Thought for the Day, 10 October 2005

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks

On Wednesday night the Jewish community begins its holiest day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and today the House of Lords debates a bill to legalise assisted dying. The contrast between them couldn't be greater. On Yom Kippur we ask God for another year of life. In our prayers we say it is you, not us, who decides who will live and who will die.

The bill before the House of Lords argues the opposite: that it's we if we're suffering a terminal illness who should have the right to decide. On the face of it what could be more compassionate than to give someone wracked with pain the choice to bid life a gracious farewell? Yet there are times when the most honourable motive can't change a wrong into a right.

Nine years ago my brothers, my mother and I saw my father go through five major operations in his eighties. It was almost unbearably painful to see one who was once so strong and upright, fight a long, slow, losing battle with death.

Yet I can't begin to imagine what it would have been like if he, or we on his behalf, had been given the choice to bring that last day closer.

He was a proud man who hated being a burden to others. How easy it would have been for him to spare us those final tormenting days. I can see him doing it. Yet he would have been so wrong - because, more than anything else, we wanted to be there with him in his suffering giving back some of the care he'd given us when we were young.

He would have missed the last conversation we had, when I was able to tell him that our son, his eldest grandchild, had just got engaged, and he smiled, and the years fell away and for a moment he was like a young man again.

The doctors were heroic in treating his pain. All of us, doctors, nurses, the family, my father himself, were united in cherishing life, leaving it to a will larger than ours to decide when it should end. There are some choices we should not be allowed to make, and of these the most fateful is to decide that a life is not worth living. My father was able to leave this world gently because he was spared that choice. Better a society that strives for life, than one that offers us the choice of death.