Woodchopper Revisited 39

and halakhic passages that they wish to use as precedents) and the target case(today’s medical treatment of the terminally ill). Each acknowledges that the texts must be interpreted or, as the CCAR Responsa Committee puts it,“translated” into a vernacular that can speak to the contemporary medical context. Each author that accepts the analogy therefore offers reasons for why he accepts it, why it is proper and fitting. They are at the same time keenly aware of the analogy’s limitations and take care to distinguish the cases to which it applies(the goses) from those to which it does not(the terminally ill patient who is not yet a goses or is not suffering severe pain). The exception here is the CCAR responsum, which both admits the limitation of the analogy and subsequently(following its development of an alternative theory to permit the discontinuation of futile treatment) reinterprets it so that the woodchopper and the salt function as symbolic expressions of medical futility. These writers, in other words, are cognizant that the woodchopper analogy can work only when accompanied by or filtered through what Louis Newman calls an interpretive assumption that renders it coherent and meaningful. Nothing is hidden about these assumptions. Their presence is obvious in each of these writings, and the reader can identify them with relative ease.

This last point deserves a closer look. Newman poses his challenge to Jewish bioethicists as follows:“To defend cogently any particular ethical position... requires that one offer reasons for adopting the interpretive stance that one has.... And if one wishes to urge others to adopt a particular interpretation, that theory must be stated explicitly and defended.”'™ That is to say, those engaging in Jewish bioethical discourse must pass a two-stage test: they should both clearly articulate the interpretive assumptions that make their analogies possible and justify those theoretical frameworks against other possible interpretations. Our halakhic authors would clearly seem to meet the first part of this test because they do indicate for us the theoretical frameworks that justify their acceptance or rejection of the woodchopper analogy. To recap, these include: Jakobovits’s remark