NYT Now Only Half A Year Late
Beyond the grating prose of comparing rituals of surgery and prayer in today’s New York Times item is the absurdity of the story’s main point being an Orthodox Jew’s willingness to have a pig valve used in his bypass surgery. There’s absolutely nothing in Jewish law that concerns itself with using a pig valve (unless one’s planning to eat it), so the premise of saving a life (which the article leaves as the only explanation for allowing the valve) doesn’t even come into play. The story leaves the seeming implication that if it’s not to save a life, a pig valve can’t be used, which is patently false. Now, one might not expect the story’s author, Larry Zaroff, M.D., to know that, but one would expect editors to put in the most basic inquiry — or Google search — into the matter.
Of course, one would expect a lot of things from NYT editors, such as not only learning of a book a year late, after the Forward covers it, or in this case, not getting on top of a theme until half a year after it’s been part of a prime-time television drama.
In May, Grey’s Anatomy had a pig valve storyline in which a young newly-Orthodox Jewess protested the pig valve over her non-Orthodox parents’ objections, and was eventually convinced to do so by Reform Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh playing an Orthodox rabbi. Follow? Well, lots of people did, including ultra-Orthodox organization Agudath Israel Spokesperson Rabbi Avi Shafran, who was rather upset by the portrayal, and Missaghieh herself, who discussed her own objections.
So, this is the second NYT “Jew” story of the High Holidays to get to a theme at least half a year late; this time, they’re more than a penny short.
BTW: ABC had a message board thread going discussing the Shafran column, which has now gone silent and is only available in Google cache. Curious, no?
October 12th, 2005 at 5:54 am
You’re minimizing the halachic ramifications. True, surgery per se is more halachicly problematic than pig valve insertion. But such surgery creates a lifnei iver prohibition against the rest of us telling the recipient to “eat his heart out.”