Judaism on medicine.

Many religions, I'm tempted to say all religions except Judaism, are death cults. Religions deal typically with the problems of death and are attempts to bypass death, deny death, or distort death. The most obvious example would be the Eygptian religion, since, as we now know, the cult, the pyramids, the priest-craft, and the sacred texts were all designed to assure at least the Pharaoh of immortality. The whole hierarchy of priests and kings, of slaves and masters, of victims and powers was deeply woven into a theme of bypassing, obliterating death. In Judaism there is, in my opinion, no such death cult. Moses himself was buried without ceremony, unless God's word is itself a ceremony. His burial place is unknown. Even he, the greatest of all possible human beings, even he is not thought of in death, not reverenced, revered, or worshipped. Perhaps in line with the same notions, religions typically identify the physician with the priest. This was certainly true of ancient Near Eastern religions and it is, to some extent, true of all the religions that I know about. It is not precisely true of Judaism. It is more true to say that healing, the art of healing, the task of healing devolved upon the entire Jewish community than it is to say that it devolved upon one sacerdotal figure. For rabbinic Judaism, classical Judaism, medicine is essentially prophylaxis and not therapy. It is essentially producing a therapeutic community and not a therapeutic profession. It is essentially the creation of norms in which health survives or conquers rather than the cure of disease. I should think in that respect it has something very powerful to say to a modern physician or medical scholar. There are in my judgement at least five principles of Judaism that bear on this notion of medicine. I will talk about emphases in medicine toward which Judaism inevitably tends. First: the primacy of life. It is impossible to exaggerate the centrality of life in the Jewish religious system, unparalleled in any other religion. I think it is a debatable principle. I think that it has led to excesses that are sometimes quite dangerous as well as quite wonderful. Take the case of abortion. Someone writes to an orthodox legal scholar, a Posek of today, asking, "May I have an abortion?" and gives evidence about the unborn child. It is a child of rape, a child with an apparent defect, it is an unwanted child, anything of that kind. No matter how powerful the argument, the answer will come back, "You may not have an abortion." But if the questioner asks in terms of the health of the mother, no matter how remote that factor is, if it is faintly possible that failure to have an abortion will threaten the health of the mother, the answer will be yes. You may not abort a fetus and destroy life for any reason con-