should ask God 's mercy for a sick person that he may die, as, for example, when the sick son is in agony and it is impossible for him to recover. He quotes as justification the story of the servantmaid of Rabbi Judah .
Roughly contemporary with this Spanish scholar is the famous German mystic-legal work, The Book of the Pious, from which many customs and laws are often cited. In this book(p. 100,#31518) it says:“If a man is sick and in pain and dying and asks another man to kill him mercifully, this request must not be fulfilled, nor may the man take his own life. Still, you may not put salt on his tongue to keep him alive longer.” Then it continues: Ecclesiastes says,“There is a time to live and a time to die.” Why does the author need to add this obvious fact? The answer is that he has in mind the following situation:“If a man is dying, do not pray too hard that his soul return, that is, that he revive from the coma. He can at best live only a few days, and in those days he will endure great suffering. So,“there is a time to die.”(See also the long note,#4, Sefer Hassidim, ed. Margolies, p. 34; also note to#723.) In Yalkut Shimoni to Proverbs (#943), we are told about a woman who wanted to die. She came tO Rabbi Halafta, who, seeing that her wish was justified, told her to absent herself for three days from the synagogue. She did so, and died.
Closer to our time is an interesting responsum by Haim Palaggi (Smyrna, ca. 1800). In his book, Hikei Lev(Vol. I,#50), he is asked the following question: A woman with a chronic, painful disease was dying. She pleaded with her husband and sons to pray that God be merciful and let her die. The husband and sons did everything material that they could do to ease her suffering, but they did not have the heart to comply with her request to pray for
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