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March 25, 2005/Adar II 14 5765, Volume 57, No. 30
For Jews, halachah sheds light on Schiavo case
JOANNE PALMER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - As a U.S. federal court considers whether to reconnect Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, Jewish scholars are turning to halachah, or Jewish religious law, for guidance on the issue.
Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents and husband have been battling in state and now federal courts for more than a decade, is the insensate center of a swirl of emotion and legal action.
Religious leaders have been involved as well; Terri Schiavo and her parents, Mary and Robert Schindler, are Roman Catholic, and many of their most fervent supporters are fundamentalist Protestants.
The Schindlers want to keep their daughter's feeding tube in; Michael Schiavo wants it removed so his wife can die a natural death.
Jews, like others caught up in the debate, have a range of beliefs, and their understanding of how to apply halachah varies accordingly. Virtually all the rabbis interviewed, though, told JTA that they did not agree with attempts by some conservative Christians to tie Schiavo's case to the public debate about abortion.
At the traditional end of the spectrum, Rabbi Avi Shafran of the fervently Orthodox Agudath Israel of America said the Schiavo case is "straightforward from a Jewish perspective: The most important point from a halachic standpoint is that a compromised life is still a life."
In halachah, there is a category for a person at the edge of death; the rules for such a person, called a goses, are complicated.
"There are times when certain medical intervention is halachically contraindicated," Shafran said. "There may be times when it's OK not to shock a heart back into beating, not to administer certain drugs. You do not prolong the act of dying."
But Schiavo was not a goses, Shafran said. Instead, before the tube was removed she "had the exact same halachic status as a baby or a demented person. Like a baby, she was helpless, could not feed herself and was not able to communicate in any meaningful way. But a life is a life."
Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, the central arm of modern Orthodoxy, agreed that from a halachic perspective the Schiavo case is straightforward.
"It's not permitted to do anything actively that would stop the process of a person's staying alive," he said. "In this case, that would be withdrawing a feeding tube, which is tantamount to starving a person to death."
Like Shafran, Weinreb said the wishes of the patient or the family are not relevant.
"It might have a bearing on whether new measures are undertaken, but once a person is on a support system, removing it is not possible," Weinreb said.
Rabbi David Feldman, who had an Orthodox ordination and defines himself as "traditional," is rabbi emeritus of the Conservadox Jewish Center of Teaneck, N.J.
"There's a dispute here between a husband and parents, but none of that makes any difference as far as halachah is concerned," said Feldman, the author of "Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law" and the dean of the Jewish Institute of Bioethics. "You can't hasten death yourself, with your own hands. If death comes, you can thank God because it's a relief, but you can't decide yourself that it has to be done."
The only time it would be acceptable to remove a medical device, Feldman said, would be if "something worse would happen - if leaving it in would cause infection, or more pain.
Rabbi Joel Roth is a member of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly's law committee. In 1990, when he was the committee's chairman, the group studied end-stage medical care and accepted two opposing positions on artificial nutrition and hydration.
One, by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, "would permit withholding and withdrawing" the tube; the other, by Rabbi Avraham Reisner, would not.
The divide comes from how the tube that provides food and water is defined. If it is seen as a medical device, as Dorff does, it may be removed, Roth said. If it is seen as a feeding device, as Reisner does, it may not be removed.
Dorff puts a person dependent on a feeding tube "in the halachic category of 'treifah,' which, he argues, is a life that does not require our full protection - an animal that is treifah is one that has some kind of physical defect that will prohibit it from having a prolonged life. So he argues that a treifah is a life that does not require our full protection," Roth said.
Reisner, on the other hand, "treats these people as goses," Roth said.
"And even in the end stage," he noted, "there is the value of 'chaya sha'ah,' the life of the hour." In other words, Roth said, even when there is very little life left, that life still matters.
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