The Torah of Chesed: Why I Became A Kidney Donor

New York Jewish Week | Dr. Devora Steinmetz


Last Sunday afternoon, I was wheeled into an operating room in Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva, an anesthesiologist said laila tov, and a surgeon removed my left kidney, which was brought to an adjoining operating room and put into the abdomen of a twenty-three year old Israeli dental student from Georgia, FSU, whom I met for the first time three months ago.

I told very few people about my impending kidney donation before Sunday, mostly close family and friends, plus a few people with whom I had had to repeatedly cancel appointments in order to pursue the extensive regimen of medical tests, psychological testing, and ethics committee interview that Israel has put in place in an attempt to ensure that donors are not offering their kidneys for personal gain, that they are not at unduly high risk for medical or psychological complications, and that they understand and have given sufficient consideration to their choice to become a living kidney donor. I have decided now to write publicly about my kidney donation in an attempt to call attention to the critical shortage of transplant organs—in Israel in particular—and to the opportunity to become a living kidney donor.

In addition, I want to explain my own choice to become a living donor and how I have come to understand my decision. This because I am all too aware that, while people openly tend to express admiration to the donor and to his or her family, there is all too often an assumption that a person who chooses to do such a thing is either a little crazy or exceptionally righteous—in either case, someone most unlike oneself and one’s friends. Indeed, just last year, as I was in the process of testing for a different kidney patient (for whom I ended up not being a match), a mature and thoughtful student in my Talmud class used the example of “people who donate their kidney to a stranger” to illustrate the kind of person who is insufferably righteous—the kind of person of whom it’s good to have a few in the world but whom you really don’t want to be around.

Read more: http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/opinion/torah_chesed_why_i_became_kidney_donor

{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}