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In response to Rabbi Waxman: I am not at all suggesting we separate couples at death. That would be heartless. Rather, I am saying the appropriate place for such couples is in a non-denominational cemetery. Someone who did not become Jewish before death does not receive the rights of Jewish burial after death, i.e. being…

I am surprised and disturbed by the tone of Rabbi Grossman’s post stating her opposition to allowing non-Jews to be buried with their Jewish spouses in a Jewish cemetery. She writes: “Let us… not undermine the final resting places of those who currently rest in peace.” It almost appears that Rabbi Grossman believes that the…

What should Pres. Bush learn from Pharaoh? Virtual Talmud’s Susan Grossman explores this question in this article on Beliefnet, written in response to the president’s State of the Union address earlier this week. Click here to read and respond to the piece. We now return to our regularly scheduled Virtual Talmud debate for this week…

So burial grounds have now become the new battle grounds for American Jewish identity. In a responsa regarding the permissibility of burying Jews and non-Jews together, Rabbi David Golikin, whom I have enormous respect for, closes his ruling that both Jewish and non-Jewish burial grounds must remain separated by saying, “Let us hope and pray…

In his piece on whether non-Jews should be buried in Jewish cemeteries, Rabbi Waxman goes too far, in my book, by suggesting that a Jewish cemetery fully retains its Jewish character if non-Jews are buried within it. Is a cemetery still Jewish when a priest or other religious leader officiates over a burial? When the…

One of the issues that has been gaining prominence recently on the American Jewish scene is whether non-Jews–typically the non-Jewish partner in an intermarriage–may be buried in Jewish cemeteries. Traditionally, Jewish law has forbidden non-Jews to be buried together with Jews but, with interfaith marriage rates in this country near 50%, there is new pressure…

Rabbi Stern raises an interesting point in distinguishing between making a general rule and judging each case on its own particular merits. The problem with a complicated situation like the one Rabbi Grossman writes about–a 9-year-old girl named Ashley with a rare and severe brain disease, whose parents gave her massive doses of estrogen, as…

Rabbi Grossman gets it just right on the issue of Judaism’s relationship to bio-ethical issues. Here Judaism radically differs with certain elements of the Christian tradition. Instead of looking for an all-embracing universal theory that runs through every situation–such as the Catholic belief in the concept of life–Judaism privileges the particular. Each situation is a…

As with most science, medical technology can be both a blessing and a curse. Our charge is to use such technology for good and not ill. The problem, of course, is that choosing a course that does “good” and not “ill” is not always clear. Take for example the recent report that Seattle doctors treated…

The ancient rabbis who wrote the Talmud (in modern-day Falluja, incidentally) understood something very important about capital punishment that we in this country–to say nothing of those in Iraq–seem to have forgotten. It’s not that capital punishment is philosophically indefensible, as some suggest. Extreme as this sanction is, there are some crimes for which the…
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