Meir Soloveichik on “L’Chaim and Its Limits”
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2017
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Jews raise their glasses in celebration, they toast “l’chaim!” “to life!” Judaism's belief in the inherent value of our time in this world permeates Jewish law and culture, and is perhaps most clearly seen in the principle that nearly every commandment is violated in order to save a life. But how far does this commitment extend? Does Judaism support any scientific and medical progress that promises to preserve and extend life? Or are there other Jewish commitments that ought to establish limits on what we do in our battle against death and disease? Could there even be a virtue in our mortality?
These are just some of the questions Leon Kass considers in his important essay, “L’Chaim and Its Limits.” Published in First Things in 2001, the piece explores the question of man’s mortality as it presents itself in Jewish sources and names the moral dilemmas posed by scientific advancement.
In his podcast, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik joins Tikvah’s Eric Cohen for a conversation about Kass’s essay. They discuss the reasons for Judaism’s concern with the value of human life; what rabbinic tradition teaches about body, soul, and afterlife; and how the family emerges as the most powerful Jewish answer to man’s mortality.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen. I'm very pleased to be joined today by my friend Rabbi Mayer Soloveitchic, rabbi of the Spanish Portuguese synagogue here in New York City. Rabbi, thanks for being here. |
| 0:21.7 | Great to be back. So our discussion today is going to focus on a very important essay by Leon Kass, |
| 0:27.8 | with the fabulous title Lechayem and its limits, was written in May 2001, and it was a moment when |
| 0:34.3 | America was thinking seriously about some of the great challenges and opportunities of new biomedical technologies. |
| 0:40.3 | Things like human growth hormone, stem cells, genetic switches, and might control aging itself. |
| 0:45.3 | And the question he wanted to ask is, how do we think about what limits there ought to be on these advancing technologies? |
| 0:51.3 | In this particular essay, the question of the human lifespan, |
| 0:55.0 | and how should we think about whether being mortal, our very mortality as human beings, |
| 1:00.4 | might have certain virtues and meanings that we ought to preserve and treasure, even as we seek |
| 1:06.1 | to improve an ameliorate disease and advance medical progress. So he begins the essay by recounting a March |
| 1:13.5 | 2000 meeting that he intended of scientists and theologians, where the major Jewish speaker |
| 1:18.6 | made the case that for Jews, God is life rather than love, and used this idea to make the case |
| 1:24.8 | that Jews should be for all life preserving technologies. |
| 1:28.1 | So let's just jump in Rabbi Solvecich. How do you see this? Is this idea that Judaism |
| 1:33.6 | and its cherishing of life ought to seek every advance that extends life? Is this the right |
| 1:39.4 | way to think about it morally and is it the right way to think about it Jewishly? |
| 1:43.0 | Well first we have to begin, |
| 1:44.5 | as Cass does in the essay, with the point that Jews do indeed love and cherish life. And as he |
| 1:51.2 | puts it very beautifully, the celebration of life, of this life, not the next one, has from the |
| 1:56.3 | beginning been central to Jewish, ethical, and religious sensibilities. And the most well-known illustration |
| 2:02.5 | of this is that, as Cass notes, even the Shabbat, one of the most sacred of rules in Halakha, |
| 2:09.1 | is violated in order to save a life. So we take life very, very seriously. At the same time, |
... |
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