OPINION: Empathy for those in pain should not lead to the taking of life
Placing limits on the human capacity for self-destruction and harm is the role of the larger structures that define our common values
Kim Leadbetter’s private member’s bill is aimed at tackling one of the most troubling questions we face today. Advances in medicine and science can prolong life but cannot remove all suffering. We know more about the genetic origins of many illnesses, some of which have no cure. We expect answers. Doctors may, with a strong degree of accuracy, be able to predict how long we have left, but does that knowledge help us in the face of the dying and their suffering?
Of course not. There are no answers, when you are faced with the anger of someone you love, a partner or your parent, or perhaps a child. The justified rage against the sheer random unfairness of pain and an unwanted end of life.
It is no coincidence that demands for a change to the law are driven by individuals with direct, desperate and personal experience; arguments in support of the proposed legislation are driven by empathy. These responses are natural, because how else should one respond to ultimate human pain?
No one could ever wish to see such suffering. I cannot imagine how I might react in the face of my own terminal illness.
Jewish teachings around suicide and end of life are in fact already incredibly progressive. The very first rabbinic rulings concerning suspected suicide were written more than 1,200 years ago in a post Talmudic text called Semachot
Yet, I believe that empathy must have its limits, and that placing limits on the human capacity for self-destruction and harm is the role of the larger structures that define our common values, as well as how society behaves.
This includes parliament, the medical and nursing professions, and religious as well as secular communities.
I describe this focus on individual experience as fatal empathy. We must not allow our natural care in the face of suffering to open the gates to the inevitable unintended consequences for others: those who are naturally vulnerable, who occupy less powerful positions, who do not have privileged access to politicians.
This includes, of course, people who face a lifetime of discrimination and struggle, people with long-term disabilities. And let’s not forget the natural vulnerability that we are unlikely to escape as we become old, less resilient, and living in a world that is disinclined to value our presence or our inherent worth.
Jewish teachings around suicide and end of life are in fact already incredibly progressive. The very first rabbinic rulings concerning suspected suicide were written more than 1,200 years ago in a post Talmudic text called Semachot.
Its authors define a new category, enabling us to assume that anyone who has taken their own life, did so without full intention or awareness. The rabbis create this distinction in order to enable the deceased’s relatives to fulfil all of the duties of mourning (such as sitting shiva and reciting kaddish). These duties are suspended if someone is proven (according to a very strict set of measures) to have ended their life with full capacity and intent. Over the next 700 or more years, Jewish thinkers strive to prove that one cannot understand the mind of another human being, and that wherever one takes one’s own life, there must have been an element of fear, distress, ignorance or persecution that would account for the act.
This compassionate approach forms the foundation of the principle that, from a Jewish perspective, one cannot and should not enable any person to end their life with medical assistance, following their written declaration of full mental capacity and settled intention, as the proposed legislation states.
We are living in complicated times; the individual and their rights must be balanced against the potential impact on everybody else. This requires debate and serious thinking, together with the knowledge that sometimes compassion for the many must come before fatal empathy for the individual.
A stronger ‘no’ is kinder than a well-meaning ‘yes’.
• Shulamit Ambalu is rabbi of Sha’arei Tsedek North London Reform synagogue. She was part of the Assembly of Rabbis Working Group on Assisted Dying. Her analysis of the Jewish legal sources on the subject, Thinking the Unthinkable, is published in Assisted Dying – Rabbinic Responses, edited by J Romain 2014
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