Last month, we marked National Organ Donor Week. The idea of organ donation isn’t something we should take for granted, nor is it something we should assume will be available to us when it’s needed. Right now, 6,000 people are waiting for an organ, and an average of five people die every week waiting for one to be donated.

But the numbers don’t tell the whole tale.

Consider the story of Alisa Flatow, 20, who in 1995 took the year off to study at a Jerusalem yeshiva. She decided before Passover to travel to Gaza, but she never made it. A Hamas suicide bomber drove his van into the bus she was travelling on, mortally wounding her.

Arriving from his home in New Jersey, Stephen Flatow confirmed that the brain-dead young woman on life support was his daughter. Hospital staff asked him whether he would be willing to donate his daughter’s organs. After consulting with their rabbi, Stephen and his wife decided to donate Alisa’s organs to six people on a waiting list who were clinging to life.

Alisa once wrote, “As Jews, it is our responsibility to help Jews less fortunate than we are.”

Her heart was successfully transplanted into a 56-year-old man who had been waiting more than a year for one. Her pancreas and one kidney were transplanted into a 42-year-old woman with kidney failure who was reported to have been waiting 20 years for the organs.

Flatow’s lungs, liver and other kidney were transplanted into other patients. Her corneas were donated to the eye bank at Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva.

Her father said, “People have called it a brave decision, a righteous decision, a courageous decision. To us, it was simply the right thing to do at the time. I didn’t know what all the media attention was about. But as I was leaving Israel, at the airport, I mentioned this to a journalist, who said to me, ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’”

What Alisa’s father didn’t understand was the emotional impact his family’s gesture had on a grieving country – an impact captured by the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said at the time that “Alisa Flatow’s heart beats in Jerusalem.”

The Toronto Board of Rabbis and the provincial agency responsible for administering the organ donation program have joined forces to defeat the idea that organ donation is forbidden in Judaism.

Some believe it will preclude them from being buried in a Jewish cemetery. But I’m here to tell you that this belief is false. Since the 1950s, leading rabbinic authorities have looked upon this new technology as a way to fulfil the divine mandate to save a life – an obligation first expressed in the Torah itself: “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour.” This obligation also includes giving blood, bone marrow transplants and donating redundant organs.

Judaism affirms this principle in the most unambiguous terms, because no one should see the preservation of human life as optional – for Jews, it is obligatory.  

Judaism urges that consent be given for post-mortem organ donation when requested by doctors and hospitals for use when directly needed for life-saving transplantation procedures. This applies to an individual in anticipation of his or her own death, as well as to health-care proxies or next of kin whenever they are legally empowered to make such decisions. It’s our belief that by so doing, we render a profound and genuine honour to the deceased.

Rabbi Flanzraich is spiritual leader of Beth Sholom Synagogue in Toronto.