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On Areivim, there was discussion about a case where a patient died because a potential organ donor's posek rejected the brain death criterion and held that the donor was not dead.<BR> <BR>R. Yitzhak Grossman wrote:<BR> <BR><<I'm not sure I understand your implication. According to the Posek who does not accept brain death as death, implementing the transfer of the lung would have constituted murder of the brain dead youth.>><BR> <BR>True, but wasn't there an alterative? When may, or should, a posek say that he does not wish to pasken, but advise the sho'el to ask another posek who will give the answer that the sho'el the answer he is seeking.<BR> <BR>For example, R. Boruch HaLevi Epstein records in his Mekor Boruch that R. Chaim Volozhiner once refused to pasken whether the sho'el should repeat his tefillah for missing v'sen tal umatar, because he personally disagreed with the p'sak of the SA, but felt he could not actually pasken that way in practice. <BR> <BR>I also remember reading somewhere that RSZA was once asked by a pregnant woman whether she could abort her foetus because it suffered from some abnormality. He told the woman to go down the road to a nice Rabbi called R. Waldenburg (the Tzitiz Eliezer), who would be able to answer her question...<BR> <BR>It is recorded, IIRC, that R. Chaim Brisker would also tell sho'alim to ask the dayan their questions, because his p'sak would be too burdensome (as with the RSZA incident) or too radical (as with the R. Chaim Volozhiner incident).<BR> <BR>Couldn't the posek in question have told the sho'el to ask someone else who would pasken that the youth was dead, or would this have been a travesty of halacha? If so, why is it different from the cases cited above?<BR>
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Kol tuv<BR>
Dov Kay<BR><BR><br /><hr />Get Hotmail on your mobile from Vodafone <a href='http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354028/direct/01/' target='_new'>Try it Now</a></body>
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