T
Mark Washofsky
wo decades have elapsed since the appearance of Louis Newman's article titled" Woodchoppers and Respirators:
The Problem of Interpretation in Contemporary Jewish Ethics." The essay has been frequently cited, and rightly so. It deserves mention in particular because it is one of the earliest efforts to apply developments in recent Anglo- American legal theory to help elucidate" the problem of interpretation" of Jewish legal texts. That problem, simply stated, is this: legal texts do not interpret themselves, nor do they usually admit of a single determinate meaning. Despite this fact, many jurists and Jewish ethicists write as though the texts they study do contain such meaning and that the task of the interpreter/ exegete is to isolate and extract it, drawing upon the writings of such legal and literary theorists as Terrance Sandalow, 2 Paul Brest, James Boyd White , 4 Stanley Fish , Owen Fiss , Karl Llewellyn , and Ronald Dworkin .
Newman argues that" the meaning of a text lies less in the words themselves than in the interpretive framework the exegete brings to them." Jewish ethicists, therefore, should beware of speaking in the name of" Judaism ," as in" Judaism teaches that...." Rather, they should adopt a more nuanced style that reflects the nature of the interpretive process: the Jewish view on a particular ethical issue is " what we, given our particular interpretive assumptions and our particular way of construing the coherence of the tradition as a whole, find within the traditional sources." 10
Newman uses these theoretical insights to analyze and critique the writings of a number of Jewish ethicists concerning the treatment of the terminally ill. As is the case with the discussion of most ethical issues, this one is textual and interpretive in nature: the Jewish ethicist identifies a set of texts in traditional Jewish literature that are relevant to her topic and then interprets them in order to derive an answer or