I had some pretty big shoes to fill last night.
My talk about raising adoptive kids Jewish was scheduled alongside four others, immediately following a plenary featuring LA’s two most distinguished rabbis: Rabbi Elliot Dorff and Rabbi Sharon Brous.
I was nervous, but I came prepared with an assortment of sources from classical Jewish texts addressing adoption and Jewish parenting, augmenting them with stories from our hands-on experience and passages from my book. My talk was part of the TBALA/IKAR lineup for Shavuot: the Jewish holiday in which we celebrate the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai with an all-night study of holy and relevant texts.
I had a good group of attendees who brought much to the discussion, and in the end, it was exactly what it was meant to be: an intense learning experience.
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad 