Beth Shalom
Oceanside Jewish Center

Teri, the Pope and Mom:
Exploring Humility and the Limits of Life

Parshat Tazriah/ Shabbat Hahodesh 5765

Each day in hospitals and homes around the world a drama takes place. It’s a drama involving fundamental questions of life and death, of love and its limits, of human knowledge and humility. It is a drama that involves making the most difficult of decisions: fighting the inevitability of death and knowing when to let go of life.

Most of the time we don’t hear about these dramas unless we are personally involved in them. They take place in the privacy of our homes or in quiet consultation in hospital rooms or nursing homes. Occasionally they become a matter of public record that grips our attention and forces us to struggle with our most basic values and beliefs. When does life begin and when does it end? And whose life is it anyway? Do we have a right to choose when and how we die?

Over the past few weeks we have witnessed two such situations in which the limits of life and death were called into question. One involved a young woman, the tragic victim of a heart attack, who lay in a persistent vegetative state for years. The other involved a beloved religious leader whose struggle with life came to a close this past week. As different as these two cases are from one another, I would suggest that they actually have much in common.

Both cases involved knowing when to let go. For Teri Shaivo’s parents and her husband there was a fundamental difference of opinion on this question. For Michael, the husband, Teri would never have wanted to remain in such a degraded state of being for so long. Removing the feeding tube was a matter of respecting her wishes. For Teri’s parents this was not a question that we have a right to decide. Life is not ours to give or take; we must do everything in our power to err on the side of preserving life.

Unfortunately what should have remained a personal family issue, devolved into a question of politics. Congress and the President of the United States should never have entered into the fray in debating this question. Rather than allowing Teri’s death to become a source of healing and reconciliation, it only made the animosity and anger between family members even worse. I can only imagine how distressed Teri would have been to see the people she loved at odds with one another over her life.

The death of Pope John Paul II was very different from that of Teri Shaivo. After years of suffering with Parkinson’s disease and multiple medical complications including a breathing tube in his throat, the Pope made a heroic decision. While medical intervention might have extended his life by months and even years, the Pope concluded that he could no longer function fully nor serve the church and the people he loved. And so he chose not to return to the hospital for more medical interventions. The Pope died peacefully in his apartment surrounded by thousands of adoring believers. His death brought Catholics together rather than dividing them.

Following these two events over the last several weeks has given me reason to pause and reflect as I sat at my mother’s bedside in the hospital. About a month ago, I returned from the annual Rabbinical Assembly convention to be at her side when she was diagnosed with pneumonia. At almost ninety-one years old, even a small illness (and this was not a little illness) could be life threatening. Mom recovered from the pneumonia only to be hospitalized again from the after-affects of the antibiotics. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

A week ago I thought I was going to loose mom. I’m happy to say that she is doing a lot better today. But a week ago, as the doctors struggled to control the bacterium that was ravaging her frail body, I wondered where we would draw the line. I was terrified of the decisions that my sister and I would have to make. How would we know that we had done everything we could to help her maintain some type of life? Is this how she would want to live? Is it a really a question of what we want or is our life not ours at all but a gift that we must preserve at all costs.

While it seems fairly clear in the case of Teri Shaivo that it was time to allow this poor woman to die, I am often struck by the fact that we are too quick as a society to give up on life. “This is not what dad would want,” we say. In a society that judges the worth of life based on productivity, there is a slippery slope over the question of when we should allow “the inevitable” to take its course or if we should intercede in allowing death a quicker and more painless resolution.

That’s why the Pope’s example was so powerful. For years now the world has watched in awe as the Pope has struggled with disease. His pain became a deeply religious metaphor for Christians. John Paul taught the world that suffering is a part of life, to be born openly and freely. In the face of such suffering there is something to be accomplished. But at the same time Pope Jon Paul recognized the limitations of life, and was willing to welcome death when the time had come.

So I would like to end by sharing two pieces of our tradition with you this morning. The first is a halachic ruling or I should say a contemporary legal disagreement in Jewish law, and the second is a story from the Talmud. And I will then leave it to you to draw your own conclusions from them.

First you should know that there is no clear-cut answer from the standpoint of Judaism in cases such as that of Teri Shaivo. There isn’t. I know we would like there to be but there isn’t. Our tradition acknowledges that every case is different and must be debated on its own merits. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly has discussed this question at length, and has issued several important Teshuvot, responsa, on the question of what to do but they are not of one mind. It all comes down to a question of how we characterize the terminal patient: Is he/she a Terefah or Goses?

Let me explain. The word Terefah (besides its context in the laws of Kashrut) means something that is torn, or someone who is close to death. According to Rabbi Elliot Dorff, when the patient has an irreversible, terminal illness, medications and other forms of therapy may be withheld or withdrawn. Rabbi Dorff would consider artificial nutrition and hydration a sub-category of medication in such circumstances, and he would argue that they may be withheld or withdrawn. This would include a person in a persistent vegetative state.

Rabbi Avi Reisner would respectfully disagree with Rabbi Dorff. He would argue that a person in a persistent vegetative state is a goses, a person literally on the edge between life of death. While a person has a right to choose between treatment options, Rabbi Reisner would argue that we should not remove medication, hydration and nutrition from a person so long as it is beneficial for the prolongation of life. It is only when we are not maintaining life but mechanically holding off death that such impediments may be removed.

That is the theory involved in this question. Obviously I’m overly simplifying a complex legal issue. The implications are two fold. The question of removing life sustaining therapies is not black and white, and it is all the more important to know our own hearts on this question and second, it is important to have someone we trust assigned as our health care proxy in case we can’t make decisions for our selves.

Having said this, I want to end with a story from the Talmud. Rabbi Judah the Prince was the editor of the Mishnah and the leader of world Jewry in the Second Century. He suffered terribly toward the end of his life. The Talmud says that as he approached death the sages decreed a fast and prayed to keep him from dying. Remember, that for the sages prayer was their version of life support. The Talmud says, that a female servant of the great rabbi, having witnessed his suffering, went up on the roof of his home and threw a large pitcher down. When it crashed, the sages all stopped praying for a brief moment to see what had happened – and in that moment Rabbi Judah passed away!

For centuries the sages have debated this case. What exactly did the servant do? Was she right to act in this fashion? Is this the same as pulling the plug or active euthanasia? Or is it a matter of allowing nature to take its own course?

I leave it up to you to decide what the servant’s actions meant. What this story suggests to me is that there are natural limits to life that we all recognize. And at some point when we maintain life at all costs, we are guilty of hubris, of arrogance; in thinking we have a right to subvert God’s decree. Life is not ours. It is a gift from God, and we must know when it is time to let go of it.

But when do we reach that point? And who has a right to decide? This is something that we will be arguing about for years to come.

Shabbat Shalom