Baltimore, MD - Dec. 25, 2015 - This Shabbos, Parshas Vayechi, many shuls across the country are participating in an effort called TEAM Shabbos, or “Traditional End-of-life Awareness Movement” Shabbos. The impetus for this effort is the broad pattern developing in the world around us with regard to end-of-life medical decisions, as well as with regard to traditional burial.
End-of-life medical decisions must be made with an appreciation of the complexity of the issue. In Jewish life, our respect for every moment of life is paramount, and we are urged to put aside the Torah’s most serious prohibitions if it will allow us to grant someone a few additional moments of life, even in a compromised state. At the same time, there are certain limited situations where we would not initiate interventions to prolong life where there is intense, irremediable suffering, and where the resultant hold on life would be tenuous. These issues are obviously very nuanced and require serious consultation with medical professionals along with rabbis well-versed in both the Halachic and medical issues.
In the world at large over the past decades there has been an obvious movement towards emphasizing the quality of life rather than its inherent value and sanctity. This has often made it challenging to make decisions consistent with our own Jewish values. This challenge has grown of late due to the trend towards taking hospital patient care out of the hands of the primary care physician and putting it in the hands of the “hospitalist”. The hospitalist lacks the ongoing relationship with the patient and family, both medically and personally, and is naturally less attuned to the values of the patient and family, and often less focused on the sanctity of life.
Traditional burial has also become less of a given. While in the observant community this is not a direct issue, but it is very frequently an issue encountered by members of our community in relation to less observant relatives. Simply stated, a growing number of Jews are choosing to be cremated at the end of their lives. Personally I have always found it difficult to imagine how such a choice could be made, with even a modicum of Jewish historical memory. Cremation – to the generation after the Holocaust – stands for the desire to erase the Jews from the map. It is also so fundamental to our mindset to visit and remember our ancestors, to go to their graves and use them as a symbol and a benchmark for who we are and where we come from. Yet the reality is that for many people this is not a given, and we must be aware of it and do our best to share our sensitivities with others well before it is time for these decisions to be carried out.
