Woodchopper Revisited 20

at the end of the day, offer not healing but extended suffering and medical futility. The vegetative state is emblematic of that futility: Who would regard such an outcome as successful treatment, and who would want it for herself or her loved ones? The doctors, for their part, are described as being at wit’s end as to how to care for patients who are so obviously beyond all medical help. The repeated use of the word“artificial”(malakhuti/malakhutiim) in counterpoint to the reference to“normal”(or“natural”; tiviim) also emphasizes the situation of futility:“artificial life” strikes the reader as no life at all, a state of existence we would wish to end as quickly as possible.

Rabinovitz thus invites his readers to join him in a quest for a practical and compassionate solution that, presumably, they desire as much as he does. In addition, the notion of“artificial life” serves as Rabinovitz’s interpretive assumption: the nonmedical impediments of which Isserles speaks share with modern biomedical technology the capacity to extend life artificially, in a condition not contemplated in the natural or divinely-intended order of things. The artificiality that defines both the woodchopper and the respirator is the significant link between them, and in this way Rabinovitz claims to solve the “problem of importance” that plagues every analogy.

3. Dr. Ya akov Levy. A physician and Torah scholar, Ya’akov Levy addresses our subject in an essay appearing in the 1973 edition of Noam, a halakhic annual published by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. In direct response to the words of Rabinovitz cited above, he writes:*

As a physician, I perceive substantial biological distinctions between the situation that Isserles describes and that of the heart-lung machine, with respect to both the patient’s condition and to the physician’s role.... The patient of whom Isserles speaks rests with certainty at the last moment before death. The patient who is connected to the machine, by contrast, is in an uncertain situation. The physicians cannot