Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the end of 2019, and throughout 2020 there were intensive international efforts to find a vaccine for the disease, which had already led to the deaths of some five million people. In December 2020, several pharmaceutical companies announced that they had succeeded in producing an effective vaccine, and after approval by the various regulatory bodies, countries started to vaccinate their citizens. With the start of the global campaign to vaccinate the world’s population against (...) COVID-19, debates over the prioritization of different sections of the population began around the world, but the prison population has generally been absent from these discussions. Approach and Findings This article presents the approach of Jewish ethics regarding this issue, that is, that there is a religious and a moral obligation to heal the other and to take care of his or her medical well-being and that this holds true even for a prisoner who has committed a serious crime. Hence, prisoners should be vaccinated according to the same priorities that govern the administration of the vaccine among the general public. Originality The originality of the article is in a comprehensive and comparative reference between general ethics and Jewish ethics on a subject that has not yet received the proper attention. (shrink)

Doctors have been treating infectious diseases for hundreds of years, but the risk they and other medical professionals are exposed to in an epidemic has always been high. At the front line of the present war against COVID-19, medical teams are endangering their lives as they continue to treat patients suffering from the disease. What is the degree of danger that a medical team must accept in the face of a pandemic? What are the theoretical justifications for these risks? This (...) article offers answers to these questions by citing opinions based on Jewish ethical thought that has been formulated down through the ages. According to Jewish ethics, the obligation to assist and care for patients is based on many commandments found in the Bible and on rulings in the Responsa literature. The ethical challenge is created when treating the sick represents a real existential danger to the caregivers and their families. This consideration is relevant for all dangerous infectious diseases and particularly for the coronavirus that has struck around the world and for which there is as yet no cure. Many rabbis over the years have offered the religious justifications for healing in a general sense and especially in cases of infectious diseases as they have a bearing on professional and communal obligations. They have compared the ethical expectations of doctors to those of soldiers but have not sanctioned taking risks where there is insufficient protection or where there is a danger to the families of the medical professionals. (shrink)

In recent years, more and more religious communities have been refusing to vaccinate their children, and in so doing are allowing diseases to spread. These communities justify resistance to vaccination on various religious grounds and make common cause with nonreligious communities who oppose vaccination for their own reasons. Today this situation is reflected primarily in the spread of measles, and vaccine hesitancy was identified by the World Health Organization as 1 of the top 10 global health threats of 2019. The (...) present article presents the religious and ethical arguments for the obligation within Jewish tradition to vaccinate all children. Apart from the obligation on parents to vaccinate their own children, it includes the ethical arguments based on Judaism that call for parents to become organized and force schools to refuse to accept children who have not been vaccinated and demand vaccination of those who have not been inoculated. (shrink)

In 2014 Bruers and Breckman addressed a series of subsidiary questions arising from the trolley problem and their answers. In this article I describe ancient and precedent treatments of some of these issues over thousands of years as found in Jewish literature and the original solutions that have been proposed throughout history by Jewish philosophers and legal scholars. I address questions that have been posed to Jewish halakhic authorities when two obligations clash — whether one may save the lives of (...) many at the cost of killing an individual — and discuss whether this is permitted in order to save lives or forbidden owing to the prohibition of murder. I also present new problems that have been introduced into the halakhic and philosophical discussions around the trolley problem in Jewish literature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Jewish tradition, expectations of the ideal teacher are very high, especially because the teacher is a role model for the next generation. So how does one become an ideal teacher? What is the proper image of a teacher according to Jewish ethics? The present paper is an attempt to answer a series of questions about what makes an ideal teacher based on an analysis of hundreds of texts, including halachic rulings and responsa as well as documents that outline various (...) communities’ guidelines and demands. The Jewish texts make up the ethic mosaic that profiles the ideal teacher, who must work with the students as well as with their families. In view of the importance of the education as it has been understood by arbiters throughout the ages, we can appreciate why there should be zero tolerance for mistakes and inadequacies. (shrink)

Countless contracts have been undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 as well as government orders to contain it. Flights have been canceled, concerts have been called off, and dorms have been closed, just to name a few. Do these all count as breaches of contract—or are the parties excused due to the extraordinary circumstances? And how should the losses be allocated between the parties? The law provides one set of answers to these questions; ethics offers another. With a focus (...) on American law and Jewish ethics, this paper shows that the two systems are in accord with some respects and differ in others: Both law and Jewish ethics would excuse a party who cannot complete his contract due to a force beyond his control, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Jewish ethics would require that the excused party still be paid, while American law would not. (shrink)

This study compares the codes of media ethics adopted by the PCCPress Complaints Commission, the IFJInternational Federation of Journalists and the SPJSociety of Professional Journalists based on the claim that it is the public's right to know, and examines the origins of this concept. A new approach is presented here which falls between the liberal-democratic approach on the one hand and on the other, the extreme ultra-Orthodox approach that claims that it is the public's duty not to know. This new (...) approach which indicates that it is the public's duty to know has evolved from the analysis of Jewish texts from Biblical times and from the study of events in Jewish community life throughout the world. This novel approach is likely to effect a change in the contents of broadcasts and in the boundaries of media ethics. (shrink)