Alan Sokobin

disconnected respirator; it is the disease.... But I have not assisted in a suicide. How different the situation is when persons suffering with fatal illnesses ask and receive help in taking their own lives.?"”

At the same time a radical theological activist with great influence, Rabbi Alvin Reines, has written:

A Reform Jew has a moral right to commit suicide.... If a person assists, that is, aids and abets a Reform Jew to commit suicide at the request(which, of course, necessarily implies con­sent) of the latter, the former has behaved morally.(An example of assisting a person to commit suicide is the case where a physi­cian, at the request of the person hands her/him a needle filled with a fatal substance with instructions on how to use it, and she/he then injects her/him-self.)....If a person takes a Reform Jew’s life at the request of the latter, then the former has per­formed a moral act. Another name for such an action is“volun­tary euthanasia.”

A direct and immediate response to the lenient and permis­sive theology of Reines is that of Zlotowitz and Selzter, both influential thinkers in the liberal Reform Jewish movement.“It

must be therefore stated at the outset that, in keeping with his­toric Jewish tradition which affirms life, Reform Judaism does not condone the deliberate taking of one’s life by someone who

is of sound mind.”3%!

The distinction between the passive acceptance of death and the active termination of life is a critical one in Jewish law.32 When the parents of the child whose existence was being artifi­cially maintained sat with the physician and the Jewish chaplain, their inchoate response to the facts and options being offered to them through their miasma of pain had to deal with this essen­tial issue: was the child really dead? Would the removal of the medical support apparatus kill their child? Would their agoniz­ing decision kill their child? If they allowed the hospital to remove their child’s organs for transplant, would that action kill their child?

These ethical issues are tangential to the moral problem pre­sented in the case of the infant whose existence was continued by artificial means. Nonetheless, there is a correlation with the essential moral dilemma that faced the parents of the child when they sat with the physician and the hospital chaplain. The dis­tinction between passive acceptance of death and the active ter­