited therein. Resp. Igerot Moshe, CM 2:73, sec. 2. Ibid., CM 2:75, sec. 2.

5. The tereifah is traditionally understood as a person who suffers from one of the specific injuries that renders an animal fereifah(e.g., severed esophagus or windpipe). One who is so injured cannot survive: that is, even though he appears healthy at the moment, physicians declare that for this injury there is no cure and that it will eventually kill him. B. Sanhedrin 78a and Rashi ad loc., s.v. hakol modim; Yad, Hil. Rotzeach 2:8. Rabbi Feinstein defines the fereifah as anyone that suffers from an incurable illness, even if it does not involve one of the specific injuries referred to above; Resp. Igerot Moshe CM 2:73, sec. 4.

Resp. Igerot Moshe CM 2:75, sec. 7.

? I argue this point more fully in“Responsa and Rhetoric: On Law, Literature, and the Rab­binic Decision,” in John C. Reeves and John Kampen, eds., Pursuing the Text: Studies in Honor of Ben Zion Wacholder on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 360-409. There I suggest that the observations of scholars associated with the legal academic movement known as Law and Literature offer an incisive set of tools with which to study the work

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