Jewish Bone Marrow Donor and Recipient Meet (3-Minute Emotional Video)
The pedophile crisis in my neighborhood has torn off my blinders, flesh and all. And it hurts. It hurts terribly to realize how evil people can be. How people can purposefully hurt children so horrifically and feel zero regret for what they did.
But, at the same time, realizing how evil people can be has given me new-found appreciation for how good people can be as well. When I mistakenly believed (as I did until a few months ago) that every Jew was essentially good, then I took others’ goodness for granted. Like the fact that they had two arms or two legs or one nose.
But I don’t take goodness for granted anymore. Nowadays, others’ kindness moves me profoundly…
So the following story of selfless giving moved me deeply…An Australian woman named Esther Ciechanowski endured the painful procedure necessary in order to donate bone marrow to save the life of a total stranger–a 15-year-old Israeli girl named Einat. Watch their emotional meeting this week in the video below…Thanks to JewishMOM Nechama Shmerling (who happens to be Esther’s co-teacher) for sending me this beautiful video:)
Why I am a Platonist: With Platonism, on the other, we expect to find that the world is imperfect. Ugliness, wrong, ignorance, hatred, death, folly, and evil are all around us in such profusion that it takes little effort to find them, if they have not already been brought directly to us in the most unasked, unwelcome, and unpleasant ways. In the Book of Job, we have the question why an omnipotent God allows all this to go on — the Problem of Evil.
The Book does not answer this. It says first of all the the friends of Job that believed in rewards for good deeds and punishment for bad deeds were wrong. Job accused Hashem of being unjust and Hashem said in the end of the book that Job was right. But the book does present at the very end that after all this there is a level– a higher level in which things really do work out the way they are supposed to.
Thanks for the lovely story. Just a point of reference: bone marrow aspiration is done with a topical anesthesia and not all that painful. Aftercare is a bandaid and 2 ibuprophen. I don’t want anyone to be fearful of donating.
Discovering the evil in our midst impacted me the same way. Thank G-d, I’ve come to see that the evil is balanced by goodness, so every mitzva we do counts so much.
A wonderful postscript to this moving story: Esther, did find her long-sought partner in life, married and became a mother after 40,