new york | As U.S. federal court considers whether to reconnect Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, Jewish scholars are turning to halachah, or religious law, for guidance on the issue.

Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents and husband have been battling in state and now federal courts for more than a decade, is the insensate center of a swirl of political and legal action.

Religious leaders have been involved as well; Schiavo and her parents, Mary and Robert Schindler, are Roman Catholic, and many of their most fervent supporters are fundamentalist Protestants.

The Schindlers want to keep their daughter's feeding tube in her; Michael Schiavo, her husband, wants it removed so his wife can die a natural death.

Jews, like others caught up in the debate, have a range of beliefs, and their understanding of how to apply halachah varies according. Virtually all the rabbis interviewed, though, said that they did not agree with attempts by some conservative Christians to tie Schiavo's case to the public debate about abortion.

At the traditional end of the spectrum, Rabbi Avi Shafran of the fervently religious Agudath Israel of America said the Schiavo case is "straightforward from a Jewish perspective: The most important point from a halachic standpoint is that a compromised life is still a life."

"In the Schiavo case, you're not dealing with a patient in extremis," he said, noting that until her feeding tube was removed, she was not dying.

In halachah, there is a category for a person at the edge of death; the rules for such a person, called a goses, are complicated.

"There are times when certain medical intervention is halachically contraindicated," Shafran said.

But Schiavo is not a goses, Shafran said. Instead, before the tube was removed she "had the exact same halachic status as a baby or a demented person. Like a baby, she was helpless, could not feed herself and was not able to communicate in any meaningful way. But a life is a life."

Rabbi Joel Roth is a member of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly's law committee. In 1990, when he was the committee's chair, the group studied end-stage medical care and accepted two opposing positions on artificial nutrition and hydration.

One, by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, "would permit withholding and withdrawing" the tube; the other, by Rabbi Avraham Reisner, would not.

The divide comes from how the tube that provides food and water is defined. If it is seen as a medical device, as Dorff does, it may be removed, Roth said. If it is seen as a feeding device, as Reisner does, it may not be removed.

Dorff puts a person dependent on a feeding tube "in the halachic category of treifah, which, he argues, is a life that does not require our full protection.

Reisner, on the other hand, "treats these people as goses," Roth said.

Rabbi Mark Washofsky teaches rabbinical studies at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, and he sits on the movement's response committee.

The movement does not speak with one voice on the issue, Washofsky said, but in 1994 it issued a response on the treatment of terminally ill patients.

Like the Conservative decision, the Reform rabbis base their view of whether a feeding tube can be removed on their understanding of the tube's function.

"We cannot claim that Jewish tradition categorically prohibits the removal of food and water from dying patients," Washofsky said. "But we consider food and water, no matter how they are delivered, the staff of life. So what we ultimately do is express deep reservations about their withdrawal, but in the end we say nonetheless that because we cannot declare that the cessation of artificial nutrition and hydration is categorically forbidden by Jewish moral thought, the patient and the family must ultimately let their consciences guide them."

Rabbi David Teutsch, director of the Center for Jewish Ethics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, agrees that the question is how a feeding tube is defined.

"If it were a form of eating, a position held by a number of more traditional halachic authorities, then you're required to feed those who are hungry," Teutsch said. "But if it's medicine — a position held by Conservative authorities like Rabbi Elliott Dorff, and by me as well — then you serve the interests of the patient, which may involve not providing medicine.

He believes that a feeding tube is a medical device, and so it can be removed, Teutsch said. "It's pretty clear that it's closer to regular intervention than to eating."




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