IB World Religions 6.6.3. Life, Death and Transgression: Sanctity of Life, Penitence, Shechitah and Zionism Notes

6.6.3. Life, Death and Transgression: Sanctity of Life, Penitence, Shechitah and Zionism

Sanctity of life

1. Jewish ethics starts from the claim that a human life is not the property of the person living it. Genesis 1:27 states that humanity is made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and the value of every life is drawn from that verse.
2. The Mishnah puts the consequence in a much quoted line. Whoever saves a single life is counted as having saved a whole world, and whoever destroys one is counted as having destroyed a world.
3. The principle is operative rather than decorative. Pikuach nefesh, the saving of life, overrides almost every other commandment, so Shabbat is broken, fasts are ended and the dietary laws are set aside wherever life is at risk.
4. Three prohibitions are held to stand even at the cost of life: idolatry, murder and certain forbidden sexual relations. Everything else gives way.
5. The duty is active as well as negative. "Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour" (Leviticus 19:16) is read as a positive obligation to rescue, and modern authorities cite it when treating living organ donation as praiseworthy.
6. The value of a life is not held to depend on its length or its quality. A person hours from death has the same standing as a healthy one, which shapes the positions set out in the sections that follow.

Abortion and contraception

1. Judaism does not classify abortion as murder, and it does not treat it as a purely private choice. The foetus is held to be potential life with real standing, and not yet a nefesh, a full person.
2. The governing text is Exodus 21:22, where causing a miscarriage in a brawl is penalized by a fine rather than as a capital matter. The rabbis read this as showing that the foetus's status differs from a born person's.
3. The Mishnah in Ohalot 7:6 supplies the decisive rule. Where a birth threatens the mother's life the foetus may be sacrificed, because her life takes precedence, unless the head has emerged, after which one life may not be set aside for another.
4. Orthodox authorities therefore permit abortion where the mother's life is in danger and divide beyond that point. Some permit it for serious threats to physical or mental health, and others confine it strictly to danger to life.
5. Conservative and Masorti authorities permit it more widely, including for severe foetal abnormality. Reform and Liberal Judaism holds that the decision rests with the woman, in consultation with her doctor and her conscience, while treating it as a serious moral matter.
6. Contraception is reasoned out in the same way. Because rabbinic law places the duty to procreate on the man, methods that do not involve destroying seed have been more readily permitted than barrier methods in Orthodox rulings.

Dying, death and dignity

1. The same sanctity that forbids shortening a life also limits the effort to prolong a death. Jewish law distinguishes a goses, a person actively dying, from a patient who can still be treated.
2. Active killing is forbidden without exception. Rabbinic sources treat euthanasia as murder even where the patient asks for it and even where the motive is mercy.
3. Withdrawal of treatment is treated differently by different authorities. Classic sources permit removing an impediment to a death already under way, and Orthodox decisors divide over whether ventilation counts as such, while Conservative and Reform authorities are generally readier to permit withdrawal.
4. The body is treated as having belonged to God, so its treatment after death is an ethical question. Kavod ha-met, the honour due to the dead, requires prompt burial, the guarding of the body and the avoidance of anything that treats it as an object.
5. This is the reasoning behind the practices themselves. Watching, washing and a plain shroud express equality in death, and Orthodox law's refusal of cremation rests on the same respect for the body.
6. Autopsy and organ donation are debated on the same ground. Most Orthodox authorities permit an autopsy only where it will immediately save another life, and most now permit organ donation on that basis, with a continuing dispute over brain stem death.

Transgression and penitence

1. Judaism takes transgression seriously without holding that human beings are fundamentally corrupt. The account given is of a person with a yetzer ha-tov and a yetzer ha-ra, a good and a bad inclination, choosing between them.
2. The remedy is teshuvah, returning. It is a process rather than a feeling: recognizing the wrong, regretting it, confessing it in words, making restitution and resolving not to repeat it.
3. Maimonides adds a test for when the process is complete. Repentance is complete when the same person, in the same situation, with the same opportunity, does not do it again.
4. The tradition sets a season aside for this work. Selichot, penitential prayers, are recited in the period before Rosh Hashanah and through the ten days that lead to Yom Kippur.
5. The confessions of Yom Kippur are recited in the plural. Ashamnu and Al Chet list wrongs the whole congregation admits together, which makes penitence communal as well as private.
6. There is a firm limit on what the day itself can achieve. The Mishnah states that Yom Kippur atones for transgressions between a person and God, and that for wrongs done to another person it atones only once that person has been appeased.
7. The ethical work therefore comes first. A Jew seeking forgiveness must go to the person wronged, make restitution and ask, and the tradition expects the request to be repeated up to three times and the injured party to accept a sincere one.

Shechitah and animal welfare

1. Shechitah is the Jewish method of slaughtering animals for food, and meat cannot be kosher without it. It is therefore the point at which kashrut meets the treatment of animals.
2. The method is prescribed in detail. A trained shochet uses a chalaf, a blade honed until it has no nick at all, to make one uninterrupted cut severing the trachea, the oesophagus and the major blood vessels of the neck.
3. Jewish authorities argue that the method is humane by design. The blade's perfection and the speed of the cut are held to cause immediate loss of consciousness, and any hesitation, pause or nick in the blade invalidates the slaughter.
4. The practice sits inside a wider body of law on animals. Tza'ar ba'alei chayim, the prohibition on causing pain to living creatures, requires feeding one's animals before oneself, resting them on Shabbat and not muzzling an ox as it threshes.
5. Critics, including veterinary bodies and animal welfare organizations in several European countries, argue that slaughter without prior stunning causes avoidable distress. Several states have restricted or banned the practice on that basis.
6. Jewish communities have answered on two grounds. They hold that the evidence on how quickly consciousness is lost is contested, and they note that bans have historically been used against Jewish communities, which makes the issue one of religious freedom as well as of animal welfare.

Zionism as a contested question

1. Zionism is the political movement, organized from the late nineteenth century, for the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and for Jewish self-determination there. Jews hold a wide range of positions on it.
2. Its religious roots are ancient. Jewish prayer has faced Jerusalem for many centuries, and the Pesach seder ends with the words "next year in Jerusalem".
3. Its modern political form was largely secular. Theodor Herzl argued in 1896 that European antisemitism made a Jewish state a practical necessity, and the movement's early leadership was mostly not religiously observant.
4. Religious Zionists, following Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, read the return as part of a divine process. On that view settling and building the land is itself a religious act rather than a merely political one.
5. Sections of Ultra-Orthodoxy opposed Zionism on religious grounds, holding that only the Mashiach may end the exile. Some groups, such as Satmar, maintain that position, while others participate in the state's life without endorsing its ideology.
6. Reform Judaism was initially opposed and later changed position. Nineteenth-century Reform defined Jews as a religious community rather than a nation, and the movement reversed that during the twentieth century, particularly after the Holocaust.
7. Since 1948 the ethical argument has centred on consequences rather than on principle. Jews differ over the state's policies, over the rights of Palestinians and over the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, and those disagreements run within each movement rather than between them.