Haya Lipschitz

Haya Lipschitz does all her mother's shopping. She prepares all her meals for her, does all her cooking. And they're extremely close. Best friends, Haya says, and she means it.

And they also live in this tiny space together, a two-room basement apartment in Borough Park in Brooklyn, where they share a tiny bedroom and sleep in two tiny beds, really cots, that are about a foot apart from each other. In this kind of setup, it's unimaginable that you could keep anything from your mother. But Haya had this whopper of a secret.

She wanted to donate a kidney to someone, to a stranger, after seeing an ad in a Jewish newspaper taken out by somebody who needed one.

It would be an uber mitzvah, and she was going to do it, unless her mother found out first. Her mother has a kind of phobia about surgery. And also, like any parent, she would worry about all the things that could go wrong. So Haya didn't tell her mother about her plan, which took many, many months to put together.

And she got away with it until her mother found some ads about kidney donation that Haya accidentally left on the kitchen table.

Haya tried to follow the commandment about not lying. For her, lying's a sin, never mind lying to your own mother. She could argue that not saying anything about the kidney transplant wasn't strictly lying. But as the surgery date got closer, Haya couldn't cling to that technicality. She was getting a lot of phone calls. She had to go for medical tests all the time.

When you would go out and get tests and do these things, where would you tell her you were going?

And what were the white lies? Like what kinds of things would you say?

Haya feels so guilty that she lied to her mother, she can barely talk about it. And the lies just became more overt as the day of the surgery arrived.

It's one thing to plan to donate your kidney and not tell your mother. It's another thing to actually have your organ removed and not tell your mother. So Haya had to figure out some way to break it to her once it was a done deal. And her scheme for doing this is so complicated, it makes all the earlier lies look really junior varsity.

What happened is that by chance, the same week of her surgery, somebody told Haya about this 23-year-old Hasidic woman who had also donated a kidney to a stranger.

Haya's mother never said anything to her about the white lies, and Haya's still not sure she even knows about them. And she never chastised Haya for keeping the surgery from her. She's just proud of Haya, which is what Haya wanted all along. Last month, Haya's brother, inspired by her, donated his kidney to a stranger. He said his mother had no problem with it at all.