For the past few weeks, I have been receiving a message on my cell phone from Magen David Adom every few days, with a call to come and donate blood at a fundraiser that will be held close to my home.
Lack of blood doses is not a new phenomenon in Israel, but the situation at the moment is acute - mainly because of the problematic weather that causes people to shut themselves in the house, in addition to hundreds of thousands of corona patients and isolated people who are prevented from donating.
But another thing weighs heavily on the distress: a wave of cancellations of blood donation events at yeshivas of religious Zionism.
Several thousand packets of blood that until now had been donated regularly (at blood donation events that also attracted non-yeshiva donors) stopped coming, after in the regular form of the blood bank the words "mother" and "father" were replaced with the words "parent 1" and "parent 2".
In early December, the quarrel clause was repealed, but the protest continues on the grounds that the disappearance of the father and mother is a surrender to agendas seeking to erode traditional family values.
If indeed the cancellations of blood donations at meetings have put the National Blood Bank in distress, then this is a very sad picture of the state of blood donations in Israel.
Israel needs 1,100 units of blood every day, and several thousand yeshiva students are not the ones holding the National Blood Bank on their shoulders.
Frequent messages from the blood bank should bother us not because there are people whose change in the donor form causes them to give up such an important act, but because there are not enough people to fill in the gaps - and that is definitely a wake-up call.
And the second note - in meetings that are right when they identify in the seemingly technical change something that needs to be delayed.
I have heard much criticism that the abolitionists "prefer form over human life," and that the bureaucracy has overruled the values.
They are not necessarily right in the decision to stop contributing, but it is worth putting things on the table: there is no such thing as "just a form" or "just a clause", especially not on a charged issue like the status of the family.
To illustrate this, see for example the letter issued this week by the Education Department of Kiryat Tivon, after all kindergartens received a gift for Family Day, a gift from the local council and the Ministry of Social Equality - a book whose protagonists have two mothers.
The letter quoted the beloved author Galila Ron-Feder-Amit, who says "the two mothers ... are woven into the story with admirable naturalness and are accepted as a fact that should not be delved into too much."
The discussion - and sometimes, the struggle - about the public space and the hallmarks of identity in Israel touches on precisely this question: what is perceived as "obvious", as a fact that there is no need to delve into it and provoke a storm or struggle, and what is perceived as "personal".
Proponents of the new section, as well as yeshiva students, have come to understand that the casual mention of "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" is particularly significant precisely because it is insignificant, casual and bureaucratic.
We hope that this discussion, even in the difficult parts of it, we will learn to conduct in a constructive way that sees before its eyes the good of the whole.
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