COMMENTARY: Remembering Max Kaplan: a paradigm for a generation

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ My wife’s 87-year-old father, Max Kaplan, recently lost his long battle with cancer and died at a beautiful hospice in LaGrange, Ga. His final weeks were especially painful for his family as this strikingly handsome […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ My wife’s 87-year-old father, Max Kaplan, recently lost his long battle with cancer and died at a beautiful hospice in LaGrange, Ga. His final weeks were especially painful for his family as this strikingly handsome man and gifted intellectual withered away.


During Max’s last days, as we waited for the grim but inevitable news, I reminded myself that my father-in-law was not simply a terminally ill patient, but a world-renowned sociologist, first-class musician, and pioneer in the fields of leisure and the arts. A college teacher for 43 years, Max truly lived the”life of the mind”_ he authored 27 books and 350 articles, and lectured for decades in such places as Israel, Iran, and Denmark.

An accomplished violinist, Max was a co-founder of the Greater Boston Youth Symphony that performed at the White House in 1961 at the invitation of President and Mrs. Kennedy.

His personal history is a familiar paradigm to American Jews. Max’s parents fled anti-Semitic Russia and emigrated to Milwaukee, where he and his two older brothers were born. His mother had been imprisoned by the Czarist police for her revolutionary activities, and until she died in the 1960s, Sarah Kaplan remained fearful of all police, forever worried her U.S. citizenship and Social Security benefits would be taken away because of her”criminal”past.

As a widow, she traveled alone by bus from Los Angeles to Washington to attend the White House concert her son conducted. The proverbial”American Dream”has constantly been transmitted to children by such remarkable parents, and Max Kaplan’s life of achievement is an extraordinary testimony to the eternal promise of this country.

And while Max’s family awaited his death, I was forced again to ask those haunting questions that emerge with startling power at such a time: What is an acceptable definition of life and when does it stop being meaningful?

One religious position holds that since we are created in God’s image, all human life is sacred, so extending a person’s life for even a few seconds is as valid as extending it for decades.

The other view maintains that each medical case should be reviewed individually, that the quality of life can be defined and evaluated by a set of verifiable standards, including whether or not the patient is conscious or whether a person can feel and reason. If a person can no longer meet these basic norms, one is not religiously obligated to try to sustain that person.

Some call these alternative positions the”sanctity of life”and the”quality of life”arguments. Not surprisingly, Judaism emphasizes the”sanctity of life”position. If we don’t do everything possible to save or prolong life, we are guilty of shortening or even terminating it, which is expressly forbidden.


However, some Jews vigorously advocate the second position. They readily admit that while the”sanctity of life”thesis is ethically admirable, it does not apply to every situation, arguing God does not require us to extend a meaningless life of pain without realistic expectations of recovery.

But Judaism is staunchly opposed to doing anything that even slightly hastens death. Rabbi Joseph Caro (1488-1575) declared:”We are not permitted to close the eyes of a person who is near death, lest one cut off even a fraction of life.” Nevertheless, Jewish scholars wrestle constantly with this teaching. While Judaism commands us to prolong life, does it also command us to prolong the process of dying? While we cannot hasten death in any way, must we force a terminally ill patient to live _ some would say”exist”_ a bit longer? When a medical cure is no longer possible, shouldn’t we stop medical treatment and simply try to make the patient’s last days as comfortable and pain-free as possible?

Clearly there is a tension in Jewish thought between preserving life and not interfering with the normal process of dying. A 13th-century rabbi, Nissim Gerondi, taught there can be no active hastening of death, but one can offer prayers to God for death. These requests are religiously valid since they require God, not a human being, to end life.

In the words of Dr. Fred Rosner, a leading Orthodox Jewish physician:”When physicians recognize they have no more to offer medically, they no longer have the license to treat. … There is a point where we just must learn to ease pain better.” And Max Kaplan was precisely at that point when God called him home after a long and productive life.

DEA END RUDIN

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