I’m sure many of you heard that Dr. Kevorkian died Friday morning. For any readers who aren’t familiar, Dr. Kevorkian was the man who really brought the issue of assisted suicide for terminally ill patients to America. This should bring up a lot of important questions for us. We could talk about the nature of life and death, the ethics of assisted suicide, crime and punishment, or theodicy. There’s a lot more to talk about than I can ever hope to address, but I just want to talk about a couple of points.
The most obvious question may be about our attitude toward life and death. I mean, doesn’t Dr. Kevorkian have a point? People shouldn’t have to suffer through life, right? But in Judaism we value life above all else. Life is the supreme good on which society is based, the basic necessity. God’s injunction to us is “I call the heavens and the earth as witness against you today life and death, the blessing and curse, so choose life so that you may live, you and your descendants.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
The choice is ours, but the Torah states the choice in absolute terms, “the life,” “the death,” “the blessing,” “the curse.” This choice is more important than we imagine. The Torah also tells us that the purpose of the Torah is so that we may live (Leviticus 18:5).
In a discussion of Genesis 1:1 the sages teach that the entire world was created for the sake of the Torah (cf. Rashi on Genesis 1:1). The world was created for the sake of moral dilemmas like the one that Dr. Kevorkian brought up. We should not ignore pain, or cause people to suffer, but we should also preserve life. The whole purpose of living is to be tested, to be tried, and to endure. So it is the height of irony to allow assisted suicide in order to avoid pain, since it was for this reason that we were born.
Without a basis in the preservation of life any society is on the rocks. At the risk of falling prey to the “slippery slope” fallacy, as soon as we start eroding the edges of our respect for life we are at risk of going too far. Even though assisted suicide is only providing the means for a patient in intense pain and terminally ill, if we allow it then euthanasia doesn’t seem so bad. If we allow euthanasia, then eugenics doesn’t seem so bad, and we’ve seen the bloody, genocidal history of eugenics.
The whole reason we live in groups and form societies is to better preserve life. By working together we are better able to protect our lives and provide for our sustainance and well-being. In Judaism this is taken beyond just not killing eachother and protecting eachother from the danger of physical harm. We are required to give charity for the sake of providing for our fellow man. It is the same value for life that inspires acts of charity that inspires us to reject the idea of assisted suicide. We do not value some lives more than others, all lives are valued equally, because they are all in the image of God. We do not want to preserve our own lives at the expense of others. We do not provide for our needs by depriving anyone else. We prefer that everyone just survive than that some should prosper while others starve. This is why we maintain a nearly Marxist ethic of “from each as he is able to each as he has need.”
From a Jewish perspective, even capital punishment has the objective of preserving life. According to the Mishna, executing a criminal serves the function of atoning for their sin, and so preserving their life in the world to come. Both the written Torah and the sages severly limit the cases in which a criminal can be executed, and make sure that only the most rigorous investigation with the highest degree of proof of guilt can lead to execution. In the case of murderers, capital punishment also serves the function of preventing them from killing again.
So if we say that assisted suicide is, in fact, wrong, why is it that Dr. Kevorkian just died at the age of 83? Why does someone so destructive to life get to live to a ripe, old age? Why does a good God allow that? Again, the “reason for which we live, and suffer, and die,” as Alon Paton put it, our raison d’être is to be given an opportunity to choose. It’s important for us to remember the words of Hebrews that it is appointed for man once to die, and after that comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Our concern, though, is less on what that justice looks like (i.e. is Hell eternal?) than that it exists. Justice will be done, and when we see it we will all have to agree that it is just.
That does not excuse us from doing our part here and now. We shouldn’t just wait for justice in the world to come, we should work for it every day. In the end, though, whether we succeed or fail we are guaranteed that there will be justice. Even if we give our all to secure justice in this life and it ends in failure, our efforts will be rewarded.
"The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their shackles. They have a world to win." - Karl Marx
Good comments. All life is valuable because we are all made in the image of God.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad how our culture does everything possible - even opting for death itself - to avoid pain. And yet pain has been one of humankind's greatest motivators for great achievement. In fact, no great achievement has ever been accomplished without at least a little pain. Why do we try to immunize ourselves from something that can push us further than we thought possible?