Jack Kevorkian raised many moral and ethical issues that troubled American society until he was, thank God, placed behind bars; if any Jews availed themselves of his services, they would have raised interesting halakhic ones as well. Most specifically, how would we treat a person who committed suicide in a Kevorkian-type way (meaning that that person was incurably ill, could only envision pain and suffering for the rest of his or her natural life, and then committed suicide)?

The first principle to stress is that it is absolutely prohibited to commit suicide in this or any other situation. Rambam (Hilkhot Rotseah 2;2) equates this to any other murder, since it is the taking of a life, a right God never granted us. As the late R. Henkin was quoted as saying (although he said it in Yiddish), "As long as a Jew is alive, he must want to live." In support of this principle, Avel Rabati (second chapter) rules that we do not perform various services for a suicide, such as sitting shiva, providing nice burial garments, takhrihin, eulogizing them, or creating a procession to escort them to their final resting-place. The only practices we do perform have to do with the honor of the living relatives, such as standing in two lines after the burial to comfort them and adding a special blessing in birkat hamazon to offer them further comfort. Rambam cites these procedures for dealing with suicides as normative, as does the Shulhan Arukh.

Ramban agrees with the basic assumptions of Rambam’s ruling, but believes the close relatives would tear keriah and would therefore observe shiva. The Shulhan Arukh does not cite Ramban’s view, so that we do not generally accept it. However, Hatam Sofer (2: Yoreh De`ah, 126) rules that since Ramban held that view, in cases where it would be a great embarrassment to the family, it is permitted to follow Ramban’s view, since observers would assume that the rabbis had decided that this person did not qualify as a me’abed `atsmo le-da`at, a suicide. That notion, that rabbis might be able to decide that someone did not qualify as a halakhic suicide for the purposes of the issues raised here will lead us back to the question of the terminally ill suicide.

Before we get there, however, we should mention an interesting side-issue raised by Hatam Sofer. He notes that he can see no reason to prohibit saying kaddish over such a person, since his having acted wrongly should not mean that we avoid helping him get to Gan Eden as quickly as possible-- plenty of people who die have committed sins in their lives, and yet their relatives say kaddish for them. He does agree, though, that other mourners in that community could object to giving this person a share of the kaddish in the communal shul, since the suicide did not have the right to cost them their kaddish. (Remember that this was when only one mourner said kaddish at a time, so that the question of who would get to say kaddish was a pressing one.) We might object that the suicide would eventually have needed a kaddish, but the current mourners could respond that that might have been in a different time and place, and it was not the right of the deceased to choose who would have to yield a kaddish to his relatives.

The more general question to raise around issues of suicide, however, is when we consider a deceased person to have committed suicide for the purposes of expressing our communal disapproval in the ways mentioned above. Based on several sources, Hatam Sofer requires that the person announced his intentions ahead of time in a way that made it clear that he was of sound mind at the time, and then that we saw him die in the way that he had announced. In the most typical example, the person says, "I’m going to jump off the Empire State Building," and then we see him jump. If we do not see him jump, finding him on the sidewalk outside the Empire State Building is not enough, since he may have been standing at the top, reconsidering his decision, when he slipped or the wind knocked him off. Similarly, even if the person announced his intention to hang himself, we would still require that we found him in a room locked from the inside; otherwise, we would still wonder whether someone else did it to him. In terms of treating a person as a suicide, in other words, we require a very high level of proof that the person actually committed the act and that this person was in his right mind (a term we will have to define in a moment) at the time.

Before discussing the definition of "right mind," it is worth noting that R. Hayyim Palaggi (Shut Hayyim be-Yad, 110) rules that if the person killed himself in a way that has a delay between the act and death (such as taking poison) and in between the two repents his sin, that that is sufficient to allow mourning this person as we would any other Jew. Others had disagreed, but R. Palaggi did not accept any distinction about the efficacy of this repentance, despite its being registered while the sin was still playing itself out.

For the purposes of this halakhah, right mind becomes an important factor. The Midrash documents Shaul haMelekh’s having fallen on his sword because he knew the Philistines would torture and kill him; the hayye sha`ah, the time that he could have had by staying alive were not seen as a sufficient reason to deny him proper burial and honor.

That suggests that an awareness of certain death, with severe pain in between, while not (not, not, not!) rendering suicide permissible, does mean that the survivors do not have to react with the usual disapproval. Another interesting possibility, accepted by R. Palaggi, and by Maharsham (6;123) is that someone who committed suicide because of financial problems (think the people who jumped out of their windows after the stock market crash of 1929) would also not be treated in this way, for similar reasons—that he would not be considered to have been in his right mind at the time, but was reacting to the unbearable financial pressures that he faced. Again, that would not make it permissible, but would affect our reaction to it.

As a historical tidbit—this last position was originally raised in a set of responsa called Besamim Rosh 345, attributed to the late 13^th, early 14^th century R. Asher, author of an important codificatory commentary on the Talmud, and R. Palaggi cites the responsum approvingly in Rosh’s name. However, Hatam Sofer rejected the responsum (and the work) as a forgery, which scholars now agree that it was, thus reducing the authority behind this particular position. Shabbat Shalom.