Brain death: revisiting the rabbinic opinions in light of current medical knowledge.

Abstract

T Ihe controversy over the legal and ethical status of brain death dates back to the publishing in 1968 of the Harvard Criteria1 which proposed guidelines to establish a clinical diagnosis of severe and irreversible brain injury. This landmark paper paved the way for a widely acceptable ethical standard to allow harvesting of vital organs from patients whose hearts are still beating. As readers of Tradition are well aware, there has been a sometimes strident controversy about the halakhic acceptability of these standards. On one side is the 1986 ruling of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate^ that ful fillment of the Harvard Criteria would allow for halakhically acceptable harvesting or vital organs from such patients for their use in transplanta tion. On the other hand was the position championed by Rabbi Dr. J. David Bleich in these pages-' and elsewhere, that brain death as medical ly defined does not fulfill the halakhic definition of death. Major rab binic figures, such as the late Rabbis Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Elazar Menahem Shakh5 and Yitshak Yaakov Weiss6 as well as Rabbis Shmuel