Second Nurture: Learning lessons on adoption from Ruth

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).

We understandably focus on the future these words portray – they light the way to a messianic promise! But, just as the Ark we carried on our journey after Sinai held both the broken and the whole tablets, we must see Ruth’s vision of wholeness alongside her lived experience of brokenness. To do less would be to blind ourselves to the messy, painful and holy work of redemption.

Let’s linger more on the cause of Ruth’s need for a home and family, for the shelter of a mother – her broken places. There is a hole in her soul that her family of origin may have initially occupied, and this is an emptiness pointedly not addressed by the text.

Is she an orphan? Was she disowned for the radical act of marrying an Israelite man? Has she changed so much that she can’t go home again?

We don’t know. But we do know that she is reaching out for circles of belonging: a family with Naomi ensconced in community, and in a relationship with God.

Our tradition does, however, take note of Naomi’s pain. In fact, the text quickly pivots from Ruth baring her heart to Naomi’s bereavement.

“Have I yet sons in my womb?” Naomi asks. From where will her progeny arise? What and who will build her a bridge to the future? “Don’t call me Naomi [pleasantness]. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty” (ibid. 1:20-21).

This kind of focus – on the anguish of a woman who longs for children – is prevalent today. And while it deserves loving and wise attention, there is another human experience deserving of a loving and wise – and brave – response: that of the child in need of the love and security of a family and a community.

As a society we generally look at adoption as a way to fulfill the desire of an adult to be a parent, especially when a biological child is not a likely option.​

But we need to turn that paradigm on its head and see adoption, urgently, as a way for every child to become someone’s son or daughter. There are more than 115,000 children in foster care in the United States who are awaiting adoption, and over 400,000 in the foster care system. Children suffer physically, emotionally and developmentally when they are not actively loved – because humans are born wired for love, for family.​

Second Nurture, the organization I direct, empowers synagogues in LA County to prioritize foster care and adoption from foster care among their membership. It’s a community-based model.

This means that for some, fostering and adopting is viable. Those members join together in a cohort and take steps toward becoming licensed foster parents. Many more members bolster those families though a community-wide support network in lots of ways like volunteering expertise, donating goods, helping with transportation or meals. And because the community prioritizes and bolsters fostering and adoption, more people have the courage to step up and become the families kids need.

What better place than a strong, loving, community like synagogues for a young person who needs a family? There are over 50 families who have stepped up to foster and adopt in our three partner synagogue cohorts in LA (Wilshire Boulevard Temple, IKAR and Nefesh) and countless more members who offer support.

Some of us are lucky enough to be born into love: a loving parent, family, community. But some of us are born into hard and lonely circumstances, into a world where no one looks at you and says, “I got you. Come what may, I got you.”

As a result, we have millions of children whose souls, like Ruth’s, call out to us from their depths: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.”​

If you will have me.