Euthanasia: Mercy Killing and Judaism

Hello, I am Jonathan Ginsburg of Jewish corrugation, Skokie Illinois. This video is about Euthanasia. This is the question of, when is it okay to take more action to terminate someone’s life? It something like Kevorkian, where you ask a Doctor to kill you because you are in a lot of pain, something that is okay by Jewish tradition.

Well again, remember the phrase bias for life. We are not deciding on our own life, God gives us life, our parents gave us life and so, do we have the right to take it away? Now there is an interesting story in the track “Take it to boat” on page 104. Which has story of a maid, say it was a miserable of pain and the students form the because they believed that if they pray continuously in a certain amount that the angel of death could not get in to steal his could and kill him.

But as most maid who know how much pain she was in did not like the that, it is that she went to the second story drop the clay so it was shattered and broke. It momentarily disturbed the concentration of the students and the prayer staff and into that moment the angel of death has snagged in she died, the Rabbi died in the Tomah praises her for her sensitivity.

Now, how do you imply that story today, and we do not commit the sin of murder is the Torah forbids us to do. Well, there is difference between passive and active Euthanasia. We are not allowed to stop the natural death process, if somebody is about that die, then it can be closed get many examples or for example, do not make a loud noise to start them back and do not do things unnecessary to stop them dying.

So you have to figure out that what that means in modern medical technology. On the other hand you are not allowed to exacerbate, accelerate, to speed up the death, you cannot shoot somebody, you cannot inject them with poison.

A lot of the very complicated factors here and this is really a medical issue, is that medical people know that sometimes to alleviate the pain when someone is in, like for example morphine, it does slow the breathing and accelerates that the demise and that is the very difficult middle ground.

But certainly, main on the Judaism there is no source that we endorse where Kevorkian has said, suggest the death be done and there is no source that says that we could accelerate consciously the murder, just like what Hitler did, he decided that before he started to murder in Jews, now they are started murdering people who are retarded or other abnormalities, he decided who was fit for the society.

And once you started doing that, it just looks so horrible, slippery sound to mass murder, and so, we believe God gave his life the main salute of Judaism is the high into life. And so, we have be very careful but very sensitive to the fact that people suffering, unbearable agony and we do not need to do anything on the necessarily to prolong their life.

We pray for them, we visit them, we comfort them, we try and make to the end as peaceful and as calm as possible without committing murder.