Mark Washofsky

declare with absolute confidence that he is dead or even that he is going to die. It may yet be possible to save his life, for it was for that purpose that he was connected in the first place to the machine.

Another difference: there are substantial biological differences between the actions taken in the two cases. The machine serves a vital medical function, supplying oxygen, nutrition, and hydration to every part of the body. To turn off the machine would prevent these vital substances from reaching the body. Such is not the case with removing the sound of the woodchopper or the grains of salt from upon the tongue. It is difficult to define the interruption of the flow of oxygen as, to use the terminology of Isserles ,“not an act of commission.”

Unlike Jakobovits and Rabinovitz, Levy rejects the relevance of the woodchopper analogy, for reasons that parallel both aspects of Newman’s critique of the bioethicists. The patient of whom Isserles speaks is a goses, a state in which the imminence of death is a certainty. Yet our patient, precisely because she is connected to machines that perform vital medical and biological life-support functions, cannot be described as a goseset. Levy’s guiding interpretive assumption is a negative one: it is improper to compare modern medical technology(particularly the heart-lung machine) to the supernatural elements described in the Shulchan Arukh. The analogy fails, therefore, because the differences between the target and the baseline cases as substantially more significant than their similarities. Here, too, we detect the author’s use of rhetoric as a means of supporting his interpretive assumption. Levy introduces his comments here and elsewhere® by reminding the reader that he is a physician and that he speaks from a basis of medical knowledge that, by definition, lies beyond the expertise of some rabbis who write about the subject. He presents his bona fides as a scientist as a reason why his readers should reject the attempts of other Torah scholars to make the woodchopper analogy: It is as a doctor that he declares the source