The sun sets over rolling meadows as I drive by, through the far reaches of Rockville and towards our home in North Potomac, Maryland, casting shadows over the white fences and the wandering cattle. The farmland helps defy the definition of our area as “strictly” suburban. But we know, with a hint of sadness and a sense of inevitability, that the clock is ticking on the cows and the farm. The land is owned by an elderly woman, the last of generations of family farmers, but has been pre-sold on the occasion of her death. Our future neighbors will be gleaming new office buildings, still more space in the sprawling complex that makes up the bio-tech “boomtown” so visible all around us. The farm will someday give way to additional administrative wings and research labs of endeavors like the Human Genome Project.

In the meantime, fights break out at school board hearings all around the country over teaching science in light of passionate personal commitments to the surface and superficial readings of the first two chapters of the book of Genesis. Many people in this country seem to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, and oppose the idea of the evolution of the species.

And yet, and yet… There is another way, a spiritual approach that takes religious tradition seriously, but not literally. I have always believed that Adam and Eve were not the actual first, but the quintessential prototypes of all human beings, that the story, in fact, is a powerful tale of what happened not so much before our time, but within our lives. For this first couple was given one rule, and one restriction: do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. (The “fruit,” by the way, was an “apple” only in Christian interpretation. In Judaism it was either a fig—after all, didn’t they wrap themselves in fig leaves?—or an “etrog,” a cousin of the lemon. Early Christian interpretation used an apple because that fruit had connotations of sexuality in the Roman world, and Christian interpretation has seen this story as being about sex. Jewish tradition does not interpret it in this way.) One might be advised not to reach out, not to know what you have not known, not to go where you have not gone before. Stay put, and stay safe; remain in the Garden.

But to reach out for new knowledge is what makes us who we are. The human story, then, begins with the eating of the fruit. It is what takes Adam and Eve from naïve innocence into the world of adult human experience. More than that: this may be a story of divine disappointment that we could not stay “close” in our original created state, but it is also a story of human growth. For me, at least, this is not about a sin that taints all future generations, but the next step in the human path.

For we are going to reach out for new knowledge. We are going to reach for the stars, and split the atom. We are going to poke and prod into the stuff and substance of the world around us, to climb mountains because they are there. It is who we are. The spiritual, the religious, the moral question is not will we seek new knowledge, not “what if,” but, in the face of what we find, “what now?”

Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, has forcefully remarked (and I paraphrase his observation here) that every generation has felt itself at the cutting edge of history. The only difference is that “because of our recent sweeping changes in technology, they were wrong, and we are right.”

In my own words: every generation has felt itself on the verge of a Brave New World, with unprecedented abilities and “everyday” realities that would seem miraculous to those who lived in centuries past. But today, in a world of the split atom and the
double helix, of space exploration and environmental degradation, of mutated crops and newly stubborn famines, of heart implants and heartless poverty which denies access to even basic medical care to growing billions at the bottom rungs of the chain of human existence, today it is clear that we alone stand in a place where no one else has stood: able to shape or alter all life on this planet—or destroy it; able to tinker with the very fabric of human life—or dehumanize all our interactions with each other. They were wrong. And we are right: the decisions we make today will affect our human future forever. We are able to be saviors or monsters. The tragedy is that we are so torn as a society that different people will use each of these words to describe the very same act.

How clearly this is the case in what we face with the new frontiers of bioethics. Such questions have been in the headlines of late, from Terry Schiavo to Million Dollar Baby. But since the human experience of dealing with the unexpected and ambiguous, with love and loss, with aging and diminution of our abilities, of frustrating “grey” when we want “black and white,” since this experience is universal, the more relevant question is why aren’t these issues in the headlines all the time?

Of relevance, perhaps, to our discussion about genetic research and therapy, puzzling and problematic words of warning emerge from the Jewish tradition, in the midst of the over-hyped and under-read Ten Commandments. For there, in the midst of what Jewish tradition considers the Second Commandment, are the following words: “For I, the Eternal your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the iniquity of the ancestors onto the third and fourth generation of those that despise me, but performing loving kindness onto the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.” This is what Jewish tradition considers the Second Commandment (Catholics and Protestants actually count the “Ten” slightly differently: one more indication of the inappropriateness of governmental endorsement and display of a set of religious writings).

How is this related to genetics? It is a reminder, if ever one was needed in this postmodern world that emphasizes this truth again and again, that “we are who we were,” that we are shaped in ways beyond conscious understanding by our parents and our past, that we inherit not only potential we did not earn, but also problems we do not deserve.

To begin to define a Jewish approach to this Brave New World of genetic testing and gene therapy we must distinguish between two modalities, two different ways of approaching Jewish texts. In our tradition there is both halachah and aggadah, “law” and “lore,” distinct elements (unless said with a thick New York accent, in which case they almost blend together). The first is the realm of the Jewish legal
tradition: what’s a Jew to do? The second is the world of homiletics and legends, stories and tales from which underlying insights may often be teased out, but which were not originally meant to tell us what to do.

While the division is not as clear cut as this, as an oversimplification of the matter more traditionally observant Jews (Orthodox and some Conservative Jews) live in the world of Jewish law. For them, halachah, as interpreted by the interaction between ancient texts and modern practitioners, determines action. For more liberal Jews (Reform, Reconstructionist, and some Conservative Jews), halachah offers guidance, but aggadah may be a way of reading new situations into the tradition as well. The fact is that both “law” and “lore” are important sources of values, and often when faced with the delicate act of trying to figure out what an ancient tradition has to say about a very new situation, we will turn to both expressions of the Jewish spirit, and still not be sure of what “Judaism” has to say about any given topic.

The entire enterprise of using ancient sources to address modern ethical situations is fraught with peril: it is inevitable, if a tradition is to remain “relevant” to the modern world, yet it is problematic. One of the best treatments of this balancing act is found in an article from a decade ago by ethicist Louis Newman called “Woodchoppers and Respirators: The Problem of Interpretation in Contemporary Jewish Ethics” (1995).

Indeed, when approaching any topic of Jewish life it is useful to keep in mind the axiom that “where there are two Jews, there are three opinions.” Judaism has no central hierarchical structure that determines doctrine, and even within similar streams or denominations of Judaism (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox), opinion on a subject is a matter of building a bridge between the past and the present, and thus depends on argument, persuasion, communal consensus, and continual openness to new insights.

There are often surprising outcomes of these discussions. To cite just two examples: the normally more “liberal” Reform movement scholar Mark Washofsky (2000) argues strongly for using great caution in the removal of a feeding tube, and the normally more restrictive Conservative movement’s Elliot Dorf argued for more open conditions for allowing it. An Orthodox rabbi named Azriel Rosenfeld argues for the possibility, in the future, of allowing genetic manipulation of offspring even for nontherapeutic purposes, such as to enhance certain desirable characteristics (intelligence and appearance); Conservative Rabbi David Golinkin views such techniques as permissible only for what we would commonly understand as medical purposes.

And as implied above, disagreements exist even between those in the same denomination. Rabbi Elliot Dorf often writes from the “liberal” end of the Conservative movement, and is challenged by others in his movement; Rabbi Mark Washofsky writes from the “traditional” end of Reform Judaism and encounters many more liberal voices amongst his colleagues.

All denominations of Judaism, however, are beginning to address questions relating to genetic testing and gene therapies with increasing frequency. A common thread to all branches of Judaism is the notion of pikuach nefesh, the “saving of a life.” To save a life all the proscriptions of Jewish law may be set aside save three: you cannot commit murder, rape, or idolatry even to save your own life. But there is general agreement that anything else can be done—anything else—if it will save a human life.

The temptation, then, is to end the discussion before it begins. The Talmud or Jewish law codes could even have directly addressed questions they never actually dreamed of, such as an amniocentesis or mapping the human genome, prohibited all of it, and those prohibitions could be set aside if the benefit of doing so would be to save human life.