Today is May 4, which should have been my father’s 91st birthday. Instead, just weeks before his 77th, he died suddenly following what we assume was a heart attack. Twelve hours after he was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead, we received a call from the “organ bank,” wanting to know if he was an organ donor. There was nothing on his Florida driver’s license to indicate whether he was or wasn’t, and the subject had never come up.
Like many Jews of my age, I grew up believing “Jews aren’t allowed to be organ donors, because we need to be buried with all of our parts for when the Messiah comes.” Little did I know that 2,000 years ago that bubbemeise (grandmother’s story) had been put to rest!
We called our rabbi, who wasn’t sure of the halachic rules, and couldn’t help. Here we were, my mother and I, waiting for his body to go to the funeral home for the next day’s funeral, trying to make a decision in the midst of bewilderment, shock, disbelief and acute grief. The people on the phone at the organ bank were not only not helpful, but not compassionate. They wanted a yes–or–no answer.
My mother decided, “I don’t want him cut up,” and while I thought it would be nice to donate what could be used, I deferred to her. That decision haunted me for quite a while, but we had the competing mitzvot of honoring one’s parent and p’kuach nefesh, preservation of life, although in this case, someone else’s.
Jewish Medical Ethics is a required class at my seminary, the Academy for Jewish Religion, and I finally learned “what Judaism says” about organ donation. I put that in quotes, because while all three major movements agree that post-mortem organ donation is a mitzvah, a commandment, not surprisingly, not all Jews agree. My final project in that class was about organ donation, including sources from sacred and rabbinic texts.
There are lot of decisions that need to be made when a person dies suddenly or tragically, by families and medical professionals. A major secular concern regarding organ donation is that the medical staff won’t do everything they can to save the person; they might speed up death in order to “harvest” the organs. The determination of brain death might be in conflict with the determination of circulatory death. For very good reasons, the individuals working to keep a person alive isn’t aware of their organ donor status, and that’s probably the last thing on their minds. After all, they’re trained to fix and to heal.
A family in this situation should never have to make such a significant and potentially irrevocable decision in the throes of tragedy. My goal is to do my best to make sure others don’t end up in our situation. Registering to be an organ donor, at any age, gives your loved ones clear direction; it’s a legally binding document. It’s a gift you can give to them, along with the potential gift of life and health to someone else.
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