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date: 26 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter discusses end of life issues, first describing how the Jewish tradition views the stages of the end of life and how the categories it uses are interpreted differently by Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. It then discusses the degree to which patients have autonomy to decide for themselves what treatments they will accept or reject, including the question of withholding or withdrawing medications, machines, artificial nutrition and hydration, and even the question of killing a terminally ill patient in order to save a viable life. The chapter concludes with a description of the new law in Israel that governs the treatment of patients at the end of life.

Keywords: Jewish ethics, bioethics, end of life, Orthodox, Conservative, patient autonomy, Israeli law, halakhah, dying patients

Daniel B. Sinclair

Daniel B. Sinclair (LL.B. [Hons.]) [London University], LL.M. [Monash University], Ph.D. in Law [Hebrew University], Rabbi) is Professor of Jewish Law and Comparative Biomedical Law at the Striks Law School, CMAS, Israel, and Wolff Fellow in Jewish Law and Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham University Law School, New York. Formerly, Dean of Jews’ College, London University, and Rabbi of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation, Scotland, he has published over fifty articles in the fields of Jewish law, its jurisprudence, and comparative biomedical law. His books include Tradition and the Biological Revolution (1989), Law, Judicial Policy and Jewish Identity in the State of Israel (2000), and Jewish Biomedical Law: Legal and Extra-Legal Dimensions (Oxford University Press, 2003). He is a member of the editorial boards of the Jewish Law Annual and the Journal of Law and Religion and has served as a member of the Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom. He has testified before the Law Committee of the Israeli Knesset on the issues of cloning and germ-line genetic therapy and is a member of an advisory group to a European Union Committee on ethics and science.

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