Moral Choices

There are so many discussions these days about grief, death, loss, and mourning that I rarely struggle too much for topics to write about. My concern is always offering words that might help those who read them. On occasion I will write something light or maybe even humorous. Warning, this not that post.

Last Saturday, January 27, was Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was a day dedicated to presenting information about the Holocaust from those who survived or their descendants, along with prayers and/or readings appropriate to the horror of the Nazi death camps.

Our local newspaper offered a guest column written by Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman to reflect his thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Rabbi Zoberman wrote about Viktor E. Frankl (1905 – 1997), a renowned psychiatrist, who wrote about his time as an inmate during the Holocaust. Many people know of his classic book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which many people believe to be the best work of this nature ever written. Rabbi Zoberman also spoke of another of Frankl’s works, a book which was published in English for the first time in 2020, “Yes to Life (In Spite of Everything).”

Frankl sought to write about “the power of the individual to contend with great suffering, asserting the human will while (she or he) was serving as a personal exemplar.” And the Rabbi writes in the column how the new book’s title, “Say Yes To Life” connects with Judaism’s, saying “yes to life” in the face of imminent death. This column was interesting I can’t say enough about “Man’s Search For Meaning.”

I thought it was interesting that the newspaper placed the Rabbi’s column immediately next to a letter to the editor entitled, “Pass It,” written by Dr. Angela F. Herring, a Family Physician and a volunteer for Compassion & Choices, the national group supporting medical aid in dying.   This cause is sometimes called, perhaps inappropriately, physician assisted suicide. There are ten states and in D.C. which have laws allowing medical aid in dying. According to the letter, there are two bills (SB280 and (HB858) currently being considered by Virginia’s General Assembly, which if passed would legally establish medical aid in dying in Virginia.

These two writers also seemed to present their positions during the same time (January 27) when Alabama executed a prisoner convicted of murder, using nitrogen gas for the first time. A person watching the execution said the prisoner shook and writhed for several minutes while on a gurney receiving the gas.

People have died in different ways In each of these three situations. The Holocaust Remembrance Day aims to dissuade our world from ever allowing a similar killing situation to happen again, a moral perspective which I think most anyone would agree.  As for other two situations, the state-imposed death penalty is determined by judicial decisions and state law (capital punishment).  Here the decisions of others (juries and state law) identify who dies, when and how. And in the case of patient’s unbearable suffering, the determination of the patient and the physician is made together, if state law allows. These are difficult personal decisions not easily made.

I hope this information is informative and wish you and your family will be At Peace regardless of the complexity of the death situation you may encounter.