Orot Students Study Medical Ethics

By Rav Uriel Touitou, Excellence Program Coordinator

In the Orot Excellence Program's course on medical ethics students learned about the intersection of medicine, Jewish law, ethics and morals. During a recent tour at the Shaare Zedek hospital as part of their study they observed how professionals deal with real-life halachic and medical challenges presented by the rapidly advancing world of modern medicine.
Created ten years ago, Michlelet Orot's Excellence Program provides advanced students tools and skills to transform their intellectual abilities into tools they can in their educational career. In addition to offering enriched courses that focus on education and teaching, the program looks to expand students' horizons by offering classes on subjects they would not encounter during their normal course schedules.
In a world of instant communications and media, students find themselves exposed to questions about organ donation, pregnancy and childbirth issues including abortion, fatal diseases as well as many others. To address many of these questions, students in the Excellence Program attend a course in medical ethics given by Prof. Menachem Schlesinger and Rabbi Menachem Schahor. Study includes frontal classes as well as a tour at the Shaare Zedek hospital guided by lecturers from the hospital's Schlesinger Institute for Medical Halachic Research.
During their recent tour students met with doctors and nurses and heard proposed medical solutions to address marital problems and pregnancy and childbirth issues. The tour included a lecture on the subject of medicinal treatment for brides before the huppah and an additional lecture on the issue of genetic match between couples. Students learned about genes that might be carry diseases, the identification process and medicinal treatment to prevent possible future diseases, genetic matching between spouses and coping mechanisms for couples where both spouses are genetic carriers of the same disease.
In the Department of In vitro Fertilization students learned about different stages of infertility treatment as well as the challenges that couples face in their quest for pregnancy and childbirth.
The students' final lecture addressed the challenges of running hospitals on Shabbat and hagim according to halachah. Run various systems whose operation requires chillul Shabbat requires hospital directors and poskim to find creative halachic, technological and scientific solutions.
Student responses to the course were excellent. They found that this special course opened a window for them to an important and fascinating world which they would not have been otherwise exposed.