In I got It!
Dead or Alive?
There is a wide difference between what halacha determines as the state of death and what science has determined.
According to Jewish Law, a living person may not donate an organ if it is likely that this will shorten his lifespan. The donation of organs is only permitted if it does not shorten the lifespan of the donor or if the donor is unquestionably dead and the donation will save the life of the recipient.
In cases of heart donations, the donation is only possible when the donor is brain dead but his heart is still pounding, albeit not pumping blood to the brain. During heart transplants, time is a crucial factor in the success of the transplant.
Therefore, the moment of death, from which point it is permitted to donate an organ, is of extreme importance regarding organ donation, and there are several methods of determining that moment.
Clinically, the moment of death occurs when a person is brain dead, a state referred to as 'clinical death'. In this situation, the brain ceases to send signals to the nervous system and loses control over the internal and external organs. However, according to Jewish Law, the moment of death is determined when the heart ceases to beat, a state called cardiac death. Due to the fact that the heart can continue to beat after clinical death – Jewish Law forbids the extraction of any organ if it would shorten the person's life and bring about cardiac arrest, even if clinical death has already been announced and even if the heart continues to beat only with the assistance of a pacemaker or a heart-lung machine.
Since medically speaking, the heartbeats that continue after clinical death are only considered involuntary spasms and do not indicate that the person is still alive, but according to Jewish Law it is indeed referred to as a sign of life – many disagreements between medical experts and Rabbis proficient in Jewish Law have erupted. Furthermore, rare cases of clinically dead people whose brains were somehow revived and returned to functioning have also served as a basis for controversy and heated debates on this issue.
According to the ruling of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliyashiv it is forbidden to extract organs from a person who is clinically dead but whose hearts is still beating. Rabbi Shmuel Halevi Wosner agrees with Rabbi Eliyashiv's ruling and adds that we mortals should not interfere with life given by G-d.
An average person's heart beats approximately three billion times throughout his lifetime, during which two hundred thousand liters of blood are pumped.
The size of the average heart is like that of a closed fist. A man's heart weighs 285 grams while a woman's heart weighs 225 grams. The brain's weight is 1.125 times more than that of the heart, making it 1.43 kilos for men and 1.27 kilos for women.