Abstract
World wide, hospitals have to deal with a considerable shortage of organs for transplantation. Since the brain death criteria were issued by the Harvard Medical School in 1968, most organs are retrieved from heart-beating brain-dead donors. Judaism stresses the huge value of human life, as human beings are created in God's image, and the commandment is to save and preserve life. There is, however, considerable debate in Judaism on the acceptability of using organs retrieved from heart-beating brain-dead patients and it is disputed whether the extraction of these organs should be considered murderous. Should this be the case, then the practice would imply a transgression of the central Jewish prohibition to kill. In this way, the debate evolves around the conflict between the Jewish commitment to save life and the worry to take life. Our analysis reveals the specificity of Jewish ethical reasoning, its text-centeredness and heterogeneous character.
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