The story is told in the Talmud of the aged and dying rabbi who had become a goses – a person between life and death. The great rabbi cannot die because, as Jonathan Rosen relates in his book “The Talmud and the Internet,” outside “all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

We found ourselves thinking of that story as the crowds of citizens gathered outside the hospice of Terry Schiavo – and in many other places – to pray for her, while inside doctors, given the go-ahead by a court in Florida, disconnected Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tubes on instructions of her husband. As the drama intensified Mrs. Schiavo’s parents scrambled with allies to gain in the Congress passage of a law that would enable the federal courts to take over the case, and President Bush returned to Washington from Texas to be in a position to sign it.

What an extraordinary country America is that such a drama can erupt over the life of a single individual. It seems to us plain on its face – given the way things have gone so far – that the secular law, at least up until the weekend, was with Terry’s husband, who wants to let her die and had already before the weekend’s drama proven himself prepared to remove the feeding tubes. But it is also plain that millions of Americans, Christians and Jews and Muslims, are praying for an outcome that can be summed up in the biblical admonition, “choose life.” That is certainly the formulation that President Bush has cited.

The drama sent us to reading about our obligations in respect, first, of a goses. The term derives from the troubled breathing sound that a dying person makes in what is sometimes called the death rattle, when death is actually coming, irreversibly, and is imminent. Even in the case of a goses, Jewish law requires that everything must be done to save a goses and no action may be taken that would hasten death. And there is another category than a goses, called a terefah, which is an incurably ill person. According to Maimonides, as cited by a contemporary American rabbi, Elliott Dorff, one who kills a terefah is not subject to the death penalty for murder, but may be subject to divine punishment.

Yet Mrs. Schiavo is neither a goses nor a terefah. She is a woman who can breathe well on her own. Mrs. Schiavo is more like an infant or a helpless old person or an Alzheimer’s patient, unable to eat or drink on her own, but able to breath and survive if helped to eat and drink. This is why many religious Americans are praying so fervently for Mrs. Schiavo’s life to be spared and this is why the Congress is scrambling. Were Mrs. Schiavo’s husband or nurse able to rush, figuratively, to the roof of her hospice and drop a clay pot onto the pavement below, startling those who are praying for her and interrupting their prayers, it seems that Mrs. Schiavo’s soul would not be released. She would continue breathing on her own and become hungry and in need of food and water.

Is the intensity of the contest for the life of Mrs. Schiavo a cipher for a larger struggle in our polity, over values, say, or abortion? Here we think of another sage who took, late in his own life, to telling those who asked about abortion, “Let’s talk, for a moment, about not the beginning of life but the end.” We speak of Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street Journal. He was wise enough to see that the two questions are at some deep level connected. And full of important subtleties and maddening, painful problems. It may be that the secular authorities will, and should, decide this. But in thinking about Mrs. Schiavo we have found ourselves impressed more than anything with the fact that the questions our country is facing are not new and have been wrestled with for centuries by the sages who interpret laws that are more enduring than those of any legislature.