Terri Schiavo's Choices and the Dying of Hannah Waskow

Where are we to go for analogies to the plight of Terri Schiavo? I can say emphatically that Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's arguments against Michael Schiavo's attempts to fulfill his wife's wishes to die demonstrate where we should not go.

Not to a person whose body has been deeply damaged but who remains emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually competent. For in three of the Four Worlds fully, and in one partially, such a person (in Rabbi Boteach's example, Christopher Reeve) was fully alive.

Not to a grandmother who is "the leader of her family," or a businessman who has lost his money, Rabbi Boteach's other examples. For each is fully competent, and may be expressing a momentary sorrow when s/he asks to die. They have the ability to enact their choices wholly within their hands, and it is certainly appropriate to make clear the love that their families and friends have for them and what they would miss if the saddened person were to choose death.

And in these cases, they do have the power to choose, and choose, and keep on choosing.

Terri Schiavo is in none of these circumstances. She expressed her will and her values to her husband when she was fully competent, and now she is unable to carry them out. Unable even to change them.

Given her condition, to castigate her husband for not "choosing life" for her is simplistic even willfully ignorant of Jewish teachings about "life" and the "soul."

In Jewish tradition, Kabbalah teaches that human beings have several sorts and levels of soul. One the "nefesh" is at the level of sheer physical functionality, without emotion, intellect, or spirit. This we share with all life-forms, including vegetation. To exist at only such a level is truly "vegetative."

It is certainly conceivable--indeed, likely--that as Mrs. Schiavo has gone through the traumas of the past 15 years, her other souls have detached themselves from her body and the nefesh alone remains.

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