arts & life

b ooks

Silverman’s five children

Casting Lots

Sandee Brawarsky | Special to the Jewish News

A new memoir by

an Israel-based

rabbi — and sister

of comedian Sarah

Silverman — tells the

story of creating

her family.

Sisters Rabbi Susan (left) and
Sarah Silverman

W

hen she was in the
fourth grade, with
two long braids fram-
ing her face, Susan Silverman
announced to her mother that
when she grew up, she planned to
adopt 100 children, one from every
country.
In a recent interview, the writer,
activist and rabbi explained that
her yearning never left her. It
may have been related to the fact
that her parents’ firstborn son
died as a baby, or that her New
England family sometimes took in
foster children and she saw kids
close up who didn’t have loving
parents. Now a mother of five,
Silverman lives in Jerusalem with
her husband, international energy
entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz,
and their children, ranging in age
from 12 to 22. Their two sons were
adopted in Ethiopia.
Silverman’s eldest daughter fin-
ished serving in the IDF, her sec-
ond daughter is almost done with
her service and her oldest son,
next in line, is planning to go into
a combat unit when he begins his
army duty next year. The next girl
and boy are still in school.
Another significant fact about
the author’s family: She is the
older sister of comedian Sarah
Silverman.
In her compelling new memoir,
Casting Lots: Creating A Family
in a Beautiful, Broken World (Da
Capo), Silverman chronicles her
early life with her family before

telling of her efforts to expand her
own family. She writes of her trip
in October 1999 to the African
Cradle Children’s Center in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia. Her instinct,
upon seeing all the children at the
Center, was to “adopt each and
every one of them.” But she left
with only one, whom she and her
husband named Adar.
At Shabbat dinners in their
home, when she would bless her
children with the traditional bless-
ing, she looked into her girls’ faces
and would see aspects of herself
and her husband, but when she
looked into Adar’s face, she would
get “a closer glimpse of the Divine.”
A few years later, she returned to
a different Ethiopian orphanage to
adopt Zamir.
In warm prose, she describes
their hectic and happy, not-always-
perfect home, in which they try
to infuse their lives with Jewish
meaning. The earlier chapters
are devoted to her own home life
as a child; her parents ultimately
divorced and married other peo-
ple, a situation that grew increas-
ingly comfortable for all of them.
This is a memoir written with
passion and humor by someone
who wants to improve the world.
She writes with openness and
curiosity, telling a story that is both
spiritual and practical.
These days, she and her sisters
remain very close. “They are my
hearts,” she writes. She says that
her kids have had rough patches

with each other, but now everyone
is getting along “and in a good
place. I’m trying to freeze the
moment.”
About the source of her humor
— and her sister’s — she says that
growing up, everybody in their
home was funny.
“Our father is crazy funny, very
irreverent — he always wrote
funny poems, stories and toasts.
We also spent a lot of time laugh-
ing and listening to comedians
on records,” she says. By the time
Sarah was 2, their father would be
teaching her swear words, and she
— the world’s cutest ventriloquist
dummy — would innocently recite
the litany of them “for appalled
and delighted guests.”
For Rabbi Silverman, advancing
the cause of adoption is her life’s
work. She founded a nonprofit,
JustAdopt, and her hope is to shift
the paradigm. “Adoption isn’t about
parents who need kids, but about
kids who need parents,” she says.
There are more than 153 million
children in the world without par-
ents. “I’m talking about the human
right of every child to be raised as
someone’s son or daughter.”
She would like to see people
from the same community, wheth-
er a synagogue, school or com-
munity center, adopt children from
the same orphanage, and hopes to
work out an adoption relationship
between Israel and Nepal.
Her rabbinate is about “what
I’m passionate about, what I can

do. I’m not a Talmud scholar,” she
says, although Jewish texts guide
her deeply. “I have a real passion
about humanity. My super power
in all of this is my willingness to
speak up and be present.
“To me, mitzvot, command-
ments, such as keeping kosher
or the Sabbath, are not ends in
themselves, but tools in building
a just and compassionate world,”
Silverman explains. She believes
that certain important command-
ments, like treating the stranger
well and prioritizing the orphan
— “all the stuff that scares us
that takes courage” — don’t get
enough societal attention. “Many
among us find the mitzvah to
treat the stranger as a citizen to be
somehow traitorous. How can it be
that honoring the commandment
to treat the stranger as a citizen
among us is anti-Zionist?”
“I live as if there’s a God,”
Silverman says. “We can’t know.
To claim that we know is a form of
idolatry.”
In an author’s note at the end
of the memoir, she writes about
the global state of adoption, dis-
missing widely accepted reasons
against adoption and showing how
they are based in falsehood. As
she explains, what often holds up
adoption for many people is not
the lack of children who would
benefit from adoption, but govern-
ment obstructions.
To those who would argue chil-
dren have a right to experience
their own cultural heritage and that
it is not fair to them to transplant
them to faraway places with foreign
cultures, she questions whether “a
life of institutionalization, mental
illness, sex trafficking, crime and
early death” is a cultural heritage
that should be preserved.

*

August 4 • 2016

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