Three Units
I lost the first three days of this week to a migraine. Tuesday’s Israel Brief didn’t go out. The monthly Vantage slid to Wednesday. I spent most of those days in a dark room feeling bad about both, which is really quite useless. But, what can you do?
So it was a slow week. Work, study, not much else.
Yesterday evening, I was standing across the street. Waiting for a pizza. Kosher pizza, in Kiryat Shmona. With onions, olives, and mushrooms. It was better than we expected. While we waited, we chatted with a haredi fellow who had come up for a few days with his wife and their kid. On vacation. Up here. He fell in love with the place when his Rabbi took them up with his Hesdar class. There has been smoke coming over the hill from Lebanon for days now, thick enough to see from (and sometimes somewhat choke) the main street. His boy hung off his arm asking about something he’d been promised. While his wife waited in the car — pregnant. So their trip to Miami will have to wait until next year.
My phone went off while we were talking. A friend, on WhatsApp. Her daughter is in hospital, and they had put three units of blood into her.
Three units. Somebody else’s, three times over.
After Shabbat is over we’re going to find somewhere to give blood. It seemed like the least we could do other than the Mi Shebeirach.
This week’s parsha is Re’eh, and in the middle of it Moshe is working through what happens once the people are spread across a country and the sanctuary is a long walk away. You can slaughter at home, he tells them. Eat it in your own town. Anyone may eat it, pure or impure, the way you’d eat a deer or a gazelle. He finishes with the practical steps and says something striking. Something he repeats just a few verses later.
רַ֥ק הַדָּ֖ם לֹ֣א תֹאכֵ֑לוּ עַל־הָאָ֥רֶץ תִּשְׁפְּכֶ֖נּוּ כַּמָּֽיִם׃
But you must not partake of the blood; you shall pour it out on the ground like water.
The second time he attaches a reason, and he opens it with a verb you don’t expect on a kitchen rule.
רַ֣ק חֲזַ֗ק לְבִלְתִּי֙ אֲכֹ֣ל הַדָּ֔ם כִּ֥י הַדָּ֖ם ה֣וּא הַנָּ֑פֶשׁ וְלֹא־תֹאכַ֥ל הַנֶּ֖פֶשׁ עִם־הַבָּשָֽׂר׃
But make sure that you do not partake of the blood; for the blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh.
Rak chazak. Only be strong. Rashi brings two readings of why that word is in the verse at all. Rabbi Yehuda says you only tell a man to be strong about something he wants, so the plain sense is that people craved it and had to be pulled off it. Ben Azzai takes it the other way — nobody actually longs for blood, and if the Torah thought even this one needed a “be strong,” you can work out for yourself what the commandments that are genuinely hard are going to ask of you.
Either way, the reason Moshe gives has nothing to do with appetite. Ki hadam hu hanafesh. The blood is the nefesh — the life, whatever is present in a living creature and gone from a carcass. That is why it cannot go into you. It isn’t yours to absorb. And when you are holding it and you cannot use it, you put it back into the ground the way you would pour out water.
There is exactly one arrangement anybody has ever built where the nefesh in blood is meant to travel out of one person and into another, and it runs on plastic bags, refrigerators, a folding chair and a cookie. Three units went into a woman this week. That means three people, on three unremarkable afternoons, sat in that chair and gave away the thing Devarim says you may not so much as eat. None of them will ever hear her name.
We will say the Mi Shebeirach for her tomorrow. We will mean it in earnest. But… I have no patience for the version of any religion that treats prayer as what you reach for once the useful options are gone or the full extent of your obligations.
The man outside the pizza place asked how things had been up here. I said it had been a slow week, which was true, and left out the migraine and the brief that didn’t go out. Next to a hillside smoking since Sunday and a kid on a ward, it seemed inappropriate to complain. He said that they were enjoying their bungalow and time outside more than expected. Though he was anxious to get back to work.
In a few hours we will light the candles. Sunday, we will head to the nearest blood mobile and give what we can. The parsha says the blood is the life, and I have spent this week with a headache and all of mine, while a friend spent it next to a bed that needed three units of somebody else’s.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham