Designing Our Descendants: The Promises and Perils of Genetic Modifications

14 Uncountable as the Stars: Inheritable Genetic Intervention and the Human Future— A Jewish Perspective

c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n Uncountable as the Stars Inheritable Genetic Intervention and the Human Future— A Jewish Perspective Laurie Zoloth, Ph.D. In blessing, I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars in the heaven, unknowable. genesis 22:17 The first promise of the covenantal relation that forms the basis of Judaism is the one of a predictable fecundity. Abraham is promised children, not empires or kingship.However,while the people of Israel are promised uncountable generativity , it has been an assumption of the texts that the future generations would be unknowable—but linked together by the Law, backward to that moment of covenant, present with us at Sinai, and forward to an imagined future —hence the ongoing need for the study and practice of the commanded law, which creates a central way to shape the character of the children entrusted ,l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.But in our time,“generation” assumes ironic meaning as we turn our attention to new ways of making children that question the moral enactment of family, culture, and religion. Since the discovery of techniques to alter the human genetic code,scientists,ethicists, and legal scholars have sought to address the ethical issues created alongside the new organisms that molecular biological research has generated, in both federal regulations and standing commissions.1 In the crafting of normative guidelines and in the search for the framing language to define the scope, nature , meaning, and goals of the research, society has sought justification and argumentation to understand the enormous challenge such a discovery represents . At stake in this is a central Hellenistic idea that the narrative of the natural world is both sacred and inviolable, and that in tricking about with its alteration , we risk erring in the most ancient and classic ways—by unlocking secret knowledge and sending danger into the world. It is a theme that underlies many theological and philosophical traditions, the fear that knowledge is hubris, threatening the very order of the world. In the contemporary period, the realm of genetic knowledge occupies the threatening theological location that cosmology or astronomy held in the medieval context, for it is in genetic knowledge that our ontological location and theological norms seem to be at risk. For religious communities, the issues involved in the manipulation of human DNA are particularly challenging, opening historic tensions between the call to healing and the respect for human limits on generativity and procreativity . Many religions understand humans as limited not only by their ability to see and comprehend fully, but by the human creaturely condition, driven by hungers, temptation, passion, and the fear of death.2 Linked to our concern that our enthusiasm for the science might blind us to its effects is the worry that our temptation for power or dominance might similarly confound our ability to control the use of this technology. But is this idea of “nature” and of “danger” a vivid concern in Jewish texts? After all,Eve (Chava) is life,she is not Pandora.Chava looses resistance but also mortality, morality, judgment, discernment, work, and the facticity of childbirth . She does not release demons or lies. For textually located religious traditions, such as Judaism, the turn to the canonical text can be difficult, since by definition, these are revolutionary technologies , and textual-based traditions operate within a framing system of logical and progressive casuistry. Hence, the search begins in these textually located , legally structured religious traditions for precedential religiolegal cases with similar moral appeals.3 At stake are questions of principle, meaning, telos ,and context,and these were precisely the questions raised in the AAAS project . Among religious traditions there is a widely shared presumption in favor of healing. Yet many religious traditions represented in the project also shared a deep caution regarding actions that might alter fundamentally and unalterably the human relationship to the given world. Such cautionary celebration has marked nearly every medical advance,and inheritable genetic modification (IGM) is no exception. A Jewish Perspective 213 For the Jewish ethical-legal tradition (halachah), which functions methodologically as a discursive community in which the justification is created by the force of moral suasion, no single authoritative voice nor one particular council of authority speaks for the entire tradition or the community. Judaism itself...