On 19th June 2001, Rabbi Sacks delivered the Samuel Gee Lecture on “Ethical Issues at the Start of Life” at the Royal College of Physicians. You can download an article that was published in the September / October 2001 edition of “Clinical Medicine” based on the lecture here.
The key points made in the article are:
- – Jewish ethics derives from its basic view of humanity that, as the Bible teaches, man is created in God’s image and each life is therefore sacrosanct
- – Life is a gift from God and therefore we are its guarantors not its owners – we must respect the life that has been entrusted to us
- – Monotheism sees God as above nature and not in it. Nature, therefore, is not holy in itself, and it is man’s duty to improve upon it, to increase his dignity and dominion
- – As a result of the above we must use medical advances (such as genetic intervention) responsibly, for therapeutic rather than eugenic purposes
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