Woodchopper Revisited 43

not, cannot readily be dismissed as implausible. I see no reason, in other words, why an audience cannot gather around an interpretive assumption concerning the lack of obligation to maintain“artificial” life or the claim that it is not God ’s will that we maintain patients in such a state, or that the suffering of the dying constitutes a reason for withdrawing medical care, that the commandment to heal does not require the indefinite continuation of measures that are medically futile. In each case, the author or authors invite their readers to identify themselves as a particular sort of Jewish audience, an audience that recognizes the interpretive assumption in question as a core value of its Judaism . To the extent that it accepts this invitation, the audience is likely to find the woodchopper analogy persuasive.

I have used the term rhetoric, which encompasses the techniques of persuasive speech and writing, to describe the manner in which our authors put forth this invitation to their readers. What I am describing, more specifically, is constitutive rhetoric, speech that does not so much persuade an already existing audience as to create(to “constitute”) a new audience through its language, speech that forms the identity of the community within the message itself. In none of these cases does the interpretive assumption work to persuade the audience of its correctness. The assumption after all, is simply that: an assumption, or, if made explicit, an assertion, a claim of meaning upon the texts, but the claim does not prove itself to be true, any more than the analogy it supports can prove itself to be true. Jakobovits, for example, never demonstrates that his interpretive assumption about“the spirit of the Torah ” is the correct lesson to be learned from the traditional texts; he simply asserts that lesson. Other explanations are possible, and were we to accept those explanations we might not follow Jakobovits to his conclusion about the propriety of discontinuing life-prolonging but otherwise futile medical treatment for the goses. Yet this lack of demonstrated proof does not doom the argument, for the interpretive assumption is the way in which Jakobovits constitutes the audience that will find it persuasive. By accepting his claim of