Monday, May 20, 2019

On Jewish Theology and Abortion



Stand up for religious freedom
Religious freedom applies to ALL religions
not just Christian fundamentalists

To begin: Judaism permits abortion


That is a given.  Different rabbis might rule differently as to when it is permitted (usually handled on a case-by-case basis) but all agree that there are circumstances where it is kosher.  In  some cases it might actually be required by Jewish law; cases which, if  abortion is universally outlawed, might infringe on the religious freedom of Jews.

The main thesis of this essay is that, because Jewish theology interprets the abortion issue differently from fundamentalist Christian theology, the US government should not be deciding questions about when the soul joins the body.  To do so violates the First Amendment.

WARNING: If you plan to hit me with antisemitic crap over this about how "wrong" the Jews are according to your religion, don't bother.  Been there, done that.  But if you are seriously interested in my more mystical take on this regarding body and soul, then read on.

When does human life begin according to the Torah? 


 Genesis 2:7 says that God "formed Adam from the dust of the earth, breathed a breath of life into his nostrils, and he became a living soul" (or a living being: Hebrew nefesh chayah) .  So we have two aspects of humans: body and soul.  The body comes from the material world, the soul from the "breath of God" or spiritual world.  For literally millennia, the first breath was considered the beginning of life as an independent human being. This is still the way that Jewish law views it. (For more details on that, see this excellent article by Danya Ruttenberg "Why are Jews so Pro-Choice?")

Anti-abortion Evangelicals quote Psalm 139:13 and Job 31:15, which speak of God saying, "I formed you in the womb." These verses are regarded as poetry by Jews and play no role in Jewish law which, as I said above, we base on Genesis in the Torah.  While Christians see the Bible as a single book, and give equal weight to all material in it, Jews understand that the Bible is really a library, with different categories of material: Torah, Prophets, and Writings.  The Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) forms the basis for Jewish canon law (halachah.)  The other books are considered to be various genres of literature: mostly history, sermons by the prophets, and inspirational writings like Psalms and Proverbs.  These materials are secondary to the Torah and are not cited in legal decisions.

I actually had an Evangelical tell me that Job is the oldest book in the Bible - trying to prove that it overrides the idea that life begins with the first breath as in Genesis - but that is wrong. The literary style of Job is like a Greek play (more on that) which puts it way later than the Torah.

So lines from Job and Psalms do not count in determining the Jewish stance on abortion.  But for the sake of argument, if we are going to discuss "knew you in the womb" verses, then what about Jeremiah 1:4-5, where God says, "“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..."? Some Christians also cite this verse to oppose abortion.  But read it again: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..."  How could God know Jeremiah before he was in the womb?  How can he be synonymous with an embryo that does not even exist yet?  What did God know of Jeremiah BEFORE gestation? His soul.  Which we can probably assume was "breathed in" by God at birth.

The bottom line is, the question of when the soul joined the body is theology, and gets into First Amendment issues.  Should the govt be deciding a theological question over which various religions disagree? No.

Influence of Roman Catholicism


The Catholic Church was more deeply concerned with the question of ensoulment than were the Jewish scholars.  "Life begins at conception" was not always their official doctrine (read more on that) but they were moving in that direction, and in 1974 it became official.  Pope Paul VI ratified the "Declaration on Procured Abortion," making it required doctrine for all Roman Catholics that abortion is forbidden because the soul joins the body at conception.

So why do I, a Jew, care about Roman Catholic theology?  Because, with the Pope's declaration, the political debate heated up. Back in the 1970s and 80s, the anti-abortion protesters were almost always Roman Catholics.  But gradually, their theology jumped denominational lines into fundamentalist Christian groups.  Although Catholics today still oppose abortion, it is the Evangelicals who are leading the charge to legally ban it.  As Cynthia Ozick once put it, we should oppose anyone "who proposes that the church steeple ought to begin to lean on the town hall roof."  Which is exactly what is happening now.  Hence the reason that Jews are concerned.

Today, the Catholic stance that "life begins at conception" has pretty much taken over the Pro-life movement. As an outsider looking in, I find it ironic that fundamentalist Christians, who have historically been anti-Catholic, are now basing their argument against abortion on a declaration by the Pope. Or are they?

The impact of embryology and DNA studies


Parallel to the Catholic Church's decision on abortion was the science of embryology.  Even in antiquity, people had seen miscarriages at various stages of development, but the process was not well understood.  When Watson and Crick unraveled the double-helix mystery of DNA in 1954, which led to the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, we suddenly had a better understanding of how the human body develops.  We could finally explain, scientifically, exactly what happens when the sperm and egg unite.   And we understood, at least to some extent, how genes carry our hereditary traits.

So the Pro-lifers seized on conception as the moment of full personhood, claiming that everything you are going to be is created in the union of sperm and egg through your DNA.

Again ironic, because we now have very religious people -- many of whom are anti-science in other areas -- relying on science to argue that the fetus is fully a person either at physical conception, or when there is a heartbeat.  Both of these are purely materialistic arguments. If you believe you are nothing but your physical body, that your DNA is all there is to your human existence, then the heartbeat argument works. An odd stance for a religious person. no?

Body and soul -- again


But what if you believe a human being is not simply a matter of biochemistry? What if you believe there is such a thing as a human soul?  Then we are back in the realm of theology.  When does the soul join the body? And how do you prove that?  You can't, really.  Which is why Jewish law bases life on the first breath, which can be observed without the use of theology or mysticism.  Even atheists can agree whether a child is breathing or not.

I suspect this is also why Republicans focus on the heartbeat benchmark, because it can now be measured by ultrasound.  But what about the brain? Nowadays brain activity is a better marker for life. Does a six-week-old embryo with a heartbeat think?  A brain dead person has a heartbeat, but are they still alive?  Is there a difference between an adult kept alive by machines and a not-yet-viable fetus kept alive by a womb?

In the case of the brain dead person, family members get to decide, along with their doctors and clergy, whether to terminate life support - even though the patient still has a heartbeat. So why is that not also true of an embryo in the womb? Why is it murder to end the life of an embryo without a thinking brain but not an adult who is brain dead?

In fact, Judaism does not consider the death of an unborn child to be murder, based on  Exodus 21:22-25, which the New American Standard Bible (NASB) renders this way: "And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no [further] injury [to her], he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him; and he [the guilty one] shall pay as the judges decide."  Fined, not executed for murder.  "Thou shalt not murder" simply does not apply here.

In conclusion 


We are back to the original questions once again: When does the soul join with the body? When does it leave? Is the body the whole essence of a person, or is it a merely a garment for the soul? These are questions we should leave to the clergy, not the politicians. True, abortion is ultimately a woman's choice, sometimes along with the father of the child or other family members, sometimes not.  Religious women will also take their faith's teachings into consideration.  And they should be free to do so according to their own theologies, not dictated to by fundamentalist Christianity.

* * *

Addenda: Seems I am not the only one thinking in this vein.  A recent New York Times article discussed whether Jewish and Muslim doctors and women should get religious exemptions in Alabama under their new strict anti-abortion law.  After all, Christians have claimed exemptions from Civil Rights laws (such as refusing to bake cakes for gay couples) based on their faith.  So why shouldn't religions that allow abortions also get similar exemptions? Good question.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I come from Australia where the majority of people I know usually have no religion, and if people are religious nobody really cares, regardless of what religion they are. I am astounded how in this day and age a state like Alabama can possibly make a backwards decision such as banning abortion on religious grounds. As far as I understand the far majority of the people who voted in favour of the bill were men which bring into question why they believe they have the right to tell a woman what she can do with her body. I agree that religion has no place in politics and so many evil and horrific things have happened because of this. In Australia at the moment the biggest issue in politics in regards to religion is voluntary euthanasia. The vast majority of Australian politicians are from a christian or catholic background and therefore continue to block this based on religious grounds rather than ethical or medical grounds. As a registered nurse I see the unnecessary suffering that so many people go through from a prolonged death.

I feel that people who enter politics should make decisions not based on religion but rather on moral and ethical grounds that, are in the best interest of their electorate.

I discovered your blog today and have enjoyed reading your posts, Thank you.

Yonassan Gershom said...

AJH: In the USA the First Amendment is supposed to maintain the separation of religion and government. Right now that is being seriously tested, not only on the abortion issue, but also on issues of discrimination, such as a bakery refusing to bake a cake fora gay wedding. Some of these cases are still in court.

And yes, it is mostly the fundamentalist Christians leading the charge. They have the belief that it violates their own faith to allow others to practice their faiths differently. It is turning into a political Inquisition.

Part of the problem is that Christians here are new to being a minority. We Jews have dealt with this long ago. We do not try to outlaw pork just because we don't eat it, or forbid people to work on Saturday because it is our Sabbath. In the marketplace, everybody's money is the same color green.

Frankly, if I had a bakery, I would advertise that I cater to LGBTQ people. They say about 10% of any population is gay and that's a big chunk of the market. Whatever they want on their cake, they would get. Of course, this attitude gets Jews called "moneygrubbers" and worse, but it is the right attitude when serving the public.

What happens in the abortion issue is that it sometimes spills over into antisemitism with the Christians a calling us "baby killers." An accusation dangerously similar to the blood libels of the Middle Ages. At the same time, they don't seem to much care for those babies once they are born. The same people who want to outlaw abortion also want to cut funding to healthcare and social services to the poir and elderly. They aren't really pro-life, just pro-birth. Go figure.

Thank you for reading my blog. I don't write very often, but when I do, I try to make it meaningful.


Anonymous said...

Every country has problems, every person has problems. Rather than people looking at themselves they always try to blame it on someone else. Like you said how if you were to open a bakery and make cakes for gay weddings, people would call you a money grabbing jew rather than doing the same thing. Donald Trump trying to blame all the economic problems in america on Mexican immigrants. Or all the worlds problems on Muslims. I wish that religion an politics stayed separate and that people would work on themselves rather than blaming other people. but unfortunately that is the problem with people. They feel that everything wrong in their lives is someone else fault.

P Michael said...

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P Michael said...

tpersinger20@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

I agreed with the 1st breath analysis of when it life begins in my mind for choice should always be up to the mother as she decides what is in her best interest (safety and sanity). However, a local politician in the area I lived in used his candidacy as a bully-pulpit for his pro-life, very Catholic stance and made people feel horrible for living in his district for the decisions they made before he ever entered office. He caused night mares. Thirty two years later his hate-crime culturally destructive energy culminated in the Tree of Life shootings even though he was booted out of town. It is clear to me that in his role as a Christian bully, he did not value life unless it replicated his thought processes. Never-the-less, I always remember the day our Summer Camp owners asked my father, the Nature Director, to kill a copperhead snake by the lower lake where we did our Red Cross swimming lessons and free swim, for fear that the copper head might one day, bite a camper. I was with my father when he brought the snake he was asked to kill back to the Nature Hut and we discovered that "she" was pregnant with several baby copper heads. Obviously her still-blue baby snakes, died before birth from the absence of their protective mother and I never forgot this in my heart or mind. My take on Genesis, as an advocate for the autonomy and freedom of each creature in it's own habitat, or such as habitat as I am my fellow animal lovers are able to create, is that Genesis needs revision. Moses wrote what he thought was best to create and thought process of optimism in the face of danger, where humans might believe they could or should have "DOMINION" over the land, seas and skies and all life that exist in these "biomes. The unfortunate consequence of this sentence in Genesis is cruel, barbaric, unneccesary animal torture and sacrifice and encroachment on their domains without social benefit (the delusional gas-lighting used by Jews, Christians, Islams alike). I think God talks directly too me. I think he also put Greta Thunberg on this planet to amplify my message. Green eyes are rare on earth. Steven Spielberg's ET has the blue, wizened eyes of Einstein. ET got "healing" not "affordable health care with third party decision making cruel, torturous decisions like NAZI medical concentration camp doctors." There is no such things as Animal Enterprise - and the most recent architects of this law deserve the benefit of being treated like the animals they terminate in production animal farming for they are less-than human having no empathy for life outside themselves Yes, God told me to rewrite Genesis as see it. My cat's name is Aryeh as she is King of the Lions in her mind, with tanzenite violet-blue eyes and the independent spirit which says we will do this together. God sent ET's sister to write you, I have wizened eyes too. They are Green.

Yonassan Gershom said...

We do not need to re-write Genesis, just translate it properly. "Dominion" is from the KJV and is not how Jews read it. Suggest you study some authentic Jewish commentaries and not view us through Protestant eyes. "Judeo-Christian" is not a thing. Judaism and Christianity are separate religions with very different worldviews.

Yonassan Gershom said...

You can start with this essay, which goes into the meaning of the Hebrew word mistranslated "dominion."

https://www.chaimbentorah.com/2015/06/hebrew-word-study-dominion/

And then read my essays on animals on this blog before accusing "The Jews" of gaslighting (whatever you meant that).

Peace.