B'Or Ha'Torah 20

(5771/2010)

(176 pages in English, including cumulative index)

Is population growth a blessing or a curse? Israeli Minister of Science and Technology, Daniel Hershkowitz, who is also a Technion professor of mathematics and community rabbi, shows us that the balancing forces of nature controlling animal populations are mirrored in the human soul. Surveying the history of "doomsayer" and "cornucopian" views on human overpopulation, ecologist Akiva Wolff, PhD, suggests that a wise application of the Torah principle of bal tashhit can bridge the two positions.

In an exclusive report to BHT, Rabbi Professor Avraham Steinberg, MD, describes how and why he steered the public committees that drafted the halakhically compatible laws in the Knesset regarding Rights of the Patient, Stem Cell Research, the Dying Patient, and Brain Death. Another international authority on Jewish medical ethics, Professor Fred Rosner, MD, examines the types of emergency treatments that Jewish doctors and dentists are permitted to perform on Shabbat. The permissibility of using computers, microphones, and chemical cooking kits on Shabbat is explored by Bar-Ilan university graduate students in three poster papers, a new format for BHT.

The Jews in south-western India enjoyed about a thousand years of tolerance. Comfortably fitting into the caste system there enabled them to retain a strong Jewish identity, yet the attitudes among different groups of Jews created a contradiction with halakhah. Professor Nathan Katz analyzes a brilliant and compassionate sixteenth-century responsum by the Radbaz to the Jews of Cochin concerning the acceptance of converts.