The Reality of Organ Transplants

Is it vivisection? There is a new book out -- Erasing Death -- by Sam Parnia that changes a lot about the ethics of organ donation. In his book he makes the case that death is a process, not some single event, and that it takes hours, not minutes for brain cells to die, refuting the popular wisdom taught in CPR classes that one's brain is dead after 7 minutes without oxygenated blood flow. By proper techniques such as chilling the victim of cardiac arrest, it is possible to restore him or her to normal life, and not as a vegetable, either. So, even though the heart is not beating and the brain is flat lined, the patient should not be declared dead until at least four hours. The time to declare the patient dead from cardiac arrest is when all the cells of the body are irretrievably dead, which means that the patient's organs are no longer suitable for donation. I regret to have to say it, but those donated organs were probably harvested from a recoverable person. Reply

Organ Donation Rabbi should know that there are transplant surgeons who are now obtaining lungs and hearts from Deceased Cadaveric Donors. DCD is a donor who died as a result of heart stopping, not brain death.

I am a recipient of a pair of lungs and the only thing the donor family wanted was to know that recipients are doing well. Reply

Jewish Law re: cold and calculating

All Torah can be summed up in Do Unto Others...so the ethics do supersede the "cold laws". As to law, it's about wisdom, and we know there is no wisdom not tempered with compassion. Fundamentalism does not examine the gray areas with respect to compassion.
We are made to "think".

As to return, mitzvot we should do without expectation of return.

Laws or rules are actually made to be broken depending on the morality involved and so we have to "temper" the letter of the law.

The reason we have interpretation is because "laws" such as the Commandments, might have been written in stone, but through the ages, we did learn there were areas of gray, and actually most ethical issues do take place in the "gray area". We have rules to guide us, but we debate for a reason.

There was a joke that Moses was the first to break the rules because he broke the tablets. And actually there is this charge against Moses. He was human and we are all of us, fallible. Reply

Organ Donation To say it is normal to ask for something in return from a living donor, I find very distasteful. When you do a mitsvah, big or small, it is un-mencsh-like (or worse) to ask for something in return.
I received two lung that allowed me to live. The parents do not want to be contacted...(their daughter was the organ donor) but if I did, do you think I would DARE ask them if they would like something to show my gratitude? I think it's an insult to all parties concerned. Reply