Woodchopper Revisited 45

provenance, do not often speak explicitly to the issues raised by contemporary bioethics. They most certainly do not mention respirators and heart-lung machines. For this reason, analogies drawn from very old Jewish texts to very contemporary social and technological realities will tend to strike us as forced and artificial. Yet there is no alternative: were halakhists to abandon the method of casuistic reasoning, they would be unable to apply the classic texts of Jewish law to those realities. Therefore if we wish to do halakhah, if we wish to pursue the study of Torah as Jews have always done as the royal road to deriving guidance on matters of religious practice, we have no choice but to reason analogically from our traditional texts to the problems that confront us. I suppose we might be able to imagine an alternative methodology, a sort of halakhah or law or ethics that functions without problematic analogical thinking. Yet such an imaginary thing belongs to the realm of thought experiment or fantasy. In the real world of intellectual practice, all these modes of thought depend on analogies drawn from very old canonical texts for their growth, development, and creative energy. Yes, analogies can at times be forced and unpersuasive, and they may never yield absolute certainty; the woodchopper, at the end of the day, is not exactly the same thing as an artificial respirator, and the comparison of the one to the other is bound to leave some of us unconvinced. The halakhic analogies we have been dealing with here can claim persuasiveness only because of the controversial(if congenial) interpretive assumptions with which our authors have approached the texts. But that is the case with all analogies: the only way to solve“the problem of importance” is by way of an assumption or assertion or translation that enables us to argue that the similarities between the source case and the target case outweigh the differences between them. At times, perhaps frequently, those who argue from analogy do not make explicit the assumptions upon which their argument rests. Louis Newman has criticized Jewish bioethicists for not doing so, yet he takes pains to reject the suggestion that those bioethicists stop studying— and, necessarily, drawing analogies from— Jewish texts, even as he calls