34 Mark Washofsky
“obvious” or“certain.” This may weaken his argument to some extent, since assertion is hardly the same as demonstrated proof. Still, an assertion can be quite effective when its intended audience regards it as axiomatic, as a self-evident starting point for argument. By calling the limitation“obvious,” Feinstein invokes as his audience precisely that community of readers who will in fact regard it as obvious, namely those Orthodox Jews who share his belief in the sanctity of even the shortest span of human life(chayei shaah) and the concomitant requirement that medicine do everything possible to preserve life to its very last instant.” This audience would presumably accept Feinstein’s claim that intolerable physical suffering constitutes an exception to the rule; after all, the story of Rabbi ’s maidservant seems explicit on that point, and Feinstein thinks it“obvious” or “certain” that pain is the dominant factor in the Isserles text as well.” At the same time, the audience would probably oppose any effort to extend the range of this exception to other sets of circumstances, and Feinstein, accordingly, makes clear in this second teshuvah that no warrant other than severe pain suffices to justify the discontinuation of medical treatment for a terminal patient.”” Taken together, these shared beliefs— that every moment of human life is sacred and that we have a moral obligation to spare the dying needless suffering— constitute the interpretive assumption that on the one hand allows him to read the texts as supporting the discontinuation of medical treatment while on the other hand limiting that warrant to cases in which the goses is suffering physical pain and agony.
6. Central Conference of American Rabbis Responsum no. 5754.11. In 1994 the Responsa Committee of the issued its teshuvah“On the Treatment of the Terminally II1.”** The responsum addresses the “woodchopper” analogy in section II,“The Cessation of Medical Treatment for Terminal Patients,” citing the Isserles passage along with the extensive commentary it has received, as“the classic source” for the halakhic discussion of the issue. The Committee notes that
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