Orthodox Jewish perspectives on withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment

Abstract

The Jewish religious tradition summons its adherents to save life. For religious Jews preservation of life is the ultimate religious commandment. At the same time Jewish law recognizes that the agony of a moribund person may not be stretched. When the time to die has come this has to be respected. The process of dying should not needlessly be prolonged. We discuss the position of two prominent Orthodox Jewish authorities - the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi J David Bleich - towards the role of life-sustaining treatment in end-of-life care. From the review, the characteristic halachic and heterogeneous character of Jewish ethical reasoning appears. The specificity of Jewish dealing with ethical dilemmas in health care indicates the importance for contemporary healthcare professionals of providing care which is sensitive to a patient's culture and worldview.

Should I Perform Genetic Testing? A Qualitative Look into the Decision Making Considerations of Religious Israeli Undergraduate Students

“…This value is based on the Jewish law that takes into account the stage of pregnancy, among other considerations, when deciding if a termination of the pregnancy can be performed. It also supports the idea that opposition to prenatal genetic testing could be related to a religion-based belief in the intrinsic value of human life, which has been noted amongst Catholics (Pivetti and Melotti 2013), and which Judaism believes in too (Baeke et al 2011). Religious values can thus influence knowledge and perceptions by leading to an unwillingness to receive genetic information, which in turn can cause such individuals to misunderstand genetic issues and genetic tests.…”

Culture, ethnicity, and socio‐economic status as determinants of the management of patients with advanced heart failure who need palliative care: A clinical consensus statement from the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the ESC, the ESC Patient Forum, and the European Association of Palliative Care

“…67 Some Eastern cultures believe that personhood is distributed throughout the body and not solely in the brain, stressing the importance of the physical body remaining whole and intact, thereby potentially rejecting approaches for organ procurement. 68 However, people assuming this cultural viewpoint, and doubting the validity of the medical criteria determining death, may still favour discontinuation of futile therapy, providing the relevant spiritual or religious rituals can be observed. 69,70 The manner of decision-making with regard to withdrawal of therapies also varies across cultures, faiths and beliefs, with many preferring to rely on physicians' or collective families' decision processes.…”

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation as a Bridge to Chemotherapy in an Orthodox Jewish Patient

“…Although it is critical to acknowledge that important differences exist among individual adherents, religious leaders, scholars, and sects, taken most generally, Orthodox Jewish law views the withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy as a usurping of God's will and prerogative of deciding who lives and who dies. Consequently, it prohibits withdrawal or withholding of LST except in narrow circumstances, such as when the patient is deemed to be a "goses" [7,8], a moribund individual, someone who is actively dying [9]. Although therapeutic efforts should be made to reverse the state of a goses, should this not be feasible, interventions might be restricted so as not to prolong the dying process and again interfere with God's will [10].…”