Rabbi Joshua Waxman: January 2007 Archives

Rabbi Grossman and Rabbi Stern make several excellent and practical suggestions for cutting down pollution and lowering demand for non-renewable sources of energy. In addition to these important measures, I also encourage us to strive to cultivate a relationship of respect and wonder with the natural world so we can come to regard it as something worth enjoying and protecting, and not just as yet an additional area in our lives to feel guilty about.

The medieval kabbalists created an elaborate seder for Tu B’Shevat modeled on the more familiar Passover seder, which included the eating of various fruits and nuts and the drinking of four cups of wine. They did this because they saw the natural world and its cycles as a tangible manifestation of God’s power and goodness; as we come to know and appreciate the divine within the natural world, we can come to better know and appreciate the divine within ourselves.

So this Tu B’Shevat, by all means follow the excellent ecological advice of Rabbi Grossman and Rabbi Stern. But also hold a Tu B’Shevat seder--many excellent examples are online (including one here from COEJL). Do activities designed to appreciate the beauty of nature: Go for a bike ride, garden, take a hike, look at Ansel Adams photographs, or even watch a nature video on the Discovery channel--anything to reconnect with the power and splendor of the natural world. Cultivate an awareness of the wonder that lurks just behind the everyday and that leads us to a relationship with nature based on appreciation, not exploitation.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observed in his masterpiece "God in Search of Man": “Human beings have indeed become primarily tool-making animals, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of their needs... It is when nature is sensed as mystery and grandeur that it calls upon us to look beyond it.”

I am surprised and disturbed by the tone of Rabbi Grossman’s post stating her opposition to allowing non-Jews to be buried with their Jewish spouses in a Jewish cemetery. She writes: “Let us... not undermine the final resting places of those who currently rest in peace.” It almost appears that Rabbi Grossman believes that the souls of those buried in a Jewish cemetery will catch cooties from the presence of a non-Jew buried nearby.

I understand Rabbi Grossman’s concerns about the current levels of intermarriage, but I also think that threatening to separate a couple in death who have been together in life will just alienate both members of the couple and won’t serve as a practical dis-incentive. There are many reasons people choose not to convert and this does not mean that they are working against the interests of the Jewish people or the Jewish community. On the contrary, they can often be active partners in raising Jewish families, supporting Jewish rituals and observances, and building Jewish community. If someone wishes to be buried in a Jewish cemetery I believe they are affirming their intent in death as in life to be fellow travelers: people who love and support the Jewish people and our communities.

One of the issues that has been gaining prominence recently on the American Jewish scene is whether non-Jews--typically the non-Jewish partner in an intermarriage--may be buried in Jewish cemeteries. Traditionally, Jewish law has forbidden non-Jews to be buried together with Jews but, with interfaith marriage rates in this country near 50%, there is new pressure to allow a Jewish final resting places to families that were committed to Judaism in life. A striking example is the Beit Olam cemetery outside of Boston--founded seven years ago as a Jewish cemetery that would welcome non-Jewish partners, it was expected to have enough lots to serve the needs of the Boston area for thirty years. It is already full and an expansion is under way.

The core issues surrounding the traditional practice of disallowing non-Jews to be buried with Jews are murky. The reasoning prohibiting the practice is dubious and stems from an age where relations between Jews and non-Jews were typically marked by hostility. In our own times, non-Jews are often not only a part of our circle of friends; with increasing frequency they are a part of our family. Add to this the fact that it’s not even always clear who is Jewish or not--the Reform and Reconstructionist movements accept patrilineal status (meaning, the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is Jewish) while Conservative and Orthodox do not. A non-Jew who converts in the Conservative movement may be accepted as Jewish in some communities and not in others. The point is, with issues of personal status becoming increasingly fuzzy and intertwined, we do not want to make Jewish cemeteries and funeral directors the final arbiters of Jewish identity, especially in the face of grieving families.

The solution? Recognize that, for practical purposes, what makes a cemetery Jewish is that the cemetery as a whole is governed by Jewish customs and practices, and not the religious status of any given individual who may be buried there. Jewish cemeteries should welcome non-Jewish partners for burial, provided that the interment services are ecumenical and compatible with Jewish norms, and that no non-Jewish symbols are displayed. This, in fact, is the position that the Reform Movement took in 1914 and that has governed their practice ever since. This path welcomes the growing number of Jewish interfaith families while preserving the distinctive Jewish character of the cemetery as a whole. It is thus a fitting parallel in death for the way our communities should welcome interfaith couples in a life: as fellow travelers who are often dedicated to building and supporting Jewish homes and Jewish communities.

Rabbi Stern raises an interesting point in distinguishing between making a general rule and judging each case on its own particular merits. The problem with a complicated situation like the one Rabbi Grossman writes about--a 9-year-old girl named Ashley with a rare and severe brain disease, whose parents gave her massive doses of estrogen, as well as a preventive hysterectomy and other procedures designed to stunt her growth and prevent the onset of puberty--is that there are different stories that can be told, leading to very different understandings of just what the case is, let alone what its merits are.

I do not doubt that this young girl’s parents are loving and devoted, and that the suffering they have watched her experience, and experience themselves, is heart wrenching. So one story that can certainly be told is that of loving parents who want to care for their daughter as best they can under extremely difficult circumstances and who believe that these extreme measures will give her a better quality of life and an increased ability for them to care for her. But another story can also be told--a story in which this girl is robbed of the dignity of developing into an adult and for whom medical interventions will be dictated by what is most convenient for others.
Depending on which story resonates for you, you’ll probably come up with different positions on whether the therapy was justified in this case.

And that’s why, despite Rabbi Stern’s desire to privilege the particular, Judaism does come up with rules and guidelines to use in medical decision making. The most important of these is whether the procedure under consideration is for the good of the patient--not for what we think the patient might want, not for what we ourselves would want if we were in the same position as the patient, but what is letovato--in the best interest of the patient himself or herself.

Rabbi David Teutsch, incoming president of the Academic Coalition for Jewish Bioethics, points out that the effects of a therapy such as this--especially as applied in such an extreme and outlying case as static encephalopathy--are unknown, and we can’t say what unintended consequences it may bring. Undertaking dramatic medical interventions when human life isn’t at stake, when the consequences of the intervention are unknown, and the patient is unable to give his or her own informed consent is ethically dubious at best, and we should approach them with the extreme caution and humility that the situation--and our humanity--demands.

The ancient rabbis who wrote the Talmud (in modern-day Falluja, incidentally) understood something very important about capital punishment that we in this country–to say nothing of those in Iraq–seem to have forgotten. It’s not that capital punishment is philosophically indefensible, as some suggest. Extreme as this sanction is, there are some crimes for which the only just punishment is death, and to my mind Saddam Hussein fully deserved to be executed.

The problem with capital punishment is that it is nearly indefensible from a practical point of vie: How do you create a system with enough safeguards to guarantee the rights of the defendant? How do you create enough certainty about the correctness of the verdict? How do you execute in a way that still protects the dignity of the victim and of the society that carries it out, and how do you ensure that the aftermath of the punishment will lead to more healing and not more recriminations?

All of these vital questions are exhaustively taken up by the rabbis who, in a brilliant act of ingenuity, proclaim the theoretical possibility of capital punishment while simultaneously putting so many safeguards in place as to make it almost impossible in practical terms. The current situation in Iraq bears witness to what happens when the rush to punish outstrips the demands of justice.

Rabbi Stern, it strikes me, doth protest too much. It is true that the vast majority of Orthodox Jews are not extremists who will take matters into their own hands to enforce their own social and religious agenda. It is...

The vast majority of American Jews would take no offense were I to take this opportunity to wish them a "Happy New Year. " Although the new Jewish year of 5767 began several months ago with Rosh Hashanah, the Gregorian...