Judaism, Medical Ethics, Secularism, and Post Modernism: Perspectives Beyond Heschel
Alan Astrow, M.D., Chief, Hematology-Medical Oncology/Professor of Clinical Medicine, New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine
This year's conference organizers ask, "On what basis can medicine and religion engage one another?" For Abraham Joshua Heschel, the answer was almost self-evident. "It is a grievous mistake to keep a wall of separation between medicine and religion," he argued in his 1964 address to the AMA. "Medicine is a sacred art. It's work is holy . . . Religion is not the assistant of medicine but the secret of one’s passion for medicine." While provocative and moving, Heschel did not fully work out the implications of this view. Many Americans would likely agree with secular thinkers, such as, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson who in his “The Meaning of Human Life” disputes the need for a transcendent Other to give meaning to our efforts. The search for meaning Wilson argues arises from human needs, and medicine to Wilson would likely represent a wholly secular good. As contemporary Jewish philosopher Shai Held explains, Heschel engaged in "sidestepping a question by reasserting a conviction . . . Heschel's statements may inspire some readers, but they will likely alienate many others, who are left with the sense . . . that an unbridgeable chasm separates his assumptions from their own." In this presentation, I will review the contrasting approaches of two contemporary Jewish thinkers, Professor Alan Mittleman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the late Rabbi Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) of Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak toward creating an approach to religious engagement with the secular more attuned to contemporary sensibilities. What precisely might Heschel have meant when he claimed that the work of medicine was holy? Mittleman, in his forthcoming "Holiness and Violence in Judaism," examines the concept of holiness and its relationship to goodness. While acknowledging that religious understandings may lead to violence, he disputes the claims of Wilson and other secular thinkers that "God" is an empty vessel into which we project human needs. He argues, "the best relation between religious and secular normatively is dialetical." "If we permit ourselves to see the world as God's world, we can take our bearings from the beauty, order, and goodness of the whole." "Full human flourishing points us toward a transcendent source for the authority of our norms." How to connect religious faith to one's passion for medicine faced with the post-modern critique of the contingency of all knowledge? Shagar wrote from world of Hasidism and religious Orthodoxy, yet attempted "a Torah-driven alternative that would appeal to as large a swath of Israeli society as possible, including the secular." "By facilitating a plurality of languages and perspectives," he offers in "Faith Shattered and Restored," "postmodernism can enable us . . . to exist in two worlds: the scientific-causal world . . . and the world of meaning, which is also the world of faith and providence." I will examine Mittelman's and Shagar's approaches to the challenges that secular thought poses to religious understandings, and suggest how each might be relevant to the possibility for a renewed engagement of medicine and religion.
This year's conference organizers ask, "On what basis can medicine and religion engage one another?" For Abraham Joshua Heschel, the answer was almost self-evident. "It is a grievous mistake to keep a wall of separation between medicine and religion," he argued in his 1964 address to the AMA. "Medicine is a sacred art. It's work is holy . . . Religion is not the assistant of medicine but the secret of one’s passion for medicine." While provocative and moving, Heschel did not fully work out the implications of this view. Many Americans would likely agree with secular thinkers, such as, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson who in his “The Meaning of Human Life” disputes the need for a transcendent Other to give meaning to our efforts. The search for meaning Wilson argues arises from human needs, and medicine to Wilson would likely represent a wholly secular good. As contemporary Jewish philosopher Shai Held explains, Heschel engaged in "sidestepping a question by reasserting a conviction . . . Heschel's statements may inspire some readers, but they will likely alienate many others, who are left with the sense . . . that an unbridgeable chasm separates his assumptions from their own." In this presentation, I will review the contrasting approaches of two contemporary Jewish thinkers, Professor Alan Mittleman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the late Rabbi Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) of Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak toward creating an approach to religious engagement with the secular more attuned to contemporary sensibilities. What precisely might Heschel have meant when he claimed that the work of medicine was holy? Mittleman, in his forthcoming "Holiness and Violence in Judaism," examines the concept of holiness and its relationship to goodness. While acknowledging that religious understandings may lead to violence, he disputes the claims of Wilson and other secular thinkers that "God" is an empty vessel into which we project human needs. He argues, "the best relation between religious and secular normatively is dialetical." "If we permit ourselves to see the world as God's world, we can take our bearings from the beauty, order, and goodness of the whole." "Full human flourishing points us toward a transcendent source for the authority of our norms." How to connect religious faith to one's passion for medicine faced with the post-modern critique of the contingency of all knowledge? Shagar wrote from world of Hasidism and religious Orthodoxy, yet attempted "a Torah-driven alternative that would appeal to as large a swath of Israeli society as possible, including the secular." "By facilitating a plurality of languages and perspectives," he offers in "Faith Shattered and Restored," "postmodernism can enable us . . . to exist in two worlds: the scientific-causal world . . . and the world of meaning, which is also the world of faith and providence." I will examine Mittelman's and Shagar's approaches to the challenges that secular thought poses to religious understandings, and suggest how each might be relevant to the possibility for a renewed engagement of medicine and religion.