44 Mark Washofsky

meaning upon the texts, his readers answer his invitation to become his audience, identifying themselves as precisely the community to whom he addresses his words, as the community that speaks as he does about these texts and about the question of the proper medical treatment of the terminally ill. The crucial point is that his audience does not exist prior to his rhetorical act but because of it. The same would apply to the writings of the other authors we have surveyed. In each case it is the rhetoric itself, that asserts, though it does not prove, the author’s interpretive assumptions, that invokes the audience he wishes to address, causing its members to become the community that understands and speaks of the bioethical issue as he does. That community, in turn, once it has been constituted by the author’s words, is the community most likely to be persuaded that his analogies are fitting and correct.'”

V. Two Final Observations. 1 have argued in this paper that the woodchopper and related analogies do support an intelligent bioethical discourse on the question of the treatment of the terminally ill. Again, this does not imply that the analogies in fact persuade all readers or that they are free of difficulty. It is to say, though, that they furnish the tools required for bioethical conversation. In other words, traditional halakhic reasoning, characterized by its heavy reliance upon analogy, can plausibly claim to possess the resources to analyze and respond to the challenge of this particular problem of bioethics. And this leads me, finally, to the following two observations:

The first is the simple truth that analogical reasoning, notwithstanding all its inherent difficulties, is an essential feature of halakhic discourse, just as it is an essential feature of legal and ethical discourse. One cannot operate within the field of halakhah and ignore this reality. There is no such thing as“Jewish legal thinking” without analogy, and Jewish legal analogies tend to be drawn from Jewish legal texts, the bulk of which are found in ancient and medieval literary sources. Those sources, by dint of their historical and cultural