Several years ago, on Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi at my parents' synagogue gave a talk on the Jewish view of organ donation. Because if you ask the average Jewish layperson, a pretty good number will tell you that Jewish law forbids organ donation. But it's actually a whole lot more nuanced than that, so that there are certain things that are allowed and others that aren't, and the talk was clarifying a bunch of that, giving different rabbis' opinions on it, and handing out organ donor cards (after noting that, in NJ, checking off the boxes on the back of your driver's license isn't legally binding at all -- it's just noting a preference.)
(Essentially, it gets down to that Jews are allowed to donate organs if it will directly save someone's life. So, donating a heart or a kidney or something for a transplant is OK. Donating the same heart or kidney for research is not. Donating something like eyes that'll help someone but not directly save their life is not. It's a balance between the laws about not desecrating the body with the law that it's OK to violate any other law in order to save a life.)
Do the rules apply to accepting non-life-saving organs too?
(I'll bet that is not a simple answer either)
I need to get a Recycle symbol tatooed on myself somewhere.
Hee.
Oooh. I just re-compiled my family tree, with a bunch more data I've added to the file. I'm now up to nearly 700 people total, with 378 descendants of the most-distant known ancestor on my dad's side. (This 378 include, so far, six people named Jakob Nathan born in 1903 or 1904. All born within the same three towns. Two of them have the same last name.)
Any chance he was just a bigamist?
I have a question for parents.
At what age did you start letting your babies cry a bit without picking them up right away?
I thought, yeah, students should hear both sides. Even though I think creation is highly unlikely, I think people should be presented with the facts and learn how to make up their own minds about stuff.
The scientific facts support evolution. Creationism is a belief system. Teaching creationism alongside evolutionism implies it has significant grounding in science, which it doesn't. Public schools have a mandate to teach without religious bias, which means that a discussion of creationist beliefs would be appropriate in English (if studying Genesis) or history (if studying religions), but not in science. Biasing a science curriculum to appease one specific religion is vastly unfair to all of the students, imo.
Sorry, sore spot for me.
