Begin with Jochebed

Every adoption story is unique.

Jochebed knew she could not raise her baby boy. She knew that as soon as he was born, so she did not give him a name even as she nursed him and hoped that she could figure out a way to give him a future. She lived near a river, so she wove a small basket herself out of the bullrushes that grew by the river, and lined the basket with pitch to make it watertight. And when he was three months old, she took her baby boy down to the river, placed him in the basket she had made, and watched him float away.

As adoption plans go, this doesn’t seem ideal. Yet inside the entrance to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts stands a statue of Jochebed. And I was startled when I realized that this beautiful marble statue of a woman holding a baby boy was actually a statue of the world’s most famous birthmother.

David’s birthparents made a tremendous leap of faith in choosing us to become his parents. They knew a little about us, but they had never met us. They knew that we would give him a new name, a new home, a new family, and a new future. When David’s birthmother held him in the hospital and then handed him to us, his journey to his new family, to us, began and ended in inches. But that journey was no less significant in our lives.

We read aloud from the Passover haggadah tonight part of the story of our ancestors’ departure from Egypt. The text in the haggadah omits any mention of Jochebed, or of her baby boy whose adoptive mother named him Moses. Our job is to tell our children more of the story of that departure from Egypt, to fill in some of the details, and to make it clear that the story is relevant to our own lives. Begin with Jochebed, and her tremendous leap of faith that day at the river’s edge.