[Avodah] assisted suicide

Gershon Seif gershonseif at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 24 12:07:00 PST 2008


My wife (who is a lobbyist for Agudah) was in Madison, WI yesterday to join a long list of people/organizations who came to voice their objection to a proposed bill to allow physician assisted suicide.

Some of the people who spoke in favor of the bill tried to show how Shimshon would have been in favor of assisted suicide. 

Can you all help me out here with some mareh m'komos about Shimshon and suicide? I know it's discussed (maybe even a mefurishe Gemara) but I don't recall where.

What are the basic chilukim between Shimshon's situation and a person suffering from a teminal illness, that would allow him to do what he did, and yet forbid assisted suicide? 

My first hunch is that by Shimshon it was only a grama. And it might even be a safek, whereas what the assisted suicide wants to allow would be a vadai and quite direct.
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