Thursday, December 25, 2008

Co-Existence, Israeli Style

I received a letter from my friend at a hospital in the North whcih again gives the example of what good relations between citizens in the area can mean and should mean. Oh, that the Gazans could learn from this.

A senior nurse who for the past eleven years has acted as the Transplant Coordinator between his hospital and the Israeli Ministry of Health’s National Transplant Center related the following story:

On November 26, 2008, a 54 year-old man was tragically pronounced brain dead here in the hospital. His wife, also a nurse at the hospital, immediately informed the transplant coordinator of her desire to donate her husband’s organs so that others may live.


Thus began intense communications between the hospital and the National Transplant Center, which culminated several hours later in coordinated operations (in several hospitals) that gave renewed life to seven Israelis. One received a liver, two received kidneys, two received heart valves and two received corneas. Among them were both Jews and Arabs; each a human being in desperate need of a medical miracle. This death gave life to others, people he never knew.

When asked what were the most emotionally-charged moments of the wife's long career as a nurse, without hesitation, she said, “The moment when a family agrees to donate their loved one’s organs to strangers. That precise instance is the most difficult moment in a person’s life … it’s the intersection where death meets life.”

The dead man, like hundreds of others, became unknowing heroes in their deaths. Their families gave the gift of renewed life to total strangers and lengthened an unbreakable thread that weaves throughout our society.

The Jewish commitment to life is exemplified the medical center’s absolute coordinated efforts between medical departments, physicians, nurses, technicians and administrative staff. The gift of life could not be delivered were it not for their combined timely efforts.

Dare we hope that one day in our lifetime the gift of life takes precedence over death as is promoted by the terrorists whose aim is to destroy Israel?

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