Setting the Time To Die
Gen. 9:5 states: "But for your own life-blood I will require a reckoning..." Torah Temima takes this statement not only to prohibit suicide, but as the biblical proof text that those who take their own lives do not inherit the world to come.
Rabbi and ethicist Elliot Dorff writes against the idea of assisted suicide because he believes that it is the lack of communal support and pain control that drives people to want to take their own lives. Pain control can be provided, he claims, and lack of communal support is our own obligation.
In Atul Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, he makes the case that nursing homes are built on a medical model to take care of illness but not to provide a meaningful life, and that most assisted living homes do not provide meaningful lives for their residents as they were founded to do.
I am wondering how you feel about this. Should we allow people to take their own lives when they are in pain or alone, isolated and lonely? Do each of us have an obligation to reach out to those who are alone and perhaps sick, particularly people who have shared our lives for many years? Should we each prepare more for meaning to our lives in our old age? Many people tell me that when their spouses die or they move into assisted living, they lose their previous friendships. People just fade away.
Are these questions you are asking yourself, and what's your thinking?