The following is an excerpt from "L'Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?" by Leon Kass.

It is severely abridged wisdom. For the full wisdom, go here.

....Jewish commentators....nearly always come down strongly in favor of medical progress and on the side of life….They treat the cure of disease, the prevention of death, and the prolongation of life as near–absolute values, trumping most if not all other moral objections…. the Jewish commentators, even if they acknowledge difficulties, ultimately wind up saying that life and health are good, and that therefore whatever serves more of each and both is better.

…. when I gave testimony on the ethics of human cloning before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, I was surprised to discover that the two experts who had been invited to testify on the Jewish point of view were not especially troubled by the prospect.

The Orthodox rabbi, invoking the goodness of life and the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, held that cloning of the husband or the wife to provide a child for an infertile couple was utterly unobjectionable according to Jewish law.

The Conservative rabbi, while acknowledging certain worries, concluded: “If cloning human beings is intended to advance medical research or cure infertility, it has a proper place in God’s scheme of things, as understood in the Jewish tradition.”

Let someone else worry about Brave–New–Worldly turning procreation into manufacture or the meaning of replacing heterosexual procreation by asexual propagation. Prospective cures for diseases and children for infertile couples suffice to legitimate human cloning—and, by extension, will legitimate farming human embryos for spare body parts or even creating babies in bottles when that becomes feasible.

....At a meeting in March 2000 on “Extended Life, Eternal Life,” scientists and theologians were invited to discuss the desirability of increasing the maximum human life span and, more radically, of treating death itself as a disease to be conquered. The major Jewish speaker, a professor at a leading rabbinical seminary, embraced the project…

....by asserting that, for Jews, God is Life, rather than Love, he used this principle to justify any and all life–preserving and life–extending technologies….When I pressed him in discussion to see if he had any objections to the biomedical pursuit of immortality, he responded that Judaism would only welcome such a project.

I am prepared to accept the view that traditional Jewish sources may be silent on these matters, given that the halakhah could know nothing about test–tube babies, cloning, or the campaign to conquer aging. But, in my opinion, such unqualified endorsement of medical progress and the unlimited pursuit of longevity cannot be the counsel of wisdom, and, therefore, should not be the counsel of Jewish wisdom.

Damn me, but that was modest! Bravo, sir! He is prepared to accept that the ancient wisdom of his people, articulated by learned men who have made it their life's work, is ignorant and incomplete. It would seem that, regarding the ancient wisdom, some wisdom is more equal than others.

"The halakhah could know nothing about test-tube babies, cloning, or the campaign to conquer aging..."

Therefore, we are justified in looking elsewhere for more palatable wisdom.

Homer, for instance.

It goes without saying that there is no virtue in the death of a child or a young adult, or the untimely or premature death of anyone....I do not mean to imply that there is virtue in the particular event of death for anyone....my question concerns the fact of our finitude.... the fact that a full life for a human being has a biological, built–in limit, one that has evolved as part of our nature. Does this fact also have value? Is our finitude good for us—as individuals?....

To praise mortality must seem to be madness....

Yes. It does.

....For it still stands as it did when Homer made Glaukos say to Diomedes:

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves to the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of man will grow while another dies.

Just for today, Homer is much more on point.

Cherrypicker.

And yet it also still stands, as this very insight of Homer’s itself reveals, that human beings are in another respect unlike the leaves; that the eternal renewal of human beings embraces also the eternally human possibility of learning and self–awareness; that we, too, here and now may participate with Homer, with Plato, with the Bible, yes with Descartes and Bacon, in catching at least some glimpse of the enduring truths about nature, God, and human affairs.... Children and their education, not growth hormone and perpetual organ replacement, are life’s—and wisdom’s—answer to mortality.

It must be a fine, fine thing to have the entire Western Canon in your corner.

Confronted with the growing moral challenges posed by biomedical technology, let us resist the siren song of the conquest of aging and death. Let us cleave to our ancient wisdom and lift our voices and properly toast L’Chaim, to life beyond our own, to the life of our grandchildren and their grandchildren. May they, God willing, know health and long life, but especially so that they may also know the pursuit of truth and righteousness and holiness....

By all means, let us cleave to our ancient wisdom. When it agrees with us, eh?