Mark Washofsky

enterprise of Jewish bioethics. To cite sources as precedents without asking what makes them precedential, to rely upon analogies without acknowledging that one is operating from within a previously constructed interpretive framework that dictates both the analogies and the meaning to be drawn from them— these things smack of unreflective habit rather than a careful, self-aware methodology. This challenge is a good thing, because no scholar, whether“traditional” or “academic,” should pursue her work in an unreflective manner.

But what if the challenge proves to be too much of a good thing? Could it be that Newman’s critique does more than simply call upon writers in the field of Jewish bioethics to examine their interpretive assumptions? Is it possible that his observations undermine the very enterprise of Jewish bioethics? Much of that enterprise has operated within the field of halakhah and Jewish legal thought. Scholars investigating the question“what does Judaism say?” about a particular issue relating to medical practice have followed the standard methodologies of Jewish law, combing the corpus of authoritative halakhic texts for sources that, through the application of analogical reasoning, might serve as precedents that offer possible answers to their question. This legal(perhaps a better term is “judicial”’) methodology characterizes the work of liberal as well as Orthodox halakhists as well as of those academic scholars whose work has been described, inaccurately, as“nonhalakhic.”'’ Newman, to be sure, does not advocate the abandonment of this traditional, text-based approach to Jewish bioethics, even as he calls upon those who engage in it to do so with care and intellectual self-awareness.”’ Yet, since the publication of his article, a number of critiques have taken aim at precisely this approach and on very similar grounds.” The authors of these critiques tend to work from liberal Jewish perspectives; for that reason, and for the sake of convenience, I will call them“the liberal critics.” Their objections, though varied, coalesce around the assertion that traditional modes of halakhic thinking, based upon analogy, precedent, and something called— imprecisely—“halakhic formalism”