The last several years have seen a sharpening of debate in the
United States regarding the problem of steadily increasing medical
expenditures, as well as inflation in health care costs, a scarcity
of health care resources, and a lack of access for a growing number
of people in the national health care system. Some observers
suggest that we in fact face two crises: the crisis of scarce
resources and the crisis of inadequate language in the discourse of
ethics for framing a response.
Laurie Zoloth offers a bold claim: to renew our chances of
achieving social justice, she argues, we must turn to the Jewish
tradition. That tradition envisions an ethics of conversational
encounter that is deeply social and profoundly public, as well as
offering resources for recovering a language of community that
addresses the issues raised by the health care allocation
debate.
Constructing her argument around a careful analysis of selected
classic and postmodern Jewish texts and a thoughtful examination of
the Oregon health care reform plan, Zoloth encourages a radical
rethinking of what has become familiar ground in debates on social
justice.