Narratives and Jewish Bioethics

J. Crane

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137021090
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Narratives and Jewish Bioethics searches for answers to the critical question of what roles ancient narratives play in creating modern norms by Jewish bioethicists utilizing the Jewish textual tradition.

CHAPTER 1

GENESIS OF JEWISH BIOETHICS

Stories are lived before they are told—except in the case of fiction.¹

INTRODUCTION

What can be done for and to the dying certainly differs from what should be done, yet discerning between them is difficult. The dual move of deciphering the realm of the possible in regard to such care and deciding the narrower category of the preferable is inherently an ethical endeavor. It involves as much imagination as wisdom, since advocating just any or all kinds of activities would be dangerous. Hence, care must be taken when thinking about the care to be given.

Creating norms for such care occurs “in a field of pain and death,” as the legal philosopher Robert Cover once said in regard to legal interpretation by judges.² Sometimes lethal by design and more often fatal only inadvertently, creating norms for end-of-life care is challenging because it involves real people (e.g., dying patients, families, professional care providers, clergy, and community in general). Furthermore, those creating the norms are persons who are themselves caught up in the throes of life, overflowing as it is with political and theological currents, familial concerns, and technological advances (the benefits and demerits of which have yet to be fully appreciated). For all these reasons, it behooves those of us who take guidance from scholars, professional care providers, clergy, and others who spend time and energy thinking seriously about how we can and should care for the dying to appreciate both how and why they make the arguments that they do. This is because there is a story about bioethical norms, a story that is at once historical, theological, legal, literary, and, ultimately, existential.

Tracing this story is less than straightforward, however. Details and digressions may distract one’s attention from the larger narrative of how and why bioethical norms regarding the dying have come about. Lest the maze of law or the amazing prowess of modern medicine entice and entrap, discipline is required to shorn this story of excesses and keep it on track. An unwavering focus promises to assist the helpers and the helped. To this end, the story told here hones in on a particular classical narrative and how it pervades modern Jewish bioethical deliberation on care at the end of life. It will be shown that this particular story is no simple tale. Its complexity, ambivalence, and ambiguity pose as problems, challenges, and opportunities for contemporary bioethicists. How they read and wrestle with that story is part of what makes this story so fascinating. What follows—the first of its kind—is but one version of what could be said about narratives and modern Jewish bioethics.³ More can and should be said on this subject, to be sure, but this should not hinder us from telling at least a first draft of this important and evolving story that has life-and-death implications and applications.

Some readers may find this story incendiary because it questions the oft-unquestioned reasoning of certain modern norm-creators, or because it scrutinizes the presumed authority of certain classic texts, or because it investigates the very relationship between narratives and norms—a relationship that hitherto has received scant attention in modern Jewish bioethics. My intention is not to burn bridges, sources, or conversations. Rather, my goal is to spark and invigorate interest in the complex interrelationship between narratives and norms, especially in regard to the ever-smoldering issues surrounding end-of-life care.

STORY MATTERS

The great modern moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre realized he could truly appreciate his subject matter (the ancient Greeks and Aristotle with his virtues in particular) only if he paid attention to the stories they told—stories of and for themselves, stories of and for the world. “There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.”⁴ If mythology—the study of legends, lore, and stories—is at the heart of all things philosophical, it is surely no less true in regard to matters that are less ethereal and abstract but more earthy and practical.

And if mythology’s importance to societies at large is undeniable, the relevance of stories to individuals comprising any society cannot rightfully be suppressed or sidelined. Whereas it is commonly understood that people make stories, the inverse is also true: stories make people. Stanley Hauerwas, a renowned Christian theological ethicist and perhaps the greatest proponent of appreciating theology through narrative, holds that “To be moral persons is to allow stories to be told through us so that our manifold activities gain a coherence that allows us to claim them as our own. Our experience itself, if it is to be coherent, is but an incipient story.”⁵ Though my story may be incipient, its beginning does not begin with me, however. This is as true about this project as it is about each and every person.

Each person emerges into already ongoing stories, and they run their courses in, through, and around us—whether we like it or not. These infinitely complex interweaving stories in which we are inextricably embedded are history: they undeniably precede us and surely will outlive us. As MacIntyre says, “What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.”⁶ However much or little we like the stories in which we find ourselves—and to which we inexorably contribute— they constitute who we are, what our life’s projects are, and what it all means to us. This notion of inheritance continues in Hauerwas, who insists that “The metaphors and stories we use to organize our life plan are inherited from our culture and our particular biographical situation,” as if to say, as would the French existential philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, that we come into existence already bequeathed and endowed with—and indebted, really, to others for—the stories, meanings, and obligations that constitute our life’s context and shape our prospects.⁷

We may be late to the ongoing saga that is our social world but we are not impotent to contribute thereto. Indeed, ours are unique narrative existences; we are subjects unique unto ourselves inscribing our own stories. Hence MacIntyre’s twofold notion of a “narrative concept of self” begins with subjecthood: “I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death; I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one else’s, that has its own peculiar meaning.”⁸ Insofar as I am uniquely situated in this peculiar matrix of relationships and responsibilities, no one else can or even could take my place, much less usurp my story. To this Levinas would certainly agree, as well as to the fact that I cannot be extricated from my situation, my narrative embeddedness. The idiosyncrasy of my story is inalienable: no one can excise me from it nor assume it for himself or herself.

Since my story is mine, others can, should, and do ask me to explain myself—to understand me and my story, to make it intelligible to them (and to me!). In their asking me to articulate why I did what I did or why I do what I do, they seek an accounting from me—and this is the second aspect of MacIntyre’s “narrative concept of self.” They want me to recount my reasons, reveal my motivations. Of course this exchange does not always occur verbally. The raised eyebrow, as much as the spoken “why?”, prompt me to explain myself. Though they cue my story, I am the one caught up in it. In this way, through others I am beholden to my story, to myself. Yet my story is not infallible or perfect, try as I might. For better or for worse, however hard we try to express ourselves truthfully, our self-narratives are fallible because our memories of ourselves are vulnerable to delusions, elisions, or evasions.⁹

Being accountable for myself is more than a reflexive responsibility, however. It is also transitive—for I, too, am bound up in others’ stories and perforce seek from them their own accounting. Others are also beholden to me, according to MacIntyre:

I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives. Moreover this asking for and giving of accounts itself plays an important part in constituting narratives. Asking you what you did and why, saying what I did and why, pondering the differences between your account of what I did and my account of what I did, and vice versa, these are essential constituents of all but the very simplest and barest of narratives. … Without that same accountability narratives would lack that continuity required to make both them and the actions that constitute them intelligible.¹⁰

I would push MacIntyre here: I am not just one who can ask from others an accounting, I am one who cannot do otherwise. Just as everyone else constantly requests me to explain myself, my very existence is a series of questions seeking from others why they do what they do. I cannot but ask because I am, Levinas insists, responsible for your and everyone else’s responsibility.¹¹ Each person, Levinas observes, comes into the world scene already indebted and excessively endowed with duties. Each person navigates—narrates—the repayment of this debt and the fulfillment of these never-ending obligations by being accountable to and extracting from others their own accounts. Since the pieces of the social scene ever shift, no account is stable for long. New questions arise, sparking a fresh round of critical self-reflection in each and every person. Life is thus questionable, an ongoing search for certainty in an ever-adjusting exchange of perspectives and explanations. It is this iterative process of offering and receiving accounts that constitutes life’s intelligibility.

This give-and-take between people is akin to Lenn Goodman’s notion of chimneying. In his Gifford Lectures on the Levitical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (19:18), Goodman suggests the image of chimneying climbers “who push off opposing rock faces as they work their way upward in a narrow defile” to speak of “an ongoing dialectic between ethics and religion, as our insights about value, including moral value, inform and are informed by our ideas about the divine.”¹² The relation between ethics and religion—that is, between extant morality and revealed morality—is dialectical precisely because “we bring our moral notions, suasions, customs, instincts, attitudes and intuitions to the Law [revelation], and they enter into dialogue with what we read, informing our hermeneutic, as scripture itself and the conception of God encountered in scripture, inform them in turn.”¹³ Neither edifice—ethics or religion—is unmoving, foundational, or non-question-begging. Both shift and adjust as people chimney between ideas of God and ideas of other values. Our hermeneutics—our questions of texts and of people—continuously form and are informed by the texts and people we encounter.

We ever shimmy along our unique paths between each other as much as we do between our ideas of ethics and our notions of revealed morality. Goodman continues with this theme:

When the Torah offers Love thy neighbor as thyself to warrant the duty of reproof, the application shapes the generality. For morals, like the sciences, can work inductively. And induction is just as able to show off the middle terms on which an inference hinges as it is to vault from cases to the universal rule that links them or rappel back again to further cases. The middle term here, connecting the particular to the universal, is our common, yet unique personhood, whose boundaries are illuminated morally by the bans that hedge it about.¹⁴

Insofar as personhood fluctuates by embodying the universal in the practical, it is more verb than noun, more movement than stasis. On this point we bound to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who echoes these themes, though his is a response to MacIntyre’s theory of narrative unity and speaks not of chimneying but of a twofold movement between universals and particulars:

Here I shall attempt to bring to light the simple fact that the practical field is not constituted from the ground up, starting from the simplest and moving to more elaborate constructions; rather it is formed in accordance with a twofold movement of ascending complexification starting from basic actions and from practices, and of descending specification starting from the vague and mobile horizon of ideals and projects in light of which a human life apprehends itself in its oneness. In this sense, what MacIntyre calls “the narrative unity of a life” not only results from the summing up of practices in a globalizing form but is governed equally by a life project, however uncertain and mobile it may be, and by fragmentary practices, which have their own unity, life plans constituting the intermediary zone of exchange between the undetermined character of guiding ideals and the determinate nature of practices.¹⁵

Goodman’s “middle term” and Ricoeur’s “intermediary zone” are the stories of which we are speaking: they are our unique lives, inextricably bound up with each other as they are with life’s minutiae and immensity. We are forever bouncing between the imperatives of the immediate moment and eternal aspirations. Neither face—the face of the other facing me just now nor the face of the infinitely distant revelation or redemption, nor my own face for that matter—is absolute or firm. Their clarity and trustworthiness emerges through iterative encounters and novel questions.

Asking new questions is itself a kind of quest. It is a sort of journey through which the telos or goal becomes increasingly intelligible. On this point we bound between Ricoeur and Hauerwas. The former says:

It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Genesis of Jewish Bioethics
• 2. Narratives, Norms, and Deadly Complications
• 3. A Dying Story: Told and Retold
• 4. Living to Die: Theo-Political Interpretations
• 5. Dying to Die: Bioethical Interpretations
• 6. Salvaging Stories in and for Jewish Bioethics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Source Index