Mark Washofsky

answers to the problem she is addressing. In this particular case, one of the most prominent of these“relevant” texts is Shulchan Arukh Yoreh Deah 339:1, which lists the actions that one is permitted and forbidden to undertake with respect to the goses, a dying person whose death is considered imminent. The goses, the text tells us, is considered a living person in all legal respects. It is forbidden, therefore, to take any action that might cause him to die more quickly, since such an action is tantamount to bloodshed. On the other hand, it 1s permissible to remove from the scene a factor defined as an impediment to his death, such as the sound made by a woodchopper doing his work(hence, the title of Newman’s article). A number of Jewish ethicists see this text, among others, as a precedent for the contemporary bioethical question of euthanasia, particularly the familiar distinction between“active” euthanasia(“mercy killing,” assisted suicide; positive actions taken to hasten the patient’s death) and“passive” euthanasia[discontinuation of futile medical treatment]; “allowing nature to take its course,” etc.)."! As Newman sees it, this move—from the text to its contemporary application—is seriously problematic, for at least two reasons. First, as indicated, the text addresses the specific example of the goses, whose death will in all likelihood occur within 72 hours,'? and it is not obvious that its conclusion would apply as well to patients considered terminally ill but who are not at this moment in the throes of death. Second, it is also not obvious that the“impediments” spoken of in the Shulchan Arukh — the woodchopper and the rest— are substantially akin to the panoply of technologies utilized nowadays in the treatment of the terminally ill. The latter are classified as“medical” whereas the former never enjoyed that designation; what then can this text teach us concerning the ethics of the contemporary medical situation? For Newman, this disconnect between the text and the(varying) lessons that Jewish ethicists tend to draw from it is symptomatic of the larger theoretical issue he explores in his article. Traditional texts do not necessarily prove the conclusions are derived from them; indeed, it is misleading to say that these conclusions are“derived” at all, as though they lay at