Leap of Faith: assisted dying
Do we have a moral imperative to end suffering?
The recent appointment of my friend and colleague, Maidenhead Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romain, as Chairman of Dignity in Dying in the same week that retired miner David Hunter received a two-year prison sentence for the manslaughter of his wife of 52 years has once again challenged those of us of the Jewish faith and other belief systems who advocate that, in certain circumstances, assisting a person with death may be an act of compassion and love rather than a sin or a crime. Hunter’s wife Janice, suffering from blood cancer, was unable to move and had begged him husband to end her ‘unbearable suffering’, which he did by means of suffocation.
Judaism is a life-affirming tradition and the Deuteronomist’s call (30: 15) to choose life and blessing is a powerful and justifiably potent motif. No believing Jew would opt for its opposite (death and curse) but what happens when life itself, through pain or indignity, or even fear of the manner of one’s dying, becomes the very opposite of a blessing? Judaism understands the birth of a child as an event in which God has an interest (Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 30b), but Judaism’s absence of serious discussion about the ‘quality’ of life leads many Jews to express the view that it is not for the human to ‘play’ God, as though modern medicine – overwhelmingly supported by public attitudes – with its capacity to create embryos, prevent natural conception, revive those who death would be imminent without intervention, has not already reframed the boundaries of creation.
Judaism demands of Jews that, as God’s partners, we are charged with bringing about the ultimate triumph of good over evil or, as the duty is described in the Aleinu prayer ‘”’takken olam b’malchut Shaddai”: to perfect the world (human society) under the sovereignty of the Eternal One. Can it be that this shutafut (partnership) with God is present at procreation but must necessarily be absent at the termination of life?
At the heart of Judaism is a compassion which arises from the Jewish historical experience itself. The phrase, “For you know the heart of a stranger {in Egypt}” (Exodus 23:9) concerns itself with the legend of the Exodus whereby God liberated Israelite slaves and others from an Egyptian tyranny which at its essence was about an absence of dignity and a lack of capacity to control one’s own future. The suffering of some individuals can be an evil for which Judaism needs the capacity to assist in its conquest. I serve as a hospital chaplain and a congregational rabbi with a faith in the goodness of the Divine but I cannot conceive of a God who would permit the suffering and injustice which some of our family members will undergo, and expect us not to intervene when requested under certain circumstances. Life is, and remains, the most precious of gifts but, if it is to be endured in agony and dismay, then there seems to me to be a Jewish case and a moral case for considering its premature end.
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