Organ Donation: Jews Can Learn Something From Atheists

[rug]

February 26, 2012 11:56 am
Author: Eliyahu Federman

Recently while renewing my driver’s license, the DMV attendant looked surprised when I requested organ donor designation. She remarked how she thought being an organ donor is against the Jewish religion. I suppose my yarmulke (head covering) gave away the fact that I was Jewish, but this encounter did not surprise me given conversations I’ve had with many of my religious friends who will not become posthumous organ donors because they believe it would interfere with a religious duty to be buried intact.

Last week the NY Times reported that in response to a growing resistance by Haredi Jewish patients unwilling to consider donating organs but perfectly willing to accept organs from others, Israel has become the first country to implement a priority system:

If two patients have identical medical needs for an organ transplant, priority will be given to the patient who has signed a donor card, or whose family member has donated an organ in the past.

- snip -

A student once asked a religious sage what lesson he could learn from an atheist. The sage answered: “If someone comes to you for help, you should never assume God will help him. Rather become an atheist for a moment by recognizing only you can help him.”

On the issue of posthumous organ donation my religious friends could learn a lesson from my atheist friends. They should recognize that only they can help those in need of organ transplants.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/02/26/organ-donation-jews-can-learn-something-from-atheists/

[saras]

1. If you're religious and someone comes to you for help, assume God sent them to the right place

[MarkCharles]

2. So, I'm ignorant on Judaism about this... Jews do NOT

donate their organs generally? I was not aware of that.

But do they or would they accept organs from other non-Jew donors?

OF COURSE!!!

Another example of religion getting in the way of rational and best humanitarian existence.

Talk me down on this one!

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Going from a British web page, it seems to be religious bureaucracy that gets in the way

In addition, Jewish patients will require agreement from their Rabbinic authority that death as defined by Jewish law has definitely occurred.
...
In principle Judaism sanctions and encourages organ donation in order to save lives (pikuach nefesh).

This principle can sometimes override the strong objections to any unnecessary interference with the body after death, and the requirement for immediate burial of the complete body.
...
Judaism insists that no organ may be removed from a donor until death - as defined in Jewish law - has definitely occurred. This can cause problems concerning heart, lung and similar transplants where time is of the essence.

Judaism insists that honour and respect are due to the dead (kavod hamet). After donation, the avoidance of unnecessary further interference with the body, and the need for immediate interment, are again of prime concern.

http://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/how_to_become_a_donor/religious_perspectives/leaflets/judaism_and_organ_donation.jsp

[snagglepuss]

8. If people believe that then those people should not receive organs

they themselves do not want to donate.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

11. Only the very religious do this.

It's my understanding that there are actually a lot of problems caused by the very conservative orthodox population of Israel in terms of receiving but refusing to give, both in terms of the welfare state and now organ donation. I believe their argument is that when they get public relief or an organ transplant, that's divine Providence, but when it's their turn to give, they have some convenient religious objection. So far as I know, most Jews are pretty secular when it comes to stuff like this.

Normally, when somebody espouses the view that one should be willing to receive an organ transplant, but should never donate, we would regard that as pretty despicable. Somehow, once we append this label of "religion" to it, it deserves polite deference. That kind of idea clearly disrupts the system for the rest of us, and if espoused for secular reasons it would never fly. It's kind of like the recent contraception dust-up; it's clearly a crock of shit, but just because somebody calls it their "religious belief," we have to defer to it. It's complete crap.

[SDjack]

3. Israel's approach makes sense. If you don't opt in the donation system, then you go to the end

of the line of candidate recipients. I will discuss with my attorney the possibility of limiting my organ donations to others in this order of priority: 1. Children (under 18) without conditions, 2. Adults (18 +) who can prove they were donation volunteers before their need arose, and lastly, 3. Adults who are not in the donation system.

[MarkCharles]

4. Israel's approach is inhumane!

Let those that believe in no organ donation sign a statement saying that they refuse modern medicine in the form of being recipients of organs.

Let the blind stay blind, the liver and kidney diseased stay liver and kidney diseased, and let them pay for their own care on dialysis.

WHY would Israel subsidize religious bigotry and ignroance?

[Behind the Aegis]

5. How is that subsidizing religious bigotry and ignorance.

Also, in your other post, it is "non-Jewish" not "non-Jew."

[MarkCharles]

12. So you don't accept NON Jewish organs?

Personally, I cannot see why anyone would defend a faith that equates their voluntary religious beliefs with the status of being gay, as your offensive avatar indicates.

Now, if you would stop being the English language Gestapo about my choice of words, however offensive you find them, Jews refer to themselves as Jews, but I cannot?

[Behind the Aegis]

14. Your post is filled with ignorance.

Jews can AND do donate organs. The "ban" is against while the person is alive, but even then, there are many who do donate kidneys, liver lobes, and skin.

You obviously have no idea what that avatar really means, which further demontrates your ignorant remarks. Why is it offensive to be proud of being Jewish and gay?

Learn the difference between using "Jew" and "Jewish." It isn't that you can't use "Jew," but rather how it is used.

The word Jew has been used often enough in a disparaging manner by antisemites that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was frequently avoided altogether, and the term Hebrew was substituted instead (e.g. Young Men's Hebrew Association). Even today some people are wary of its use, and prefer to use "Jewish". Indeed, when used as an adjective (e.g. "Jew lawyer&quot or verb (e.g. "to jew someone&quot ,[1] the term Jew is purely pejorative. However, when used as a noun, "Jew" is preferred, as other circumlocutions (e.g. "Jewish person&quot give the impression that the term "Jew" is offensive in all contexts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_(word)#Antisemitism

Also, where is your answer to the question posed to you?

[MarkCharles]

15. Of course YOU chose not to educate a single "ignorant" person...

like me, but you chose to show off your incredible religious arrogance, something which is over 2000 years of age, transmitted to you from your parents and your parents' parents, you just HAD to show you are more "educated" than "ignorant" me!

What a brilliantly blatant display of your "sacred" religious beliefs you have shown, how you embody the full humanistic meaning of your faith by belittling me!

That's just classic. All I can say, you belittle the "ignorant", you don't endeavor to educate, you just display your supreme sense of superiority over us all.

I asked questions about why you felt so superior, and why you didn't comport with the humanistic aims of modern medicine, namely: " to do the most good for the most people", from the Hippocratic Oath: "first, do no harm"

Obviously, you have no alliance whatsoever with that oath, your sole aim is to embarrass the ignorant, like me. I get it. Now if you never made fun of a gay person, like me, because of your better size or stature in our community, I would respect you, but somehow, I see your responses as part of a pattern: a pattern to misidentify yourself with the downtrodden, while you feel free to insult the less than well informed, you and I are not part of the people who don't sit around like we do with out computers on a Sunday afternoon, the people you so despise with your remarks, and your unwillingness to educate. People like me.

Now, Please! Tell us why we gay folks should associate ourselves with people like you; with your innate sense of superiority over us all. Tell us why you cannot educate us, and have to malign us. Are you THAT arrogant that you cannot do your fellow human beings the service of educating them when they, (evidently me among them) are wrong?

[Behind the Aegis]

17. I did educate you!

I explained that Jews DO donate their organs. I explained why your use of "non-Jew" was offensive. The rest of your rant makes no sense whatsoever, has nothing to do with your or my being gay other than you trying to re-direct your outrage over absolutely nothing! You asked NO questions about my superiority, but rather are claiming sonething that didn't happen and making a story of it. This is known as a strawman.

You STILL haven't asked the question posed to you, but rather blather on about unasked questions I didn't answer. Absurd, and disingenious!

[MarkCharles]

22. Jewish or gay, stop being offended

And stop asserting your superiority over non-Jews.

I made perfect sense to non-Jews. If you don't like that wording, too f*ckin bad. It's how we know ourselves when you call yourselves "Jews".

If you are offended by the term, try to live your life without being offended, that might start to make you a noble arguer for any cause. I'm so sick of people choosing to be offended by one silly term, when I have been offended by your religious beliefs since I was able to understand them. I am more offended by the word, "FAGGOT", evidently that has no effect upon you.

An insistence that a body go into the ground a day or two later, without being able to benefit humankind, simply because of religious thinking... think of how many thousands of lives that could have been saved without such rigid religious thought. But we are supposed to respect that?

Choose to be offended by the word "Jew" or "non Jew", while those of the Jewish faith call us "Gentiles" or "Goy"get over it and move to this century when so many millions of people of the Jewish faith use that word to describe themselves. This word game and the faux outrage has to stop. Get with our 21st century thought, either dead bodies can help mankind or they cannot. Keep religion and 3000 years of foolish history and being offended about old words out of this.

HONEST QUESTION: What is the best way to describe people NOT of the Jewish faith, if it is not "non-Jew" or "Goy" or "Goyshka"? Sometimes you folks invent these words, only to condemn them a few hundred years later.

[Behind the Aegis]

23. Are you fucking for real?!

You have the audacity to tell me what I cannot be offended by and that I need to "get over it," then launch into a diatribe about how YOU are offended?!

I never asserted my authority over anyone, Jewish or not. Your strawman comment reeks of paranoia. You barely know anything about Judaism, as evidenced by your remarks, yet you know what does and doesn't offend me? Laughable. The "victimization" in your comments are classic misdirection and pathetic, yet, I am not at all surprised you then turn around and make comments about "how to debate."

You want to be able to live you life your way, but someone with religious convictions cannot? Classic hypoctirical remark.

You demand I "educate" you and when I do, you basically tell me to get over it. So what you are saying is I am supposed to show you respect and defer to you, but you will not show me the same respect.

HONEST QUESTION: What is the best way to describe people NOT of the Jewish faith, if it is not "non-Jew" or "Goy" or "Goyshka"? Sometimes you folks invent these words, only to condemn them a few hundred years later.

I already told you. I even provided a fucking definition and why it was offensive. Love the "you folks" line. Classic!

[MarkCharles]

18. Your question had no question mark, therefore it was NOT..

a question.

If you want an answer ask a question.

You should have learned this in classes of rhetoric, or debate.

Ask the question, stop with the political subtext, ask a question.

Here's the answer, when you ask for it, I'm ready.

[Behind the Aegis]

19. How fucking disingenious!

Here: How is that subsidizing religious bigotry and ignorance?

Now it has a goddamed question mark!

[MarkCharles]

20. How many pages of research do you want to read?

We can agree on one thing. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and tens of thousands of gay people were killed, slaughtered, eliminated from the planet, for no reason, between 1934-1945.

That's where the comparison stops.

If you want a list of 100 or more references as to how Jewish people CANNOT equate themselves to people who are gay or lesbian, and how they continually wish they could become part of a genetic and apagenetic class of people, naturally produced in the human speicies for more than 10,000 years, before there was a Jewish faith. If you really want to go there, if you really want to make sure a few million people of the Jewish faith wish to re-align themselves with people who have been persecuted and killed for many more thousands of years, and then turn around and have members of the leadership of the Jewish faith condemn gays, out of the right to "free thought".

Come back when you do some study of the history of that, (your) faith and all the Biblical and other pronouncements in recorded history that denies gay people an identity nor any rights, yet insists upon supreme rights over Palestinians today. I am sick of the Jewish faith being portrayed as some faith ABOVE and better than Christianity, it has a longer history, a relatively more destructive history, and certianly, even today, has sects that practice as much bigotry as any Christian denomination.

TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION:

No nation should give people rights to deny their heirs and their community a right to life, while insisting upon a right for some believers to get medical services paid for by the taxpayer. Simple as that! If anachronistic religious beliefs are allowed, given tax supported medical care, THAT IS:

How that is subsidizing religious bigotry and ignorance.

[Behind the Aegis]

24. Drivel.

You battle on with your ignorant strawman and other logical fallacies.

You apparently aren't knowledgeable about Judaism, nor even interested in a dialogue. You simply want to excerise your ability to trash religion and make up issues. No nation should ever dictate what a person can do with his/her body or remains. I am pro-choice for that very reason; you appear not to be.

[MarkCharles]

25. You are about the most insulting person I have..

ever communicated with, willing to relegate tens or thousands of gay people's deaths to your cause of defending your religion as superior to any other aim in humanity, And to equate the right of a living woman's right to choose to that of a dead Jewish person's heirs to decide what to do with a dead body, well, I now see how illogical your arguments can get.

Dead body, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, or whatever faith, equal in the state of death as a rock.

For you to portray yourself as such a superior being and deny the difference between a living woman's right to choose and your religious rights to demand no desecration of dead bodies, absolutely irrational blatherings of an overly religious zealot. Totally without logic, and totally arrogant in your fallacious accusations about my thoughts or beliefs.

I assume you believe in a God. Too bad you have such infantile and meaningless fantasies to support your arrogance. But I am through with people like you, chosen ones.

[MarkCharles]

26. Thousands of historical and scientific pages. you call....

"DRIVEL"

Nice to know how educated YOU want to be!

[Behind the Aegis]

27. I was referring to your post!

[MarkCharles]

28. My post? The one where I asserted that...

there is actual evidence, versus your assertion that you must equate yourself with people of the pink triangle, simply because of how your parents raised you, not about something you actually suffered.

What offends me is when a religion, that continues until this day, to ridicule and deny rights to equal treatment of gay people, tries to align itself with the thousands of gay people who died alongside the millions of Jews who died in the Holocost...and still wants to deny people freedom, by defending their "religious" beliefs.

That disgusts me, in a symbol you feel no shame, (indeed a pride), in displaying.

When your entire religious faith eventually gets it together, and doesn't deny gay people their rights, THEN and ONLY THEN do you deserve to display that pink triangle, not until then, and certainly not when you insult people ignorant of your religious heritage, certainly not when you insult gay people in any way at all.

[Behind the Aegis]

29. You don't determine what I can and cannot use to express MY identity!

Are you saying I should be ashamed of being a Jew? Of proudly displaying an identifier of my religion and my sexual orienation? I amc gay and Jewish, and my avatar reflects two parts of my complex identity.

Take your own fucking advice and stop being offended, but I will expand it to actually mean, stop being offended at shit you make up about others.

[rug]

21. Be careful you don't use a semi-colon.

God knows what will ensue.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

7. I can think of few things more odious than an ideology

that proscribes the giving of organs, but not their reception. This is to regard others as simply existing for one's own benefit. It's as if to say, "Let them lose their souls, so long as I can go on living." It's hard to imagine anyone could be so selfish and vile. Before reading that, I never would have supported the idea of only saving the lives of other donors. Organ donation is not supposed to work that way; it's ultimately an altruistic act. It's only once people start preaching the doctrine that one should receive but never give that this kind of exclusion becomes necessary.

That aside, it has always seemed strange to me that organ donation is not compulsory. The majority view on the issue, that one should have some say over what happens to one's body after one is dead, seems sentimental and superstitious to me.

[MarkCharles]

16. Mandatory donations! Now THAT will...

go over big with those religious nuts!

Heck, the ONLY usefulness of an organ in the 12-20 hours after death is to preserve another human life for a few more hours, weeks, years!

That is blatantly obvious!

Religions, from Jewish to Catholic, will unilaterally oppose this, forever! I can bet on it!

Proving the lack of logic and lack of usefulness of any religion that gets all this messed up with some "soul" fantasy.

[unblock]

9. i'm jewish and i've always checked the organ donor box on my driver's license.

most jews i've talked to about organ donation have done likewise and NONE of the ones who didn't said anything about religious objections (it was invariably the usual paranoia of premature harvesting that made them not check the box.)

that said, judaism is like any other religions in that there's no shortage of variants and opinions and practices, so it wouldn't surprise me if some sects had a religious objection to posthumous organ donation.


in terms of the taking but not giving, thing, judaism has no beliefs whatsoever regarding the behavior of non-jews. jewish laws and customer pertain to jews only. jews don't ask non-jews to keep kosher. many jews believe, for instance, that they can't turn lights on on saturdays (shabbat) but non-jews can, so they could ask a non-jewish roomate to do this for them. similarly, they wouldn't require non-jews to keep thie bodies intact for burial, and why wouldn't they avail themselves of a life-saving medical procedure (saving a life is the highest priority in judaism; it's fine to turn on an electrial device on shabbat if it is necessary to save a life, e.g.)?

i think the solution to prioritize recipients who are also donors makes a lot of sense.

[Behind the Aegis]

10. Organ Donation: Where Your Religion Stands

None of the three major denominations of Judaism bans organ donation. Because Judaism believes the dead must be buried as quickly as possible, many believe that Jews cannot signed Universal Organ Donor cards, since removal of an organ would delay burial. But Conservative, Orthodox and Reform authorities have all said that if the reason for delay is to remove an organ that can save someone, the action is justified. Indeed, some rabbinical authorities assert that Jews are required by their faith to sign donor agreements, owing to the duty to save those in need. Some Orthodox Jewish interpretations forbid organ donation because it is viewed as mutilating a corpse, but this opinion is currently receding.

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2001/05/Organ-Donation-Where-Your-Religion-Stands.aspx?p=2#ixzz1nWeQucjk

Judaism

Main article: Organ donation in Jewish law

Jewish medical ethics takes a unique approach. It accepts organ donation as a meritorious charitable act, but with two conditions: that the donor be deceased before removal of the organ and that the organ be treated respectfully (and not, for instance, merely discarded if it for some reason becomes unusable). One of the ethical problem stems from a lack of consensus on the definition of "deceased." According to the strictest interpretation of halachah, "deceased" means the cessation of circulation, respiration, and brain activity. For most organs, once the heart stops beating and circulation stops it is too late for the donation to be medically useful. Nevertheless, for the adherent to this view, removal of organs prior to cessation of heartbeat would be tantamount to murder. Given the nature of the market for donated organs, the second condition would limit donation to a case where there is a known and ready need for that specific organ. Alternatively, a promise can be made to ensure a proper burial for a donated organ in the event that it is not transplanted. A movement to promote organ donation from Jews to the general population in consonance with halachah has been spearheaded by the Halachic Organ Donor Society.

Despite the adoption of whole brain criteria in the United States and "brain-stem" criteria in the United Kingdom, there has been some opposition to the brain death criteria (aka Neurological Criteria of Death). Some Orthodox rabbis have staunchly defended the definition of death as indicated by irreversible cessation of heart beat.[17] Conversely, some Orthodox rabbis and Israel's Chief Rabbinate have adopted determinations of death based on brain function irrespective of a beating heart.[18] As a result, Orthodox Jewish ethics has been sharply divided over key death-related policies. Tactically, Orthodox Jewish opponents to brain death have requested waivers from state law, as a matter of religious freedom, so as to continue relying on traditional indicators.[17][18] Meanwhile, proponents of organ donation such as Halachic Organ Donor Society have been active in advocating organ donations and transplants either at brain death or even at cessation of heart beat, where donation of corneas and skin is still medically possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_organ_donation#Judaism

[rug]

13. Those are interesting links.

I suppose the initial hesitation about organ donation was to preserve respect for the dceased and for the body. I think that was also the rationale for the Catholic Church's disapproval of cremation up until 20 or 30 years ago.