Mark Washofsky
Although Jakobovits, speaking of the removal of “impediments to death,” has suggested the medical implications of these texts, he has to claim explicitly that they bear such meaning. It is therefore at this point that he makes a crucial methodological observation:
Admittedly,(in this question) we are not concerned with nonnatural factors. At any rate, it would seem that as a matter of principle the spirit of the Torah is not utterly indifferent(ein ruach hatorah mitnaker legamrei) to the plea of the suffering to be released from their affliction. From that standpoint, these texts are very important to us, especially because they emphasize once again the significant difference between taking active measures to shorten life and removing that which is merely an impediment to death.
This, of course, is a powerfully rhetorical passage. What good Jew would imagine that“the spirit of the Torah ” is so callous as to ignore human suffering? Yet the rhetoric is hardly a superfluous effort; it cannot be dismissed as a mere literary flourish. Jakobovits, like every author of an essay in persuasive communication, wants his intended audience to accept his claim of meaning upon the data(in this case, the canonical Jewish texts). He therefore bases his claim in a statement of what he perceives as a value commitment to which his audience will certainly assent, namely the belief in the Torah’s compassion for the dying. That statement, in turn, formulates the interpretive assumption through which Jakobovits validates his analogies. He recognizes clearly the technological gap between“non-natural factors”(prayer, the woodchopper, the salt, the keys to the synagogue, etc.) and the world of modern biotechnology. The analogy from the former to the latter is therefore a problematic one. Nonetheless, our commitment to relieve human suffering, rooted in and validated by the“spirit of the Torah, ” allows us to read— and, indeed, demands that we read— the traditional texts as legitimate basepoint cases from which to derive