#1070 Renal Rabbinical

Our world just seems to be getting crazier every day. Partly it’s people being what they’ve always been, corrupt, greedy, and immoral, and partly its people using those traits with new technology.
Communications technology has improved so drastically since a few decades ago, that the world’s most elusive terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, continues to be able to issue taped missives from remote hideouts. “It’s the newest Bin Laden tape,” the media will crow, and out will come his most recent hits against Satan America.
The same Satan who invented all the technology Osama gets his message across with. Go internet.
His messages are treated like new releases from pop stars. I’m surprised his latest MP3s aren’t downloadable on iTunes.
And now it seems refrigeration technology has made it possible for corrupt physicians, mayors and rabbis to be involved in a kidney black market. Whether you checked your organ donor box on your license or not, your body parts may end up being acquired by someone else, for a price. A recent corruption probe in New Jersey netted a number of mayors and a whole bunch of rabbis who were making both money laundering and an illegal organ donor scam work. Is this what they mean by organ-ized crime?
And the rabbis who facilitated the process—how? Had they counseled a crooked physician? Did they talk some poor schmuck into donating one of his kidneys for a low price and then turn around and sell it really high?
Or were they there just to make sure the rendering was kosher, in case one of the recipients down the line asked.
It presents a religious dilemma. Do the injunctions of Leviticus have anything to say about transplants? You’re not eating the organ, but it’s certainly going into your body.
I just figure if I were a rabbi, my first thought would be, is it legal? Render unto Caesar what is Caesar, only then can you make salad.
And in New Jersey of all places. Wow. You knew from their license plates that they were the Garden State. But I bet you didn’t know one of things they were harvesting was human organs.
America, ya gotta love it.