Activities Prohibited On Shabbat - Saving of Human Life

Saving of Human Life

For more details on this topic, see pikuach nefesh.

In the event that a human life is in danger, a Jew is not only allowed, but required, to violate any Shabbat law that stands in the way of saving that person. The concept of life being in danger is interpreted broadly: for example, it is mandated that one violate Shabbat to take a woman in active labor to a hospital.

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Famous quotes containing the words human life, saving, human and/or life:

    Human life is beyond comprehension.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)

    We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.
    Marita Golden, educator, author. Saving Our Sons, p. 188, Doubleday (1995)

    I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    ... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)