Surgery, Michael Reese Hospital, c. 1900

The Park Ridge Center's project on Judaism and Health Care Ethics has three aims: to create communal dialogue about Judaism and ethics; to carry out research from a Jewish perspective on contemporary ethical issues; and to conduct educational and training activities. A planning grant from the Michael Reese Health Trust (see Dorothy Gardner's article) provided the impetus for this project. Rabbi Peter Knobel, PhD, of Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, chairs the project Advisory Committee.

While Judaism has historically engaged with ethical questions (see Philip Cohen's article), more recently the dominant religious voices in the West have been Christian, owing in part to sheer numbers. But Jewish ethics also has much to contribute to current discussions about ethics. It delves into essential moral questions: What does it mean to be human? What are our ethical obligations to others in our community? What is the nature of suffering and our responsibility to alleviate it? What constitutes the self, and how is selfhood assessed? Individually, how do we contribute to healing the world? The Code of Maimonides, demanding in its own way, calls attention to the obligations of the physician. Recent work in Jewish ethics addresses more specific questions of resource allocation, assisted reproduction, genetic testing, and old age.

Judaism also contributes a method of ethical inquiry that relies on text, custom, history, interpretation, and serious discussion with others. Different branches of Judaism place varying emphasis on these components. But critically engaged conversation, whether written or oral, has become an increasingly important way to raise and respond to new ethical questions.

Jewish ethics in practice once occurred in daily life in Jewish-affiliated hospitals in nearly all large American cities. Built by philanthropy, often as a response to discrimination against Jewish doctors, these institutions served Jewish patients, who were often poor and recently immigrated. Today all that has changed. Competition and demographic shifts have led to the closure of many Jewish hospitals. Hospitals today are as pluralistic as the communities they serve. Often, one religious denomination operates a hospital, physicians from another tradition dominate the staff, and the patient population represents yet other groups.

Thus, the shared traditions that once marked particular institutions, patients, and staff are easily lost. What might have occurred casually in hallway or cafeteria conversations when people shared a tradition is now harder to achieve. What, if anything, does it mean to be a Jewish doctor at St. Anne's Hospital, the University of California's Moffet Hospital, or at Cook County Hospital? How does religious identity create the sensibilities (see the excerpt of Davis and Zoloth's Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics) that shape our responses to problems in medical ethics? No encounter with another or with an ethical conflict comes unmediated by our history, values, or prejudices. Action has meaning—though not always self-evidently so; only through reflexivity and discussion does this become evident.

By developing research around specific questions, such as genetic testing or gene therapy, providing opportunities for clinicians to reflect upon the sources of their moral sensibilities, and creating educational programs for the entire community, this project will advance thinking in Jewish ethics. It will also help to reestablish informal communities in which clinicians can examine the contributions of Judaism to their thinking and to their work. Jewish ideas about ethics can influence thinking in the non-Jewish community. Jewish interpretations of obligations and responsibilities to our neighbors and to strangers can contribute to a renewed debate about health care reform. Although ideas that emerge from Jewish sources may be justified through readings of Jewish texts or through particular interpretations of history, they can be placed into the common pool of ideas worthy of attention as we struggle to heal the world and the relationships of people within that world.

Rabbi Gail Glicksman, PhD, will be the director of the project on Judaism and Health Care Ethics. A Reconstructionist rabbi and now the director of an educational program on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, she will start work at the Park Ridge Center in July 2000.

Watch for events sponsored by this project over the next few months: the conference on April 13 (see announcement), a breakfast meeting with Rabbi Peter Knobel of Beth Emet The Free Synagogue on May 9, and three other events: breakfast with John Lantos, MD, and two joint events cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and ther Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact Bernice Chantos at (877) 944-4401 or e-mail bmc@prchfe.org.