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THE   CANADIAN JEWISH   REVIEW
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1 wholly disapprove of what you toy and wilt defend to the death your right to toy \t..-� Voltaire to Helvetiui.
JUNE 5, 1959
Publication Offir*
VOL XIX No. 36
Adoption Means Belonging
BY  DAVID  WEISS,  EXECUTIVE  DIRECTOR  OF  THE   SAtON  DE  WHICH  INSTITUTE  AND  JEWISH
CHILD WEIFAKE BUREAU, OF MONTREAL
Adoption con hove as many meanings as~tnere~are people who are interested in it. Everyone seems to be in favour of it, and almost everybody feels like an "expert" about it. Adoption has its tragedies, its wonders, and triumphs. It is one of the most rewarding and frustrating services in modern social work and child care programmes, especially in North America. Yet, like the weather, though everyone talks about and feels it, very few are real experts in understanding the causes and the meaning of such a phenomenon. Adoption as a human service recfuires knowledge, experience, and a certain quality of wisdom. �
Those who 'know about adoption intimately, and are engaged in its processes in a professional and helpful way, realize the many delicate aspects involved. It has the breathless and awe-inspiring condition of almost "playing God". To attempt to ..pJay.-S:uch a role would bejogtently impossible and even unaesir-able. As in any healing-service or teaching profession, Ichowl-edge develops and is deepened by experience through which people glean competence and skill. So, too, in adoption.
. To appreciate the adoptive process means to have an awareness of how the very nature of family life has emerged in our culture, from primitive to modem times. Just as the family has gone through many social, cultural, and psychological changes, so too have the expectancies of children in family life. The adoptive way of acquiring a child has also undergone many changes. There is no Question that, as society has achieved sufficient productive capacity and higher standards of living, adoption as a social and legal system of creating families has come into existence as the way of enabling the childless couple to fulfil themselves as a family unit. In the past and in other cultures for that matter, the adoptive process may not even exist, as the attitude toward "the illegitimate child" or ".unwed*'_mother has. different meanings and status in other cultures or societies.
In our society, there has been a continuing and unbroken emphasis on the unitary and primary importance of the family group. Consequently, our social and religious systems are all based on the support and the protection of the family as the basic reproductive and developmental circle within which individuals ore socialized and prepared for their 'adult roles. As economic conditions have improved by and large, and as the corresponding decline in large-size families has also taken place, the phenomenon of the sterile or infertile married couple has come into prominence. Correspondingly also, the attitude towards the unmarried mother and the offspring has shifted from a punitive and depreciated one to a more rornpdssionate one. These various forces have come into a balance that seems to respond to the need for children by the unfulfilled married couple to acquire a child through adoption.
Religious and legal" institutions have always been concerned about the family unit and the role of parents and children
from the point of view of mutual rights and responsibilities, in order to protect the contractual relationship of the family group on which other social institutions are based.
In recent times community attitudes about adoption have been increasingly permeated by the sodcd concern for the rights of all children regardless of their birth status. Consequently adoption is seen as a legal process by which children are given equal opportunities, regardless of how they were born. Perhaps in time this may change as the place of the unmarried mother is given a less rejected position in our society.
There is much more to be said about these and related subjects, but this would require a textbook for the reader. Suffice it to say that adoption la here with us and has taken on a fashionable and often a notorious aspect. However, for the people In-' volved in adoption, this can mean the solution of many personal as well as social problems.
Certainly, for the unmarried mother whose emotional and personal difficulties are expressed this way, giving iip the child for adoption can be a very healthy and healing experience if properly done with professional help. She recognizes that society is not hostile and rejective and she can clarify those forces which have compelled her through this experience, so that she can regroup the forces of her self in order to return to a more mature, adult living.
For the child, for whom a future of secondary status was implicit, there opens up an opportunity to be eoiual with other children, once he experiences the legal as well as emotional adoption which childless couples offer. For the childless couple, adopting a child fulfils the social and emotional need to be like others, and to have a meaningful purpose in relation to the partnership j^ marriage.L There are other meanings, of course, and one often must tread carefully among the various mixed and dis-turbed motives and reasons for which p^gple^gYe._babies_out_ of wedlock, and childless couples want babies to cement or hold together a marriage which should not go on.
Taking all three elements together, and taking them as having been carefully understood and brought to a solution, one must ask: what does adoption truly mean to the adopted child and the adopters, the couple which now has the opportunity to experience parenting or parenthood? This is usually asked in relation to what parents tell their adopted child, and how the adopted child responds to this difference which often
Israel Air Force Head Is In US., Speaking For Bond Drive
Brigadier General Erer Weir-mann, Commander of the Israel Air Force, arrived in the United Statea for a tour of major communities on behalf of the Israel Bond campaign. His first appearance will be in Chicago, 111., where he will be guest speaker at a dinner honoring Samuel Rothberg, of Peoria, 111., national chairman for trustees of the Israel Bond Organization. The Air Force Commander, who was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General on Israel's eleventh Independence Day, is a nephew of the late Dr. Chaim Weizmann, first President of the State of Israel.
General Weizmann is a "sabra," or native of Israel, who was born in Tel Aviv 36 years ago. Formerly the Chief of Operations of the Israel Air Force, he distinguished himself in the War of Liberation, and previously in the R.A.F. during World War II. Fol-
lowing his service as fighter pilot with the R.A.F., in which he saw action in North Africa, he returned to Palestine in 1947 where he plunged into the effort to build an air force for the Haganah, the Jewish defense force. The embryo air force, which consisted of Piper Cubs, and called itself the Palestine Aero Club, supplied the experience and training for the test that came in the Arab invasion of Israel and the subsequent War of Liberation.
When Israel's independence waa proclaimed in May, 1948, General Weizmann rose to the command of the first fighter squadron, which then consisted of a few obsolescent World War II fighters. In 1951, he went to England for studies at the R.A.F. Staff College for a year, returning home to set up the first Staff and Command Course of the Israel Air Force which he commanded for 18 months.
causes
difficulty in getting along with other children whose unwitting cruelties may often upset adopted children. It may often serve to initiate distorted fantasies in the adopted child and sometimes create difficulties in the relationships between the adopted child and his parents.
.these_.and_
loved, to _be hostile as well as to experience other people's grievances^wftfiout^Being rejected or to beTeTf to drift fif~"a~"no~ man's land". Many times the lack of this feeling and relationship of belonging are most pronounced in mentally disturbed and sick people who have lost their anchors in human relationships and therefore drift and wander in emotional Antarcticas.
If one belongs to a family made up of parents and relatives, friends and hopefully other brothers and sisters, one can move naturally and healthily into learning to belong to schoolmates, to achoolo, to ploy groups, to
feelings and needs to work out. Many adopting parents themselves often need to work this out too. One adoptive couple explain adoption as being equal to "loving". This is true, but not enough. If one is adopted and is an adaptor, to love always is superhuman, an impossible human state to sustain. It does not permit of individual differentiation as the child grows and even as the parents age and change. One knows from natural families that love is not the omnipresent emotion in family relationships. Deep reflection wiU Indicate that the basic and jnost mean? ingful meaning of adoption is "to belong", which is a growing, changing, and sustaining emotion and relationship, without which no human being can ever develop a self, or an independent personality. Without belonging, no one.can have an identity, nor a home base to serve as a point of departure in growing up: in moving out into the world, and eventually in establishing a new series of-belonging through the hyphenation process of friendship, marriage, and so on.
\ To belong is the crying need of the illegitimate child as it is'of his unwed mother. They are outcasts, without the usual protection of most institutions in our society. Without a country to belong to, no individual has a place to call his own, and is what we have learned to call a "refugee". To belong is almost as instinctual a need as it is to eat, to experience warmth and protection from falling. Without belonging, one is truly a member of the herd, lost in a lonely crowd of human creatures, without definition, and therefore without capacity to create a place for oneself in human society.
Naturally this emotion and relationship are usually the accompanying developments in most adoptions, without even being expressed or consciously felt This is th& basis on which all children grow up in their own families and homes in which there are healthy relationships between parents and children. To belong gives people the chance, especially as children, to assert and experience themselves freely and safely, to love and be
whether it be a national or religious grouping. In this way one learns to belong to the larger brotherhood of man as well. This is what family life is all about to begin^with, and in many respects is the way in which parents may often evaluate their own" achievements: The child grows and moves out of this primary relationship to set up his own network of relationships through
Through this process of belonging, with its love and care, response and responsibility, he contributes to the on-going process of human continuity.
It is no small thing to observe in biblical writings the stature and importance of Moses, the greatest prophet in Israel. He was closest to the divine power from whom has stemmed so much important religious and social history for the Jews and others. Yet, is it not perhaps more significant in these terms that Moses too was a child who had to be fostered and adopted by someone other than his natural parents? One must ponder the implications of this, for it seems that there must be a deep and profound lesson that can be read Into this unusual status ordained for Moses by God.
For our purpose Moses suggests that all human beings are in a sense "adopted� by- their parents. Parents-are the human instruments used by God in whose image each of us is created. It is the responsibility of parents to give their "adopted" children, shared with them by the divine power, the opportunity to experience the human condition of belonging through which is carried out the fulfilment of man's destiny. And in helping others to belong, as by the adoption process here discussed, one fulfils the other Commandment of serving God through others to whom inevitably all of us return.
Yes, adoption is a popular and growing phenomenon of our times whose deep and profound meanings go beyond that of those directly involved in such an experience, go so deeply as to suggest that no one, regardless of how he or she is bom into the world, is other than an "adopted" child whose parents -in the process of extending human warmth, love, and belonging-ness, give us all the opportunity of becoming truly human personalities. And as parents give to us, we have the further opportunity of offering to children yet to come, the same important, ineffable experience of knowing what it is to be a human being.
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