Symposium On Jewish Bioethics

Let me offer a few preliminary responses to Ari Schick’s insightful essay:

I fully welcome Ari’s call for both a broadening and re-centering of what we think of as Jewish bioethics. Ongoing discourse not only about public policy and the clichéd ethical dilemma but also about the experience of illness and the meanings we assign to it would answer a genuine yearning of Jewish practitioners to frame their own experiences in the context of our tradition.

As Ari notes, academic bioethics has pitched a roomy tent: The department in which I studied, for instance, unapologetically mixed philosophers and jurists with sociologists and anthropologists without needing to put forward a unifying theory of it all. Similarly, perhaps Jewish medical anthropology could complement the extensive halakhic discussions that abound in Jewish medical ethics. In writing about truth-telling, I contrasted a modern, rabbinic description of the physician—his or her role, authority, and relationship to the patient—with a Medieval one, suggesting that the modern version has less to do with Jewish tradition than with early 20th century perceptions of medicine (see endnote #8 in my opening statement). I would like to think that I stumbled just a bit into the territory that Ari is describing, though perhaps unknowingly.

That being said, I think a diverse Jewish bioethics department would still have room for the traditional “ethicist,” whose interest lies primarily in providing practical guidance and answering pressing questions, both public and private, albeit with broad vision. Admittedly, Alan and I might be biased in this regard (for better or for worse), in that we are both practicing clinicians and frequently encounter old-fashioned ethical questions that call for action just as much as puffed wheat, at the end of the day, needs the right ritual blessing. Here, I think questions of methodology are not somehow external or prefatory but rather are critical to the actual exercise and to the quality and usefulness of the result.

Finally, I have a question about Ari’s assertion that “the lack of Halakhic precedent or Talmudic sources is not problematic for Jewish Philosophy and Theology, which have ample resources outside of those (there are ideals and values embedded throughout the Jewish tradition) , and Jewish bioethics therefore has much to draw upon when Halakha is silent.” At the semantic level, does “Halakha” here mean codified Jewish law, or does it refer to the full corpus of rabbinic literature? (My mentor R. Aharon Lichtenstein closes his seminal essay, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognizes an Ethic Independent of Halakha,” discussed in this forum last April, by relating to the same ambiguity.) If Ari means the former, I fully agree; if the latter, then I profess my own allegiance to what in Hebrew is broadly called “Torah she-ba’al peh”(the Oral Tradition). Indeed, the last part of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s “The Halakhic Mind” is devoted to this topic, in which he argues that this expansive version of “the Halakha” is the objective data from which all inquiries of Judaism can proceed. The Jewish philosophical tradition, in his view, strayed from this path, incorporating elements which are not in any particular sense Jewish and sometimes having little connection to real, experienced Jewish living. To be sure, I don’t think we need to be overly rigid about Rabbi Soloveitchik’s directive. I would argue that a part of the “Oral Tradition” are the unspoken values and forces that are embodied in real Jewish practice and that they play an important role in ethical discourse as well. However, I do think that the rabbinic corpus should tether any attempted conceptions of Judaism.

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