Mark Washofsky

inevitable death of a terminally ill patient. As with Feinstein, this invocation of an audience has less to do with proof and evidence than with assertion: if these words resonate with you, the responsum seems to be saying, then you are the audience to whom they are addressed. Notice that the rhetoric of this passage enables the responsum’s authors to rehabilitate the woodchopper analogy, which it had set aside because of its apparent weaknesses(it does not cohere with modern technology and it does not apply precisely to the case of the terminally ill patient who is not yet a goses). Now that the theme of therapeutic futility has become the dominant organizing principle of the fteshuvah, the Responsa Committee is in a position to claim that medical measures that are useless in the face of terminal illness are tantamount to“salt on the tongue and the sound of a woodchopper.” The Isserles text, although it speaks literally to the situation of the goses, is now understood to refer to any and all measures that serve to delay death while offering no medical benefit. This passage calls upon its readers to assent to the logic of the analogy, and the rhetorical question with which it commences suggests a confidence that they will do so.

IV. Conclusions. What has the foregoing analysis revealed about the use of analogy in the halakhic discussions concerning the treatment of the terminally ill? Let me set forth some tentative conclusions in accordance with the two questions I posed at the outset of our study.

1. Our first question was the procedural one: do these halakhic writers make clear the interpretive assumptions that enable them to use the traditional sources for purpose of analogy? We have seen that each of these authors does mention the well-known analogy between the woodchopper(or the prayer of Rabbi ’s maidservant, or the death of R. Chaninah b. Teradyon) and the life-sustaining technologies of modern medicine and that all, with the exception of Dr.Ya’akov Levy, do so positively. Yet we have also seen that none of them regard the analogy as self-evident and problem-free. Each one recognizes the “technological gap” that separates the source cases(the talmudic