As a child, I was told that Pirkay Avot in English was “The Ethics of Our Fathers.” But ethics today is not what my father and grandfather told me it was. Nowadays, if you happen to have a different outlook, then that's your ethics. So we'll get together and form an ethics committee. We'll take a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a social worker. Most ethics committees now don't even have a priest.

Euthanasia is a situation where we kill a patient, allegedly, for his own good. The patient is suffering, and unfortunately, patients may suffer terribly. According to this approach, euthanasia is not such a bad thing. We will never do what the Nazis did! We will never kill a patient just because he's black, white, can't pay, or because he is 80 or 70 years old. We will only kill a patient whose suffering is unbearable!

PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATE
There's a sad condition, which doctors call the “persistent vegetative state.” This describes a person who, as a result of a catastrophe — either external, like a road accident, or internal, like bleeding in the brain may be in one of two situations. He's either unconscious and unresponsive, and has to be fed intravenously. He has to be looked after from morning to night with no connection to the outside world. Or, he may go in and out of consciousness. He may awake, even sit in a chair. He may follow you around with his eyes. Some have been known, after years of special treatment, to go home and even have some conversation with family, to express love, to receive love. Yet, both categories are lumped together under this title “PVS” —persistent vegetative state.

The cost to keep and treat such a patient in the hospital is tremendous, not just in terms of money. It's a tremendous cost to those who have to look after such a patient. And it's an even bigger cost to the patient's family. To sit by his bedside for hours and hours, day after day, month after month, with no contact, and to see their loved one lying there like a broken doll. The pain, the suffering of the families is unimaginable. But after all is said and done, the patient is still a human being. It isn't that he once was a human being and now is no longer a human being. Breathing by himself. Heart beating by itself. And yet, it's becoming fashionable to talk about the PVS patient as being dead.

Look at this contradiction. We don't turn off a machine for this patient, because there's no machine to turn off. Instead, we starve him to death, we don't provide water. Why? Because his brain is so badly damaged that he is not suffering. Since he's not suffering, starving him to death will not cause any extra suffering. So why should he be killed? Because how can we see him suffering!! Because a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, husband or wife suffers, are we allowed to kill the patient? This is what has become accepted...

The definition of life in Jewish law is one second. You must violate Sabbath, the most important day, even a million times, if you can lengthen someone's life by one split second. On the other hand, if a person is about to die, and he has one second to live, and one willfully shortens that life by half a second, and by one’s own hands, the Sanhedrin would consider it a capital offense. (Maimonides - Laws of Murder 2:7; Minchat Chinuch 34)

EUTHANASIA IN THE TALMUD
Probably the earliest story of euthanasia is found in the Talmud (Avoda Zara 18). One of the ten martyrs, Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon, was burnt at the stake holding a Torah scroll. His students stood around and said to him, “Rebbe, open your mouth. Let the flames and smoke enter your body and choke you so that you will die quicker and not suffer this terrible torture.”

He said, “No. G-d gave me my soul. Only He should retrieve it from me.”

I think that this is the earliest discussion on record in which the patient himself refuses to hasten his death — the patient himself, who was in such terrible suffering.

BROTHERLY LOVE
There’s an interesting verse in the Torah about murder. G-d says, “At the hand of man, at the hand of his brother I will require the life of man” (Genesis 9:5). The Ha'Ktav Veha'Kabbala asks: “What does the Torah mean? It would have been sufficient to say “at the hand of man.”

The message is that “at the hand of man” is the ordinary murderer. “At the hand of his brother” is one who murders for brotherly love, the one who kills so that the other should not suffer — even from such a man G-d will demand recompense. In only one circumstance is a person is permitted to kill — in self defense. To turn off the respirator is active euthanasia no less than injecting him with an overdose of morphine, because in both cases you did something to shorten that patient's life.

ALL BUT THREE ARE SUSPENDED
G-d has given us a single most precious gift, and that is life. More than life, time is the most wasted gift we have. Time and life together are the essence of Judaism because we were created to use our lives and our time to serve G-d.

We put aside every single law of the Torah — apart from three — to save that split second of life. It is absurd and arrogant for us to even consider the possibility that we are masters of someone else's life, or even of our own lives.

“Against your will you were born, against your will you die, and against your will you are destined to give an account before the supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He” (Ethics of our Fathers 4:22).