It’s always a pleasure to see my neighbor Rabbi Avraham Yeshayah Heber. Especially between Minchah and Maariv. When he comes to daven in the minyan we hold in the lobby of our building we can tell by his stride and the expression on his face if he has good news.

During the break we ask him “Nu Reb Avraham Yeshayah? How many today?”

With his usual modest smile he answers “Today? A kollel yungerman and a little boy from a settlement in Samaria. They’re both still in the hospital.”

***

Being well acquainted with this man we know he isn’t talking about accident victims. The subject at hand is transplants. The kollel yungerman has volunteered without remuneration to donate a kidney to a little boy whose kidneys have given out and who cannot survive much longer on dialysis.

“The operation was successful” he tells us with satisfaction. “The two of them are still under anesthesia but the doctors are very pleased.”

And of course Rabbi Heber is very pleased too. He can check off one more entry in the records of his organization “Gift of Life ” which is dedicated to soliciting kidney donations and matching the donors up with recipients. With every successful operation that takes place he thanks Hashem for allowing him to be instrumental in saving one more Jewish life.

This is Rav Avraham Yeshayah Heber a talmid chacham who disseminates Torah in a prominent Jerusalem yeshivah dedicating the rest of his time and his life to the mitzvah of hatzalas chaim. If not for his efforts as a go-between many kidney patients would no longer be in this world. Rabbi Heber has a personal reason for his enterprise. Having received the gift of life himself in the form of a donated kidney he is daily thankful to be alive and his work is an expression of that gratitude.

I stand among the others watching his face and listening closely as he tells the story of how he found a donor for this terminally ill boy whose eyes had almost lost their childish sparkle due to his suffering and how the yungerman who had decided to become a donor had persuaded his worried wife to agree and with true mesirus nefesh to share the huge merit of the mitzvah with him. While sharing these details Rabbi Heber is practiced in the art of preserving medical discretion and says nothing that might betray the identity of either patient or donor. He tells us about the couple’s consultation with a kidney specialist who assured them that the risk involved was minimal and that the young man could definitely live a fully normal life with one kidney. “If that’s true ” the yungerman’s wife wanted to know “then why did Hashem create man with two kidneys?” Without missing a beat the doctor answered “One to keep him alive and the other to save another life.”

Standing there as the last rays of daylight filter into the lobby listening to Rabbi Heber talk about his work with such understated yet obvious joy I can’t help but think of the contrast between him and the distorted image of the chareidi Jew being held up to the public eye in the current atmosphere of incitement surrounding the issue of “sharing the burden.” With all the passion about drafting yeshivah bochurim the uninitiated might well think that chareidim are apathetic to their nation’s needs and hold themselves aloof with an attitude of selfish superiority. For me at least Rabbi Heber is a living walking rebuttal to that view a true embodiment of “sharing the burden” if ever there was one.

There is little point in listing the many organizations founded by chareidi Jews in Israel for the benefit of the general public such as Yad Sarah Ezra Umarpeh headed by the indefatigable Rav Elimelech Firer and Rav Chananya Chulek’s Ezer Mizion which have contributed so much to the health of Israel’s people (yes including the Arabs as well) not to mention Zaka Hatzolah and other life-saving organizations which everybody benefits from and nobody wants to remember as the fierce debate rages on. Rabbi Heber has displayed time and again that people will willingly give an organ out of their own body in order to save another person’s life. If we’re talking about sharing the burden this is the big leagues.

How far does this go? Several weeks ago a conference took place at Tel Aviv University to mark the fifth anniversary of the Organ Transplant Act a law designed to prevent trafficking in human organs. The discussion that took place concerning the conditions surrounding transplants before and after the law was enacted took a surprising and interesting turn.

An audience of hundreds was astounded to hear from experts in the field Professor Eitan Mor and Dr. Chagai Boaz who conducted comprehensive research spanning several years on how the law has affected the type of people giving live kidney donations — that is healthy individuals consciously choosing to have a kidney surgically removed from their own body and transplanted in the body of a dialysis patient an act of outstanding generosity from a higher plane. It turns out that over the last five years there has been a major change in the population of donors from outside the patient’s family. What was once the province of exploitative profit-seekers has been taken over by altruistic donors for the most part from the yeshivah world and the chareidi community in general.  

Professor Mor who is director of the transplant department at Beilinson Medical Center said that these new donors tended to be people who were not related to the patient and who donated for altruistic reasons. Compared to the sample group before the law was passed they were better off financially older and more educated. The study also found a unique group of charedi men mainly those who had chosen to adopt a religious lifestyle later in life who wished to donate a kidney to an unrelated person as a mitzvah. The percentage of altruistic donors who were educated in yeshivah and in kollel rose from 2 percent of the total number of altruistic donors before the law to 22 percent after it was passed. At the same time altruistic donations by non-Jewish Israelis decreased from 37.5 percent before the law was passed to only 8.3 percent afterward.

Of course the attendees as the conference all turned and looked at Rabbi Heber. They asked him to explain what motivates people to donate a kidney to a total stranger. (In fact Rabbi Heber told me in private conversation that a clear majority of donors are chareidim while some 60 percent of the transplant recipients are not religiously observant.)

And how did Rav Heber respond? “I simply described to them the home I grew up in. My father and teacher he should live and be well would get up every morning and ask himself ‘What will I do today for Klal Yisrael?’ There wasn’t a day when that question didn’t arise and it was accompanied by a lifetime of quiet volunteer activity l’shem Shamayim. This was the kind of home I was raised in. And most of the people (nearly 90) who have voluntarily donated kidneys in the last few years were raised with a similar outlook.”

These are facts that speak for themselves amid all the noise and clamor directed against the chareidi community today. We can hold our heads up in pride because yes we share the burden (beyond the great burden of Torah learning) in our way according to the Torah tradition.

Food for Thought

A Jew without mesirus nefesh

is no Jew at all

(Rebbe Mordechai of Lechowitz)