18 Mark Washofsky

legislative authority empowered to create new law, halakhists have utilized“judicial” tools, interpretation of texts and analogical reasoning from previous cases, as their(almost) exclusive mechanism for deriving legal guidance for new situations. At the same time, like their counterparts in other legal and ethical traditions, the rabbis recognize the uncertainties inherent in the analogical method, which as we have seen inevitably involves the element of judgment and the reliance upon indemonstrable interpretive assumptions to solve the “problem of importance.”

All this leads to my reexamination of the issue that serves as the springboard for Louis Newman's observations: the cessation of medical treatment for a terminally ill patient. As he has noted, much of the Jewish ethical discussion of this question involves analogies based upon traditional texts that, to put it mildly, do not mention respirators, heart-lung machines, feeding tubes, aggressive experimental surgeries, and any of the other sophisticated technologies that can maintain a patient’s vital signs or extend her life for a brief or extended span of time long after any realistic hope for curing or containing her disease has vanished. There exists, in other words, a “technological gap” between the traditional texts(source or basepoint cases) and the contemporary medical situation(the target or problem case) that questions the cogency of any analogy drawn from the latter to the former. My reexamination therefore will focus upon whether halakhic writers display an awareness of this gap and whether and to what extent they succeed in bridging it. I want to confine this study to specifically halakhic as opposed to ethical writings. As have noted, there is considerable overlap between these subject areas in Jewish thought. Most Jewish writing on“ethical” subjects draws heavily upon halakhic sources, for the simple reason that halakhah is the genre of Jewish literature in which questions of praxis, ethical as well as ritual, tend to be most thoroughly analyzed, elaborated, and argued. The difference between the two may lie more in the realm of identification than of essence: by“halakhic” writings, mean literature