Woodchopper Revisited 35

the world of modern medicine, various halakhic authorities have adopted the analogy and argued for its relevance.

This theory” helps to translate the medieval language of the texts into a usable contemporary vernacular. Does there not come a point in a patient's condition when, despite their obvious life-saving powers, the sophisticated technologies of modern medicine— the mechanical respirator, for example, or the heart-lung machine-become nothing more than mere “salt on the tongue,” mechanisms which maintain the patient's vital signs long after all hope of recovery has vanished? Answering“yes” to this question, some contemporary poskim'” allow the respirator to be disconnected when a patient is clearly and irrevocably unable to sustain independent heartbeat and respiration.

Here the responsum identifies and clarifies the interpretive assumption by means of which halakhists can usefully analogize from the Isserles text to contemporary medical technology: when treatment can do nothing more than keep the“vital signs” going in the absence of any hope for recovery, they become the functional equivalent of the woodchopper and salt on the tongue. This assumption is stated in the form of a rhetorical question that suggests that the responsum’s authors expect their readers to accept its cogency. The text goes on to say, however, that not all halakhic writers accept the analogy, since woodchoppers and bird feathers and salt can be described as “scientific” or“technological” only with great difficulty. Moreover, even if we did draw the analogy from medieval“science” to that of our own day, the classical source speaks only of the goses, whose death is imminent; it tells us little or nothing about the terminally ill patient for whom the physicians see no hope for recovery but whose death may be weeks or months away. The responsum presumes, in other words, that“we”(the audience it addresses) agree that the respirator can be compared to the woodchopper, but it also posits that“we” would not