Ethics Bob

If not me, who? If not now, when? That’s one of the ethical guides laid down by Hillel, the great Jewish scholar of the first century B.C.E. His other guide is his expression of the “Golden Rule.”

Hillel’s guidelines are aspirations of ethical people in all cultures, but they are aspired to more than adhered to.

But when Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter learned that freshman outfielder Kevin Jordan would likely die without a kidney transplant, and that Jordan’s family didn’t qualify as a compatible match, Walter got tested and found out last week that he was a match: his kidney might work for Jordan.

Yesterday at the Emory Transplant Center in Atlanta, Walter had one of his kidneys removed and donated to Jordan.

Both are recuperating nicely. Walter will be running in two months, and the docs have told Jordan that he could start to swing a bat in six to eight weeks.

Everybody thinks it was a big deal, but Walter demurs.

“I would do anything to help any one of my players and any one of my family members. Anything that I could do in my power that I could do to give them a better quality of life, is something I want to do. Maybe it’s something as little as helping mentor them in their academic pursuits or help them choose a major, or something of a greater magnitude like this. But my number one priorities in life are my family and my team and I will do anything to help any one of those people.”

Nobody knows what they would do in Walters’s situation, but his gift is a light for us all—if one supremely ethical person can do this, then others can too.

Tags: baseball coach, Emory Transplant Center, ethics, Golden Rule, Hillel, Kevin Jordan, kidney donor, kidney transplant, Tom Walter, Wake Forest

This entry was posted on February 8, 2011 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Ethics-general, Health care, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.