and whoever preserves a single soul, it is as though he had preserved a complete world

This is a line from the Talmud saying that to save one life is as if to save the entire world. The idea comes from the fact that we all started from one human and now we are an entire population. In the creation story there were pairs of animals created and pairs of trees/flowers/etc but humans were only started with Adam, then came Eve after. Therefore, to kill one man is as if to kill the whole world, and to save on man is as if t0 save the whole world.

To make this Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) even more meaningful for me I was able to take part in doing just that...saving a life. As some of you may know I donated bone marrow in December to a three year old girl with Leukemia. She received the transplant the second or third week in January and on March 18th I received a request to donate a second time to her. This time I was only going to donate white blood cells so no injections beforehand as with the stem cell donation.

Today my friend Eli went with me to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem and was a trooper while I was hooked up the the machine for 4.5 hours while it went through all of my blood and extracted the white blood cells. The doctor was a little rough, he kept pushing on the IV site on my left arm even as a winced in pain and told him it hurt a lot when he touched it. The site was working fine so he didn't get why it hurt. Either way, it hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to what this little girl has been and will be through in her life. Here's the certificate they gave me, it says thank you for saving a life! In really nice Hebrew.

I couldn't stand when the siren went off for two minutes at 10am today but I thought about the victims of the Holocaust, this day is really for them. Also, though, to show how far Israel and the Jewish people have come from this disgusting and devastating tragedy.

Am Yisrael Chai...The people of Israel live...