Jewish Law Responds to American Law 147
that the traditional“vital signs” are not independent indicia of life but are part of an integration of functions in which the brain is dominant. Use of this new medical equipment has led the medical community to consider the cessation of brain activity as the measure of death and compelled a reexamination of the traditional legal and medical criteria for determination of when death occurs.'® Under the leadership of Harvard Medical School , the medical profession established a multistep test to identify the existence of physical indicia of brain stem activity.13
In recent years the general consensus of the legal systems in the United States has been to accept the definition of the Uniform Determination of Death Act.'¥ The first statutory recognition of cessation of brain function as a criterion for death was in Kansas in 1970." All fifty states, the District of Columbia , the Virgin Islands , and Puerto Rico now accept some variation on“the complete and irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain” as a definition of death.!®
Dealing, as we are, with the questions that are most basic to our existence, it is not surprising that even within the legal community there has not been immediate or complete acceptance of the Harvard standards for death.'* Even the acceptance of the standards by state legislatures does not assure uncritical agreement by courts and the populace. Justice Frankfurter is often quoted when he epigrammatically noted that statutory construction is not“a ritual to be observed by unimaginative adherence to well-worn professional phrases.”!*! Nonetheless, statutory standards throughout this nation mandate that physicians shall adhere to the criteria of brain death. The new legal standards for determining death placed the traditional definition of death in halakhah in an uncomfortable confrontation with the law.
Jewish tradition has come to a definition of death through inductive reasoning. The writers of the Bible did not attempt to define death. The subject is raised in the Gemara as an element of a discussion concerning the value of life in relationship to the fulfillment of biblical mandates. In affirming the sanctity of life, the rabbis agree that the saving of a life has greater religious value than observing the divinely inspired biblical commandment to observe the Sabbath .
Every danger to human life suspends the[laws of] the Se bath. If debris[of a collapsing building] falls on someone, and 1