By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
Babies are so cute.
Don’t you agree?
The soft skin, cherubic smile, and countless other feature cause us to instinctively adore our babies, toddler and infants.
Thank G-d for that!
I want to be a bit provocative here.
First a story.
Grandpa was pretty poor and grumpy. It wasn’t fun to have him around. He came to his son’s house to ask for a winter coat yet again. He had misplaced his coat for the umpteenth time. The exasperated son sent his own son (grandpa’s grandson) upstairs to find an old coat to bring to dad. Grandson brings back and old coat. Cut in half. When his father angrily asked, ‘why did you cut the coat’? the naïve grandson responded innocently ‘I will give grandpa half the coat and I wanted to leave the other half of the coat for you, father, when you will be a grandpa, old and forgetful’.
I say thank G-d that we treat our newborns who are helpless, dependent on us and quite limited in their ‘quality of life well.
And that we don’t treat them like large segments of society treats those who are in the waning hours of their life. They too are helpless, dependent and quite limited in their quality of life. But for some reason they are often not treated with the same care.
I would like you to join me in thinking this through.
An elderly person I was helping to work through adapting to some of the limitations of being in the late 80’s once wrote to me
Someday?
They will ask "Where is the Rabbi" and they will say he was put in the Jewish Home for the aged.
Beware!!!!!
He is right.
Because one day you and I will be old.
The way we treat our elders should be the way we would like to be treated.
Interestingly, in a standard healthy society, raising children, notwithstanding all of its challenges, is seen as something positive and meaningful.
It is seen as an entry way to a productive life. Investments of time, love, care and money are made into raising children. Then they mature and enter the next stage of their life where they are please G-d independent and active participants and contributors to society.
I say interestingly, because nobody enters the world and immediately lives the lifestyle of a fully mature adult.
They go through the process of being totally dependent on their parents and caregivers. Slowly growing into independence. This process takes several years. In our current society it is not even uncommon for children to be supported financially till their twenties. Things like cooking meals and doing laundry are often carried by parents when the children are still living at home.
Shouldn’t we look at life as a spectrum.
A soul enters a body and is born into the world from its mother’s womb as a helpless newborn. Newborns grow up to be toddlers. With time, children grow up to be teens. The progress to becoming young adults. Older young adults. Middle age. Just past middle age. Elderly and independent. Old and dependent. Sick and not much quality of life. Soul leaves body – death.
We do pretty well in doing our moral and ethical duty during the first stages of the spectrum. We raise kids to be independent adults. But I think we need some rethinking of the end of the spectrum.
What I have observed, and all the more acutely lately, as I am involved with some ageing members of our community, is that our instinctive feelings towards old age are tinged with immoral overtones.
We are not to blame. We live in a society that has shed many of the classic moral values that used to be sacrosanct.
But we need to be aware. So that we don’t look to newspaper articles to find out what our moral code should be. So that we educate ourselves about our Jewish values and make sure not to be led astray. We need to set the moral tone, not drift lifelessly pulled by the waves.
Yesterday, I studied the below Chapter of Rambam (Maimonides) as part of my daily study.
Meilah Chapter 8 scroll down to Paragraph 8
To paraphrase:
Rambam writes that when G-d gives us a Mitzvah we ought to treat it with much respect and guard it meticulously.
Particularly when it comes to Mitzvahs that don’t make much sense to us as mortals.
Say, not stealing, not murdering, respecting father and mother, these are mitzvahs that we relate to intellectually and we are all fully cognizant of the reasons behind them. We recognize these behaviors to be critical to the benefit of society at large.
There are other mitzvahs that are not so logically imperative. Like not eating pig produces, or not mixing meat and milk, or the law of the ‘Eglah Arufa’ or ‘Para Aduma’ (red heifer) or the Goat sent away on Yom Kippur.
Not just do we not understand them and thus feel challenged not to keep them, but the society around us may ridicule us about them.
Concludes the Rambam, if they are from G-d, we need to cherish and respect and of course adhere to, all the rules that Hashem gives. Whether the Mitzvahs in discussion are understandable or totally non-understandable.
A Mitzvah is an instruction by G-d. It is thus holy and requires our vigilant attention and fulfillment.
Did you notice what I noticed?
Two of the ‘logical’ mitzvahs that are listed are not allowing bloodshed and honoring parents.
Let me clarify ‘bloodshed’. Obviously, the readers of these words don’t need to be told not to take a knife or a gun and kill someone cold-bloodedly. Our moral compass would totally abhor that.
How about letting someone drown when you could save them?
Or choke to death when you could do a Heimlich maneuver and eject the blockage.
Sometimes people need that kind of help.
We have a responsibility to prevent loss of life. This too is part of the mitzvah of not shedding innocent blood.
How about if they are not in their ‘prime years’ anymore?
What about if they are alive, but not blessed to have a ‘quality of life’.
Talking about ‘quality of life’ I must interject with a story.
It was nearly thirty years ago. I was asked to visit a young man who had suffered a terrible motorbike accident. He was in a nursing home with elderly people. He was lucky to be alive, but his leg was shattered, and he needed to have his leg suspended for several months as his bone healed.
In making small talk, this young man said ‘the old people here should be shot’. I couldn’t believe my ears and I asked for some clarification. He explained ‘there are some old people here who have dementia, one old woman even walks around at night in her sleep and talks nonsensically. These people have no value to society and are a burden on the taxpayer being supported in a nursing home’.
I didn’t know much about this young man, but I did know that he loved playing soccer and was quite good at it. I asked him ‘do you think you will be able to play soccer again’. He responded that he probably wouldn’t resume soccer playing.
To which I retorted ‘Then I think that you are pretty valueless to society because what is someone worth if they can’t play soccer’.
Obviously, I was just trying to make a point.
Life, quality of life, contribution to society or burden on society, these things have nothing to do with the moral questions of life and death.
For some reason our values when it comes to honoring or ageing parents or saving infirm elderly patients when they may be drowning in water on their lungs or choking on their food unless a feeding tube is inserted, center around ‘quality of life’.
It is an insidious pervasive societal misvalue.
As if the sanctity of life as prescribed in the Torah is somehow hinged on what you and I consider ‘quality of life’.
I will be first to say that it is excruciating and painful to watch a person who is elderly and infirm, bedridden and sometimes uncommunicative. But they are very much alive. Breathing, digesting, and reacting.
True, they don’t have any ‘quality of life’ if we define life as actively contributing and interacting socially with society.
But they do have LIFE. Their soul and body are together. And we don’t know what is going in their minds, hearts and even less so in their ‘soul’.
Who are we to define at what stage of ‘quality of life’ life is sacred?
LIFE is given and taken by the Almighty.
The same G-d who GIVES life, instructs us to PRESERVE life and eventually TAKES life.
Important to note, that there may not always be an obligation to engage in ‘heroic medical interventional acts’ to preserve a person’s life.
At the same time, I have found that most people are not familiar with the difference between ‘heroic act’ and simple ‘life-saving’ procedures that we morally must administer. Even to people who’s quality of life we don’t envy or understand.
(The details of what should or shouldn’t be done during end of life scenarios in hospitals and so on, is intricate. The contemporary rabbis who specialize in ‘medical Halacha’ are very advanced in their knowledge and application of eternal Torah law to modern day medical situations. I am not trying nor am I qualified, to lay out the details of this matter conclusively in the course of a few paragraphs.
My intention is to educate about the need to ask these moral questions before just deciding to end someone’s life based on ‘hearsay’ or ‘water cooler’ discussions. Or ‘google searches’.
These are moral Halachic questions of the highest degree, and we must consult competent Rabbinic authority if we are to know what to do from the standpoint of G-dly morality.
Societal norms cannot be our moral barometer ).
Perhaps, and I am just thinking out loud here, it would help us to view the spectrum of life a bit differently.
To use a very simple example, when you bake a cake, you need to consider the cleanup of the work area before you take out the ingredients and make a mess. Baking a cake has three parts. The work of mixing ingredients. The fulfilling smell of a baking cake wafting through your home and subsequent enjoyment of eating the cake. The clean up after baking. In my house it is said ‘the clean up after baking is part of the baking’. i.e., don’t offer to bake a cake and do the fun part if you are not ready to do the tedious part.
Naturally, many of us view the work in preparing the cake much less tedious than the clean up after the baking.
Couldn’t life be viewed that way?
Shouldn’t we see the end years of life as being a precondition to being born.
Humans are not disposable that we discard them after they have contributed.
There is a build up from birth to adulthood. We do that beginning part lovingly thank G-d.
Then there is fully active life. When the person interacts, contributes and makes their mark in G-d world.
Following that comes gradual easing out of life.
Dying a sudden death is not a blessing.
Living till 120 with ALL our senses, being able to take care of ourselves and just passing in our sleep, is certainly the most peaceful option.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Oftentimes elderly people reach a stage of being dependent. Sometimes even reaching the stage reminiscent of a newborn. Eating and sleeping most of the time.
Don’t our elderly deserve to be cherished?
And have their lives protected?
Here is the gazillion dollar question.
How does our Creator, G-d Almighty expect us to treat our elderly?
Indeed you will ask, how do we know what is Eternal G-d’ly morality?
The answer always was, is and always will be.
By looking in the Torah….
The Torah is our G-dly moral compass.
ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE.
That is why it is so exciting that we just began writing a new Sefer Torah in Bangkok.
The Torah is our LIFE and it instructs us how to live our moral LIFE and thus provides us with long meaningful and spiritual LIFE.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yosef Kantor
PS I would love to hear from you about this above very sensitive topic.
PPS This new Torah is being written by our community and for our community. For the sake of Unity. Not in memory of someone. No sponsored by someone in their families honor.
A UNITY Sefer Torah in which please G-d all of the Jews connected to Thailand ( if you are reading these lines, you are part of that group 😊 ) will participate in this ONE Torah that UNITES us all together.
Click here of details on how to become a partner in the Torah.
Letters can be purchased starting from THB 180 (USD $6).
Options for dedication parshas etc can also be found at this link.