Woodchopper Revisited 5

are inadequate to the task of contemporary Jewish bioethics. The texts, they contend, provide an insufficient basis from which to extrapolate meaning for today’s Jew who confronts a brave new world of medical choices and dilemmas. The analogies are forced, artificial, and morally irrelevant. Moreover, the traditional Jewish activity of deriving guidance from authoritative texts simply fails to capture that which is essentially“human” and“ethical” in Judaism ’s teachings concerning the practice of medicine. This attack carries some serious implications for those of us who work in the field of progressive halakhah, for it suggests that our approach to bioethical questions, an approach firmly rooted in the discipline of traditional halakhic thinking as taught and practiced by our teacher R. Solomon B. Freehof, is not sufficiently progressive or, for that matter, ethical. My goal here is to examine these criticisms in both a general and a specific light. In general, I want to discuss the pivotal role of analogy in traditional legal and halakhic reasoning. Specifically, I want to consider how analogy has served halakhists, both Orthodox and progressive, in their efforts to confront the difficult life-and-death issues surrounding the treatment of the terminally ill. The findings, I think, will reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional case-and-text-based approach in halakhah as it relates to contemporary bioethical questions, and they will also reveal that the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. That is to say, the method of analogy, when used in the way it ought to be used, can lead the progressive halakhist to bioethical conclusions both progressive and ethical. I will argue that progressive halakhists, as long as they heed Newman’s call to examine their interpretive assumptions and make them clear, need not reject the traditional methodologies to create a progressive Jewish bioethic. On the contrary: Jewish bioethics, even of the progressive variety, is best understood and practiced as a subspecialty within the discipline of halakhah.

I. Analogy in Law and Ethics. There is no question that analogy, the process of reasoning by cases or by examples, plays a pivotal role in