It's truly an honor to be here this evening, and I'd like to thank Rabbi Gibson for inviting me. I've had the privilege of speaking to a number of different groups over the past year, but the invitation to come home is always the most special.

When Rabbi Gibson invited me to speak this Shabbat, he told me that tonight's parasha, K'doshim, is, and this is a quote, "The best single parasha in the entire book of Leviticus." No pressure. I shall do my best.

I belong to an extremely informal, loosely-knit neighborhood watch group called "WINK." WINK stands for Wilkins Neighborhood Kvetchers. It consists of my family, the family next door and one family down the street. The chief activity of WINK seems to be the annual barbecue, at which we all get together, eat hot dogs, drink sangria and, well, kvetch. We try to look out for one another and help each other when we can. Our children adore each other. We're good neighbors.

One night last Fall, I was awakened by screams. A neighbor was being attacked on the street. Brian turned on all the outside lights. I dialed 911, but I couldn't get through. Our neighbor ran out on the porch and yelled at the attacker to get away, which, thank God, he did. As people started to emerge from their houses, I saw why I hadn't been able to get through. I, the woman next door and the woman up the street -- the women of WINK -- had all been calling simultaneously. We had jammed the circuits.

In tonight's Torah portion, K'doshim, we read the commandment, "You shall not stand idly while your neighbor's blood is being shed." It doesn't take a WINK member to know what that means. And it isn't too much of a stretch to see this commandment in a more global context. Our neighbor isn't just the person next door or down the street, but also our global neighbors. In the name of Torah and this commandment, Jews can and do rightfully speak out against hate crime and genocide against our people and against other peoples -- here, in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, and around the world. You shall not stand idly, and, hopefully, we don't.

This commandment and the Torah portion in which we read it are so important that we read them twice a year. Once now, and once on Yom Kippur afternoon, as we reflect upon our sins. For the first 27 Yom Kippurim of my life, I heard this commandment and considered whether I had done my best to uphold it -- to come to the aid of my neighbors when they were the victims of violence. For 27 years I had no doubt that I understood this commandment, and I had no experience at being that neighbor whose blood was being shed. I was the helper, others were the victims, and, frankly, that was ok with me.

Then, in March of 1998, when I was 6 months pregnant, my husband called me ato work. Since Brian never calls me at work, I figured someone had died, and I was calculating who it might be and how much time I could take off to go to a funeral. But what he said caught me totally by surprise and changed my life forever.

"My platelet count is 19."

Platelets are the part of your blood that make it clot -- without them you bleed to death. A normal platelet count is over 150. When Brian was a teenager he had an unexplained low platelet count which eventually went away. They told him it was possible he was in a pre-leukemic state. Now he had gone in for a blood test and the count was 19.

Leukemia, I thought. It's finally happened. The hematologist wasn't nearly as concerned -- an "immune system fluke" was her guess, but they ran more tests.

When the diagnosis came back, of all that I was told, all I heard was "it's not leukemia." I rejoiced. What I did not hear -- what it took me almost a month to process -- was the diagnosis Myelodysplastic Syndrome, the description progressive, life-threatening bone marrow disease, and the prognosis, a median life expectancy of 5 to 6 years.

It soon became clear that Brian did not have 5 or 6 years. He probably had two at the outside. His platelet count dropped to the point where he needed transfusions. You cannot keep someone alive by giving them transfusions forever. Eventually the body builds up so many antibodies to the foreign matter you are pouring into it that it rejects the new blood. Brian needed a bone marrow transplant. His best chance for a match would have been a sibling, but he is an only child. Like the vast majority of patients in need of transplant, his was going to have to come from an unrelated, anonymous donor. Without transplant, he would die. With transplant, he still was only given a 75% chance.

Just as we began telling our friends and family the news, I was put on bedrest for premature labor. The phone and the doorbell started ringing. Friends offered rides and food. People came to sit with us. People came to make us laugh. People came to just be.

Three months later, our daughter, Eve Joelle, was born. Sixty people jammed our living room on her eighth day not just to welcome her to our community, but to sing her in with songs of joy and praise. Not one person asked about Brian. Not one person whispered about how tragic our lives were. That wasn't what it was all about.

But Brian's illness went on, and the search for a marrow donor dragged on. Brian now needed platelet transfusions almost every week, and it was suggested that he might have a better chance of surviving his transplant if his platelets came consistently from one person. We needed a single donor who would donate platelets once a week for Brian.

So we did what people do in a crisis these days. We sent out email. We wrote to everybody we knew in Pittsburgh with this request: We need a healthy, A+ donor who is willing to donate platelets through a process called apheresis, where they spin the platelets out of the blood and return the rest to the donor, every week for two or more months.

Our friends responded in droves. For the most part, however, they couldn't help. Many were the wrong blood type or were sick themselves. Some were going out of town for the holidays. At the end of the day, we had many offers and no donor.

Then the phone rang. It was a lecturer from Brian's department, a man he barely knew. His wife was A+. She had already called the blood bank to set things up. For the next four months, this wonderful woman whom to this day neither Brian nor I have ever met, donated platelets for Brian for two hours every 8 or 10 days. She didn't know us. She got nothing out of it except the satisfaction of knowing that she saved someone's life.

Meanwhile, Brian's search for a marrow donor went on. Through the National Marrow Donor Program, a large number of potential matches were found. But as we started sorting through them, we learned that although Brian's preliminary marrow type was very common, his detailed type was fairly rare. The search dragged on. His counts dropped. We got scared, realizing that we were running out of time and we were probably going to have to go with a mismatched donor. And mismatched transplants are much more complicated and dangerous, as though a 25% chance of dying wasn't bad enough.

In early April of 1999, we got the call that every Bone Marrow Transplant family dreams of. They had a perfect match. A 28 year-old man in Australia was going to donate marrow and save Brian's life. We don't know him, and although we may have the opportunity to meet him someday, chances are we never will. My sister calls him "the mensch down under."

Last April 24 was Shabbat K'doshim, and I can tell you with certainty I wasn't in shul. Just 48 hours before we were to board the plane which would take us to Seattle for Brian's transplant, and faced with a 1 in 4 chance that Brian would not return home, we did the only thing it made any sense to do. We had a party. We packed the house with sweets, invited our friends, and shaved Brian's head. About to lose his hair to chemo, Brian defiantly refused to have any hair to lose. After auctioning the rights to first crack at the clippers to benefit a marrow typing fund set up in Brian's name, his friends took turns adding stripes, mohawks, and circles to his head, before I finally finished off his hair.

Brian's marrow arrived in a cooler carried by an Australian doctor one night last May. The transplant itself was a non-event -- essentially a blood transfusion done by a nurse in his hospital room. As the cells made their way down the IV tubing, Brian put "Fanfare for the Common Man" on the stereo. The hard part was yet to come. For that one night, it felt like all the forces of the entire world had organized to bring Brian his marrow. I sent out a Shehechiyanu over email to our friends at home, and thanked God for the mensch down under.

I'm not going to lie to you. Bone marrow transplant is the worst procedure modern medicine has invented. In order to kill the diseased marrow, you have to give enough chemotherapy, or a combination of chemo and radiation, to kill the patient, and then give the new marrow to save their life. It is painful, it is scary, and it is not always successful. On Brian's 20-bed floor, four of his neighbors never left the hospital, and one died shortly after discharge. Three of our closest friends died from complications. In this day and age of drive-through deliveries and outpatient mastectomies, the average marrow transplant patient stays in the hospital for about a month.

Brian had his transplant 2,000 miles from home. Before we left, we asked our friends not to forget us, and they didn't. One person coordinated a phone-call schedule to ensure that both Brian and I had at least one call from home every day for the four months we were gone. Another video-taped our friends as they shared warm wishes and silly greetings on a tape we played in Brian's hospital room the day of his transplant. Another wrote us a song, and another made Brian a quilt. Balloons arrived from the Temple Sinai Saturday Morning Minyan, and donations poured into Brian's marrow typing fund. 2,000 miles from home, we were certain every day that our friends and family were with us.

I am pleased to tell you that on May 22, Brian will mark what we call his "first re-birthday." He is doing well. He is a part-time stay at home Dad for Eve, now almost two, and working on his dissertation. Because of the drugs he continues to take which suppress his immune system, he is still not permitted to be around crowds, so he couldn't be here tonight. His recovery isn't over. It won't be for a long time. But every day that goes by makes it more likely that he will make it.

So, it's a good story. But why am I telling you it tonight? Why is it appropriate for this Shabbat, K'doshim? Because, one year ago, your neighbor, my husband's blood was being shed. And one year ago, people chose not to stand idly by.

Surely the hero of this story is his donor, an Australian stranger, a man who was given the opportunity to save the life of someone, somewhere, someday, and took that opportunity to register as a potential marrow donor. A man who said, "If my neighbor, a person with the same bone marrow type as me, if his blood is ever being shed, I will not stand idly." And the hero is his platelet donor, and the other blood donors who donated the estimated 100 blood products which supported Brian before and during his transplant. People who said, "If your blood is being shed, you can have some of mine."

Those heroes are real and they are obvious. But my experience over the last two years has given me an additional interpretation of the commandment we read tonight. We are commanded not to stand idly when our neighbor's blood is being shed because we might be able to prevent their death. But we are also commanded not to stand idly even if we cannot help. Why? Because no one should undergo pain alone. No one should face death without knowing that he or she is loved and supported and cared for, and that if something can be done it will be.

So the heroes of our story are not only Brian's blood and platelet and marrow donors. They are also our friends and our family. When their loved ones were in a horrible situation that could not be controlled, they chose to see the people and not the disease. Rather than give us their fear or their pity, as many did, they gave us their love and their hope. They knew that to treat us simply as tragic was an affront not only to everything that we had been before Brian's diagnosis, but also to who we still were, and who we were yet to become. Our blood was being shed, and to feel sorry for us would be to stand idly.

So, what k'doshim, what holiness, can you take from our story and bring home with you for the week? First, I ask that, between this Shabbat and the next, you call or visit or write or email your friends and family who are sick or troubled and those who mourn, and talk to them. And listen to them. If you don't know what to say, don't say anything. Just be. They were your friends and relatives before whatever is going on now ever happened, and you loved them then. Love them, don't pity them, now. They are not tragic, they are your neighbors, and you shall not stand idly.

Second, go give some blood. And when you do, let them take an extra tube to register you for the National Marrow Donor Program. There are thousands of patients looking for donors right now, today. They may be looking for you. And if they are, how could you live with yourself knowing that you didn't help?

I am proud to be a member of Temple Sinai because many of you already give blood every 8 weeks, and many of you are already registered marrow donors. On April 9, this congregation sponsored a blood and marrow drive, and over 100 of you participated. We collected 68 units of blood and typed 31 new donors for the National Marrow Donor Program. Many who could not donate themselves chose to sponsor someone who did, and we raised enough money not only to cover the marrow typing at our drive but to pay for 10 more donors to be typed somewhere else. And as I signed people up for the drive, I was approached by a member who actually donated marrow for a stranger just two years ago.

And yet, I look out over this congregation tonight and I see faces I did not see on April 9. Some of you are ill, and I wish you refuah sheleimah, a healing peace. But some of you are quite healthy. You are afraid of needles. Or you would donate for a friend, but the notion of having surgery for a stranger does not appeal. I understand those concerns, truly I do. In the last year, I have met literally hundreds of people who share them, and who do not give blood and are not marrow donors because of them.

But I have also seen hundreds of units of blood go into the veins of my husband and my friends, and I have watched friends die because they did not have a marrow donor match. It seems strange to help a stranger. But these strangers are someone's father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, and so many of them are children. They are your neighbors. They are you. And without you, they will die.

It is written that those who rise from prayer changed, their prayer is answered. Now is your chance. Central Blood Bank has a center where you can give blood and be typed as a marrow donor downtown on 5th Avenue. They open at 7:30 tomorrow morning. And we learned our obligation tonight. You shall not stand idly when your neighbor's blood is being shed.

Shabbat Shalom.

© 2000 Naomi L. Zikmund-Fisher