Bioethics and the contemporary Jewish community.

The enormous growth of interest in questions of normative ethics, which has come in direct response to the even greater growth of medical technologies during the past twenty-five years or so, has had a profound resonance in the contemporary Jewish community. Many prominent Jewish scholars have taken it upon themselves to address questions of bioethics, drawing upon the vast resources of the normative Jewish tradition. In these efforts they have received much encouragement from the wider Jewish community; indeed, a few scholars have gained considerable recognition both within the Jewish community and beyond it because of their ability to articulate their own expertise in this new area of intense public interest. And not only has bioethics raised the whole field of normative Jewish ethics to a level of public prestige it has not enjoyed since premodern times, it has also placed more traditionalist rather than more liberal scholars in a new position of authority as spokespersons for Judaism to the wider non-Jewish world. This quiet revolution in the Jewish community can be appreciated only against the backdrop of the rise of bioethics as an area of intellectual and political interest in our society. Normative Authority and the Holocaust For all the centuries when Jews had communal sovereignty, and the relative social and cultural isolation it presupposes, traditional Jewish law known as halakhah (what Christians have usually seen as "the Law") governed the communal and individual lives of Jews. There was no area of human activity with which it was not concerned and about which it did not have much to say. Even though Jewish intellectual pursuits were certainly not exclusively confined to questions of halakhah as normative ethics, halakhah always functioned minimally as the negative limit for Jewish discourse and action. Ultimately, nothing was allowed to contradict its norms. This situation changed radically when the communal sovereignty of the Jewish community was eliminated by the emergence of the modern national state, which eventually accorded Jews the rights of full citizenship as individuals. The Enlightenment brought with it a secularism that most Jews welcomed as giving them, at long last, equal social space in European civilization and the opportunities to become fully contributing members. For most Jews, the Enlightenment was seen as the emancipation from the ghetto and all its restrictions. However, these cultural developments accorded nothing to the traditional Jewish community as the mediating social structure between individual Jews and the non-Jewish body politic. One immediate and profound result of this radical shift was that halakhah no longer served as the norm for all of Jewish life. The structure of all-encompassing authority it presupposed was simply no longer present. Within the Jewish community, the most secularist elements saw this shift as the end of the authority of halakhah in toto. In this view, Jews were now entirely part of another world and would have to derive normative guidance for how to live from the moral resources of that world. Either explicitly or by strong implication, these Jews advocated abrupt, or more often gradual assimilation into the surrounding society. Except for ultraorthodox East European Jews, especially the Hasidim, who rejected this new situation of modernity altogether and strove to retreat from its advance, even many Orthodox Jews were willing to formulate Jewish responses to the questions raised by the modern world in a decidedly nonhalakhic way. Thus, the leader of this more worldly orthodoxy in Germany, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), characterized his approach as Torah im Derekh Eretz, roughly translated as, "The Torah together with worldliness." Whereas more specific internally Jewish questions pertaining to such areas as diet, family status, and worship were still discussed according to the ancient norms of halakhah, more general questions pertaining to such areas as politics and economics were now addressed according to the general principles of what was considered to be "universal ethics" (which almost always meant Kantian ethics). …