- Suicide
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- Moshe Ben-Chaim
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- Readers Question: Irene M. is 67 years old and has been
diagnosed with the first stages of Alzheimer's Disease. She is a
vigorous, intelligent woman who has made her living for many years as
a newspaper columnist and book reviewer. She is married and has three
grown daughters. Irene has already begun to notice the first traces of
the impact her disease will inevitably have on her life. She finds
herself unable to remember simple things or follow the plots of
television shows or movies. She can feel herself losing vocabulary
words and has lately begun to lose her bearings even in her own
neighborhood; twice already she has had to ask a stranger to phone her
husband to pick her up although it later turned out she was just
around the corner from her home.
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- Irene's whole sense of herself has been tied up with physical and
mental pursuits. She and her husband are avid golfers and she has read
at least two or three books a week for decades. Facing the slow
deterioration of her mind and her eventual, and apparently inevitable,
slide into total disability, she has decided to end her life. She has
considered the matter carefully and wishes to end her life now, before
there is any further degeneration of her intellectual or physical
health. She feels grateful for a wonderful life, but she wants it to
end while she can still, as she puts it, die with dignity.
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- She has made plans to travel to Michigan to allow Dr. Kevorkian to
assist her to commit suicide, but she is having second thoughts. She
has read in a book of Jewish thought that it is considered the
ultimate act of ingratitude towards God to end one's life as though it
were one's own possession and not a gift from God. Irene does feel
that her life should be her own to end but she feels uncertain and she
is not prepared to proceed until she feels completely sure that she
has chosen the right path. She turns to you, her rabbi, for advice.
She isn't interested in hearing a list of Talmudic references or
stories she wants to know what you think she should do based on your
understanding of her wishes and your grounding in Jewish law and
ethics.
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- Mesora: Irene's
maintains three false premises: 1) The physical, Earthly existence is
existence - since all is not well here, she incorrectly feels there
are no other post mortem considerations to ponder, 2) She feels she
has rights over her own life, and, 3) She also feels there are no
other forces at play except for the physical, so she assumes Divine
intervention to save her is a fallacy. Recently a testicular cancer
patient worked with a pharmaceutical firm to develop a cure,....which
worked. Whether God assisted this determined cyclist is unknown, but
he certainly could have. Irene feels this is not so, even with proof
from the Torah that God intervened countless times on man's behalf.
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- Without God being an essential part of man's equations, he is doomed
to err. God gave life, and man has no right to take it, not another's,
and not his own.
- Man does not cease to exist after physical death. His perfections
during life, and his attachment to wisdom survive death, as the
metaphysical soul does not die in the face of a physical death. At
least the fact that major philosophers throughout the centuries attest
to this should be food for thought.
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