Tikkun Olam

The Business Day section of Last Tuesday’s Times reported an interview with Theodore J. Forstmann, a 71-year old billionaire who is fighting brain cancer. The Times interviewed him in his office, where he continues to work, even though the cocktail of medicines he’s taking to combat the cancer is extremely debilitating. He’s working, he said, “because I want to make a pile of money now, stick it in a charitable trust and give it away.” Last year he attended a dinner for billionaires, organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, at which the attendees were asked to sign a pledge to give away more than half their fortune to charity. Mr. Forstmann signed the pledge, but after the dinner, he told his friend Michael Bloomberg, who had encouraged him to attend, “Mike, I already do this. I don’t need any formal pledge.” He wants to spend his money on “kids in the world,” particularly those in Africa, who are the most vulnerable.

Great benefactors like Mr. Forstmann make our own efforts look pitiably meager. So each year when my college solicits me for a donation, I ask myself why I should contribute my mite to an institution whose endowment is in the many billions of dollars. Yet while each year’s contribution is small, when added to amounts I’ve been giving for more than 50 years, the sum becomes substantial. Institutions rely on small donations as well as on large ones, for when many small donations are added together, they create an impressive amount. But even if that were not true, since others contributed to the college to help it while I was a student, I have an obligation to do the same for the students of today.

There are, of course, many ways besides financial contributions to help make the world better. We can donate our time, for example, as a volunteer in schools or hospitals. But even lesser acts can make a difference. A friend of mine reported that recently she noticed a woman walking towards her. Something about the woman attracted her attention, and she looked at her longer than is customary among strangers in New York. In response, the woman gave her a warm smile. My friend, who was feeling blue at the time, felt so much better after that smile.

I’ve been the recipient of the kindness of strangers, particularly during the past five months, while I’ve been disabled with one injury after another. They open doors and hold them open for me, they help me out of taxicabs if the driver does not do so, they offer me their seat on the subway, and so forth. Each of these acts is a tiny one, true, but if everyone acted in this way, the world would be a better place.

Such small behaviors contribute to what in the Jewish tradition is called tikkun olam, repair of the world. Although as individuals we cannot do much towards this goal, taken together, our efforts become as important as those of the great philanthropists, perhaps even more so.

Hors de Combat

The last of a cascade of minor injuries to legs and feet, beginning in December, has almost immobilized me. I can now scarcely walk. As a result, I've been spending much of my time flat on my back, unable to contribute an essay for today. I hope to return to action soon.

Two Film Festivals

During the course of the 25th Annual Israel Film Festival, which ended last week, my wife and I saw ten films, sometimes more than one a day. I’m glad I left the selection of films up to her, because almost all the films she chose were excellent. Those films set in Jerusalem were particularly moving to me. The familiar streets and squares evoked a wistful nostalgia tinged with a sense of loss, as if I had never felt the inevitable frustrations and irritations of living in a strange culture and operating in an imperfectly learned language, as if I had never felt apprehension during the second intifada when I walked those streets and squares or boarded a bus.

Ten films within a two-week period are a lot of films – more than we normally see in a year outside of festivals – but we would see even more during the annual Jerusalem Film Festival, held every July. We would see fifteen or sixteen films during the festival’s ten days, sometimes as many as three or four in one day. Unlike the Israel Film Festival, the Jerusalem festival is international in scope, screening more than 200 films from all over the world. My wife and I would ponder the catalog of films, each entry enticingly described in thumb-nail sketches, before choosing what we would see. Our choices overlapped about one-third of the time, so more often we watched the films alone.

But we weren’t really alone, because we were bound to meet lots of people we knew. So attending the Jerusalem Film Festival reinforced our sense of community. Many of our friends and acquaintances knew one another and moved in the same or overlapping circles. But I felt a sense of community with all Israeli Jews, no matter what their background, whether or not they ever attended the festival, not only because they were Jews but also because they shared my fate as citizens of a troubled land. In contrast, my sense of community with my fellow Americans is more abstract, more cognitive than emotional.

Yossi Klein Halevi, in an interview last Sunday with Krista Tippett, on her radio program On Being, spoke of the intensity with which Jewish Israelis approach political issues, because there is a sense of community among them and because political decisions matter so much to the community as a whole. What is the nature of the state- is it the state of the Jews (a state for all its citizens, of whom the majority are Jewish) or a religious Jewish state? Can religion and state be separated in Israel without removing Judaism from Israel’s Jews? How is Israel to deal with another indigenous population with valid claims to the land? Can a settlement be reached with the Palestinians and if so how and on what terms? These and other existential questions are debated endlessly and with passion. Here in America, few people are passionate about political matters, perhaps because we feel that political decisions here rarely have life and death consequences, as they so often do in Israel.

Halevi also spoke about the sense of transcendence that drew him, an American citizen, to settle to Israel. Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 provided one of his examples. The man who had started, with his allies, the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel and thus was hated by Jewish Israelis, became overnight, with his visit to Jerusalem, a hero. Thousands of Israelis, waving Egyptian flags, cheered his motorcade. Halevi cited another moment of transcendence, the 1983 airlift of Ethiopian Jews from Sudanese refugee camps to Israel. They arrived barefoot and wide-eyed, he recalled, never having seen a plane before let alone having flown in one.

During our time in Jerusalem, I felt the same sense of transcendence, not all the time, of course, but often, just by walking the streets and squares of the city, a city that provides such a deep sense of history and continuity. So just as I miss an overall sense of community, so I miss the transcendence which simply living in Jerusalem provided. Still, we knew we would be giving up much when we moved permanently to New York, but it hasn’t been a total loss, not at all. New York, with its extensive rapid transit system (and half fares for seniors) and its many free cultural events, is a good place for those my age. I'm now under a consistent medical regime, supervised by a physician whom I trust and admire. We've gained greater access to our children and grandchildren and made it easier for them to supervise our care if and when it becomes necessary. These are substantial advantages, but they didn't make us feel the loss of Jerusalem any less.

Power and Sex

On Friday I wrote about infidelity, beginning with the accusations against the former head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now under house arrest, then moving to the affairs of powerful men. If power is an aphrodisiac, I continued, and powerful men are besieged by women, it’s only because the men appear receptive to seduction.

My essay has been criticized because it began with the issue of sexual predation but then segued to the seduction of men by women. The criticism is valid, because seduction constitutes only part of the story, and probably a small part. Powerful men sometimes abuse their position with subordinates, even forcing themselves upon them, as in the case of the former president of Israel, who has been convicted of rape. More often, though, men who abuse their authority with subordinates to extract sexual favors do so not by physical force but by threats, implied or actual, of retaliation for refusal or rewards for acquiescence. The abuse of authority is not restricted to politicians, of course. Friday’s Times carried a front-page story about the culture of sexual predation at the IMF, where “alpha male economists” prey on their female subordinates, and where women feel threatened and vulnerable.

In any setting, wherever men have authority over women, the potential for sexual predation exists. Workplace rules, therefore, must not only make it explicit that such behavior is unacceptable, but management must also punish its violation. At the IMF, however, such behavior might actually have been encouraged by the rule that “intimate personal relationships between supervisors and subordinates do not, in themselves, constitute harassment.” The head of the IMF himself provided an example a few years ago, when he remained in his post after it was discovered that he had been carrying on an affair with a staffer. I can only imagine what it must be like for a woman to work in such an atmosphere.

I did not intend to trivialize the problem of men’s abuse of authority over women, and if I left that impression, I apologize.

Infidelity

Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be innocent of the horrific charges against him, stemming from his encounter with a hotel chambermaid in New York, so we're obliged to withhold judgment until after his trial, but innocent or guilty, he’s already paid a heavy price for the multiple accusations against him. The former French Minister of Finance and leading Socialist candidate for prime minister in the next French elections, has suffered a stunning fall. He has had to resign his post as head of the International Monetary Fund, a position that, according to reports in the Times, he has held with distinction during a most difficult period. The husband of an exceedingly rich woman and thus used to luxury, he sits at this writing in a prison cell at Rikers Island, held in solitary confinement under a 24-hour suicide watch.

Shortly after the Strauss-Kahn scandal broke, the former governor of California admitted to having fathered a child 13 years ago with a member of his staff and of having concealed this episode from his wife, who had successfully campaigned to rebut the widespread rumors of his sexual predations during his first run for governor. The serial affairs of President Kennedy and his brother Robert are well-known; rumors of President Clinton’s sexual lapses circulated during his White House years; and his encounters with Monica Lewinsky – or more accurately, his lying about them - resulted in an attempt to impeach him, an effort supported by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who himself was guilty of marital infidelity.

Strauss-Kahn’s alleged transgressions in the case of the chambermaid, of course, are far more serious than simple adultery, since he’s accused of attempted rape and holding the woman against her will. His serial adulteries, however, presumably consensual, have long been a public secret in France. Why are so many powerful men unfaithful to their wives? They say that power is an aphrodisiac, but if powerful men are besieged by women, it’s only because they appear amenable to seduction. Years ago, a university colleague told me that a female student came to his office and offered herself to him if he would raise her grade. He refused and sent a memorandum to the dean, recounting the episode, for fear that the student would turn the story around and accuse him of offering to raise her grade if she submitted to his advances. When I asked him why, in 25 years of teaching, no student ever offered to go to bed with me, he responded “You have to look as if you’d be willing.”

I guess it’s true. After a day spent at a professional conference, held at a beach resort, a woman sat alone with me by the now deserted pool, and we talked, sitting side by side over drinks, as the evening darkened into night. Later a colleague who knew her, told me that the woman had confided in her that she had hoped to seduce me and was disgusted when I asked her to show me pictures of her children. I’m not portraying myself as particularly virtuous – in this case, I didn’t even realize what was going on - for probably a majority of men are faithful to their wives, although it’s hard to know for sure. And maybe powerful men are no more likely to stray than the average adulterer, and it’s only the celebrity of the powerful which brings their extramarital adventures into public view.

I remember how shocked my wife and I were by the separation of a couple, the parents of three children and married for 25 years, who separated because the husband was carrying on with a neighbor. We had looked up to that couple as an example of marital stability. That their marriage foundered after 25 years – 25 years! - was threatening to us, at that time married for only five. Was our marriage vulnerable too? We’ve now been married for 48 years, but it took far less time than that for me to understand that my relationship with my wife is the backbone of my life, its background and its foreground. No infidelity could be worth the catastrophe that would ensue if it destroyed my marriage. At my present stage of development, though, my opportunities to stray are distinctly limited, even if I were wide awake enough to know that I was the object of an advance. For a long time, the only advances I’ve received have been from publishers.

Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand

Our Mussar class at Congregation Beth Elohim, led by Gary Shaffer, will conclude the study season next week with a discussion of the trait called, in Hebrew, yirah. That Hebrew term combines the meaning of both fear and awe: fear of Divine retribution, on the one hand, and awe of Divine majesty on the other. These emotions are sometimes merged, as when you look at a stupendous view from a precipice without rails or when you experience the overwhelming force of nature, as in an earthquake or hurricane or, if, you believe that God will evaluate your life at its end, when you stand in the blinding presence of the Eternal to be judged.

Our discussion of this trait next week will focus not on fear but on awe, a more congenial notion for the modern sensibility. Few in our class, I suspect, believe in an avenging God who will punish His creatures, in spite of many examples to the contrary in the Torah. Since I don’t believe in a presiding deity, I would find it hard to apply the notion of fear of divine judgment to my own life, unless I believed that one suffers in this life for one’s misdeeds. It may be true that some criminals who escape jail or public shaming are nonetheless plagued by guilt and remorse, but it’s so easy to rationalize one’s actions, especially if they are financially rewarding, that most of the wicked who flourish probably do so without regret. I’m too timid to be unusually wicked and even if I were not timid, my conscience would plague me for my misdeeds. So for me, at any rate, virtue must be its own reward.

But what about awe? Again, I can’t stand in awe of a Deity in which I don’t believe. On the other hand, I do stand in awe of the works that the Divine is said to have created. I felt awe at the cyclone which swirled past our windows last fall, awe when viewing the sunrise from the deck of our freighter as it crossed the Pacific, awe when looking into the multicolored vastness of the Grand Canyon. But cyclones don’t arrive every day, nor do we often visit the Grand Canyon or the redwood forests or other stupendous works of nature, and even if we're awake when the sun rises, the artificial canyons in which we live, at least in New York, make it hard to see it. The issue for me, then, is how to open myself to awe during the course of an ordinary day.

When I was able to walk every morning in Prospect Park, the beauty and grandeur of the trees would move me, as would the progression of the seasons that the trees reflected day by day - their budding in spring, their efflorescence in summer, the flaming demise of their leaves in the fall, and the delicate traceries of their branches against the winter sky. Awe in Prospect Park is easy to find. Listening to Mozart or Bach sometimes creates the same feeling. The melting beauty of the adagio movement of one of Mozart’s piano concertos, for instance, provides as good an argument as any for the existence of God. Again, it’s easy to feel awe in the presence of such masterpieces.

Sometimes awe takes me by surprise. Years ago, during an elementary course in drawing, we were asked to draw the ear of the person sitting next to us. The woman whose ear I drew was what one used to call plain, not homely but not glamorous either. Her appearance was perfectly ordinary. Her ear was an ordinary ear. Yet when I started drawing it, I realized that no ear is ordinary, all are beautiful in their construction and in the curves that compose their external aspect. For a moment, the woman glowed into beauty.

Such epiphanies have been rare for me. Yet I realize that even if we’re not standing in the presence of God, the majesty of the world around us is ever present, whether we’re viewing the stars, a man, or a leaf. As I try to find opportunities for awe, I’m reminded of Blake’s poem, which perhaps best expresses my goal: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.

Dolci Fatti en Casa

When I read “Dolci Fatti en Casa” at the top of the restaurant’s list of desserts, I laughed, until I understood that it meant not that the house desserts were fattening but they were all made on the premises. The menu was offered by Queen Italian Restaurant, a ten-minute walk from our temporary quarters in downtown Brooklyn. It’s an old-line establishment, now in its second generation of family ownership, and it provides superb Italian food along with swift, attentive, and unobtrusive service. It’s too expensive for casual dining, but it’s a wonderful venue for an occasion.

The occasion in question was our 48^th anniversary, which we celebrated recently with a visit to that restaurant. We each ordered a three-course meal, and I abandoned all restraint in my choices, from the spinach pasta sinfully bathed in cream sauce to the tomato puree and tiny fried onion rings of my next pasta course, to the sublime vanilla bean gelato at the end. Each choice was delicious, but each one would have made the authors of Dropping Acid, the reflux diet cookbook and cure, my new bible, flinch. They prescribe a low acid, low fat diet, and my meal last week was not only high acid (tomato puree and fried onions) but also high fat (everything else).

I can’t say I ignored my diet at that restaurant last week, for its strictures were firmly in mind as I ate my dinner. Better to say that I intentionally violated it. Yet I didn't feel any guilt - well, only a slight tinge of guilt - for I was convinced that acid indigestion would keep me up all night; I’d be punished for my transgressions; and thus moral balance would be restored to my world.

It pains me to admit that enormous pleasure engulfed me during that meal. It was a new sensation. I had eaten good dinners before, of course, but I had never before experienced the pure satisfaction that excellent old-fashioned cooking can provide - cooking, that is, with plenty of butter, cream, and eggs, with utter disregard for the food's cholesterol content. We had gone to celebrate and enjoy ourselves and we certainly did. I wonder if it's old age that allowed us to abandon ourselves to such pleasure.

Of course, it wasn’t only the food that was wonderful. That my beloved, sitting opposite me, was also participating in this feast was an essential element of my pleasure. We talked about what we had been doing at that very hour, 48 years before. We had landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and were being driven to Laurence Rockefeller’s resort, the Dorado Beach Hotel, then a relatively small hotel before being sold to the Hyatt chain. As we talked, we agreed that we hardly knew each other then. But we had the good fortune to make the right choice in each other. We were lucky. We still are.

As we walked home in a state of satisfied satiation, I was apprehensive about the consequences of my folly. But the gods that supervise acid reflux must not have been paying attention that night, or maybe they were on vacation, or maybe they gave me an anniversary present. In any event, I slept through the night with no problems whatsoever, providing yet another example of the world’s injustice. Still, if I eat like that more than once a year, I’m unlikely to reach our 49^th.

Carole Gould and the Beth Elohim Minyan

Carole Gould, a lawyer who for many years wrote a weekly column for The New York Times business section, grew up in a Jewish family that was religiously non-observant. But when her sons entered the religious school of our congregation, Beth Elohim, in 1993, she became active in the affairs of the congregation and, as she has written about herself, “the world opened up.” She began to study Torah. Five years ago she entered Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion as a rabbinical candidate. Last Sunday, we witnessed her ordination at Congregation Emanu-El in Manhattan.

For the ten years of its existence, she’s led our congregation's Shabbat morning minyan – in our case from twelve to eighteen persons who meet for the service. Although my wife joined the minyan several years ago, I only started to participate two months ago and that’s when I began to know Carole. True, I had met her twice before. The first time was in Jerusalem, where she was spending a year as part of her studies, when she came to lunch at our home. When she saw our shelf of Trollope novels, she borrowed several, returning them to us later in Brooklyn. That was the second time I had met her.

But now that I’ve been attending the minyan every Shabbat, I‘ve been able to see her in action, so to speak, and to admire the pleasant but authoritative way she presides over our service. She’s a tall, trim, handsome woman, with a crown of abundant, curly gray hair, a strong melodious voice, and a commanding presence. She’s scrupulous in thanking everyone who participates in the minyan service, particularly the readers, whether these are accomplished or not.

Before the minyan meets, my wife and I attend a lesson with our rabbi, after which we participate in a small group that studies the weekly Torah portion. These sessions are enlightening and intellectually stimulating, but it’s at the minyan that I enter another world, a world not of intellect but emotion. Don’t get me wrong - I haven’t burned my atheist card – but the communal singing, repeated each week, the only half-understood Hebrew, the intimacy of our small minyan, and the intensity of the other worshipers, create for me an other-worldly atmosphere, one that exists on an elevated plane, one in which, for the space of the service, I willingly suspend my disbelief.

There was no need to suspend disbelief at Carole’s ordination, but I was nonetheless moved by the beauty of the ceremony, the music, and the grandeur of the ordination’s venue, the main sanctuary of Congregation Emanu-El. I was not a stranger to the congregation. My wife and I were married in its chapel, as were her sister and my brother. Her father was on its Board of Trustees and served as the long-time head of its religious school committee, so during the first years of our marriage, when we lived in Manhattan, we attended the high holiday services there. These services never moved me emotionally. I viewed them mainly as a social occasion, not a religious obligation, a feeling perhaps reinforced by the presence of so many of New York’s richest Jews. The difference between my ho-hum response to the grand Emanu-El high holiday services and my spiritual response to the small gathering every Shabbat at our congregation is remarkable.

I don’t know whether I’ve changed or my circumstances have changed, but one thing is certain: I’ve found that religious experience is available to atheists. I’m grateful to Carole Gould for leading the minyan in which this discovery was possible.

A Visit to Ikea

The Ikea superstore in Red Hook offers a brilliant example of compelling merchandising. On the way to your destination within the store, you pass tableau after tableau of beautifully furnished rooms – dining rooms, living rooms, work rooms, and so forth – rooms that would not look out of place in the glossiest of shelter magazines, rooms that invite you to linger, rooms that whet your appetite for items you didn’t know you wanted. You cannot avoid passing these rooms because there’s only one way to your destination. To reach it, you must follow the store's arrows on its version of the yellow brick road.

Our destination a few days ago was Ikea's kitchen department. We wanted to see the kitchen cabinets that we had chosen for our renovation, cabinets initially chosen from a catalog, to make sure they were suitable. This inspection permitted us to choose the doors (birch veneer with solid beech edges), make a few minor alterations in our plan, and clarify the procedures for ordering and delivery.

Ikea kitchens are beautiful, functional, and inexpensive. Our architect endorsed them, and we’ve heard good reports about them from people we know. So we did not consider pricier, customized cabinets that no doubt would last even longer, because as far as we’re concerned, they don’t have to last terribly long. By now, after all, our life expectancy is not brilliant, unlike that of the majority of our fellow customers, young couples with earnest, unlined faces, justifiably concerned about how long their kitchens, a major purchase, will last.

The kitchen we’re remodeling is the second kitchen that we’ve renovated. The first was our Jerusalem apartment, in which we lived for 32 years. We did virtually no planning of our own for that kitchen but instead relied almost entirely on our architect, who gave us a functional, pleasant, minimalist kitchen. Ironically, we’re spending much more time designing our kitchen in Brooklyn, even though we'll be working in it for nowhere near 32 years.

There are several reasons for our greater attention to detail. First of all, we’re no longer employed, so we have the time to spend on the design. Second, even when inflation is taken into account, the cost is enormously higher now than it was for the Jerusalem kitchen, which was remodeled in 1975. At that time, incomes in Israel were modest, expectations for luxury rare, and inexpensive labor from the occupied territories plentiful. Finally, the choices available for finishes and fittings are far greater now than they were then. Indeed the plethora of choices is almost bewildering. Which of a dozen materials, for example, should we choose for counter tops when each has its own advantages and disadvantages?

We probably raised the average age of the customers visiting the Ikea kitchen department by 20 years. But as we were leaving the store, we saw an elderly couple. The woman, bent with osteoporosis, was pushing her husband along in a wheelchair. From snatches of their conversation that we overheard, it seemed that they were moving from their home of many years to a small apartment in an assisted living facility.

My wife and I hope that we can avoid such a move. No steps are required to enter our building or our apartment, we're remodeling with an eye for future disability, and most important, our daughter, a palliative care social worker, and her family live in the other wing of our building. If we need caretakers, she can supervise them with minimum inconvenience to her. So if we’re lucky, we can remain in our apartment even if someone else must do the cooking. If we're lucky, this renovation will be our last.

Four Seasons Lodge

Four Seasons Lodge is a documentary film about a group of elderly Holocaust survivors who meet each summer at the modest bungalow colony they own in the Catskills. The film documents the 26^th summer they spend together, a few years before the colony was sold in 2009. We saw it, appropriately enough, on the eve of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Most of the residents, the youngest of whom were in their early eighties when the film was shot, came from Poland. Many of the couples met in America after their spouses had been killed in Europe. With few if any relatives in America, they sought each other out, and these friends became a substitute family that together bought the colony, where they repair each summer. They need not talk with each other about their suffering during the Holocaust because it’s a shared experience and taken for granted. It’s only the filmmaker’s probing that elicits stories about that past, and not all residents were willing to provide them.

Photographs of the residents as they appeared in Europe or in their first years in America show them with the beauty of youth. We see them a generation later, this time in home movies, when they first entered the colony. So we observe stages in their development, from youth to old age, when they are by now, naturally enough, bent, wrinkled, flabby, and often sick.

Yet we watch a resident in his eighties crawl through a first-floor window to make a repair. We see another climb a ladder to saw off the branch of a fallen tree. We watch residents driving large mobile machines to cut the grass. The residents dance together, sing together, play cards together, and laugh together. What’s striking about them is their unquenchable zest for life. Perhaps their escape from Europe increased their appetite for life. Perhaps it was this appetite that helped some of them survive in the first place.

One by one they’re losing their fellow residents. Some no longer have the strength to participate in communal care-taking duties. Some are too sick to leave their winter homes. Others die. Perhaps their awareness of the brevity of the life left to them and the suddenness with which it can be taken away has increased their love of life. Whatever the reason and in spite of the disabilities of old age - the lessening of strength, energy, mental capacity, and health - their enthusiasm for the everyday pleasures of being alive appears undiminished. '”Life is not easy,” remarks one of the residents, “ but it can be beautiful, even when it's not easy.” May that be a mantra for all of us.

Choices

Last week we had the privilege of attending a reading of Linda Faigao-Hall’s new play, The Lay of the Land. Five of the play’s seven characters are faced with choices representing varying degrees of importance but all involving moral issues. A young woman must decide whether to marry a rich older man whom she does not love but who has promised to help her career as an artist if she marries him. Her brother faces two choices, whether to fulfill his ambition to confront and punish the father that had abandoned them as children and whether to rehabilitate himself from his drug addiction. A young caterer must decide whether to accept a lucrative and career-advancing assignment when it would require her to renege on a promise to take her young nephew fishing.

The central dilemma is faced by the play’s principal character, a young Philippina, recently arrived in New York, when she learns that Marcos has been overthrown. Should she return to her country to help build democracy there? Her brother, longer in the country than she, has decided to return. He wants to join his people, to be part of its history. She wants to be safe.

This last dilemma resonated with both my wife and me. Our decision to sell our apartment in Jerusalem and make our year-round home in New York made us feel that we were losing our part in the history of Israel and that we were leaving not only our close friends behind but also the country as a whole. We could no longer do our small bit to encourage a settlement with the Palestinians. We could no longer participate in demonstrations against the Occupation, my wife could no longer work with Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest, thus serving as a shield against settler aggression. That advancing age would eventually keep us from most of such activities did not soften the pain that leaving cost us, since at that point we were still able to participate. We couldn’t even vote without returning to the country to do so.

We knew that the decision to return to America was a momentous one, just as we knew that the decision to marry each other and later to have children (and to stop at two) were momentous. Other decisions, entered into more lightly, proved to be crucial too. When I became Joshua Fishman’s research associate, shortly have earning my doctorate, I had no idea that it would lead to a career in the sociology of language, a field of which I had not even heard. We could not have known that my work with him would lead to my work in Ethiopia, to a fellowship at Stanford, and to my work in Israel. And when I accepted his invitation to join him in Jerusalem for two years, we could not have known that we would spend the next 36 years there. So our lives have turned not only on deliberate choices but also on relatively casual ones that were largely determined by the exigencies of the moment. I suspect this is true of most people.

Our decision to move back to America - not to be safe but for reasons of health and to be closer to our children - was perhaps the last major decision that we will ever make, since almost all of our important decisions have already been taken. What choices might lie ahead? We’ve already made the decision faced by the young Philippina and her brother. The survivor of the two of us is unlikely to accept and even more unlikely to receive a proposal of marriage from a sugar daddy (or mommy) who promises to advance our career. Whatever opportunities we had for that interesting proposition have fled long ago. My guess is that the next choices, if there are any, will be disagreeable ones, but we’ll worry about that later.

Fifteen Minutes a Day

Following the example of my father and father-in-law, who wrote weekly letters to us for years, I started writing a weekly letter to each of my children many years ago. I’ve lost copies of the ones written before 1993, but since then I’ve kept them in the hard drive of my computer, transferring them whenever I bought a new one. Since each child receives a separate letter, there are from 1,200 to 1,300 letters to my children in my computer's hard drive.

Our children tell me that they’ve saved each of these letters but, if their repositories are like the archive we’ve kept of our parents’ letters to us, the letters our kids have kept are disorganized, piled helter-skelter into one or more boxes. So towards the end of 2009, I started printing out copies of my letters to each child on paper punched for three ring notebooks, and as these letters began to accumulate, I thought it would be nice to print out all the letters written before that. Not that they have any particular literary merit, but I thought some of my descendants might like to dip into them from time to time to see what some of their ancestors were doing during a vanished era. Besides, it would, I thought, give me a sense of accomplishment to see them all neatly bound together.

But the job seemed monumental – all those letters! So I decided to devote 15 minutes a day six days a week to the task, printing out five letters per child every day, on the theory that you can stand to do just about anything for 15 minutes a day. The theory proved correct.

The job turned out to be more interesting than I had expected. By looking at the letters as they were being printed out, I recalled incidents that I had totally forgotten, people entertained at dinner, conversations held, films seen, books read, illnesses suffered, rallies attended, and so forth. The letters also gave me a chance to review the development of our children, as they graduated from university, married, began careers, and produced children of their own. Reading these letters was an exercise in nostalgia.

With judicious editing, the letters would provide a history of Israel, as seen through the eyes of a liberal academic, during a tumultuous period of wars, burgeoning settlements, Palestinian resistance, Israel’s repressive response to this resistance, the two intifadas, the withdrawal from Gaza, and the peace process, which dashed hopes more often than it raised them. My wife has suggested that I try to publish a selection of these letters, but many contemporary accounts of the period have already appeared. There’s no a market for another, especially when written by a person less qualified than the writers who have preceded me. But if the letters survive, they might be useful to a future historian.

Last week I completed the job. The letters now stand in three very large red three-ring binders. It does give me a sense of satisfaction to see them, just as I supposed it would. Unexpectedly, though, I feel sad at the loss of this occupation, albeit one that usually took just fifteen minutes a day.

Fatherhood

My granddaughter’s fifth birthday has prompted thoughts about fatherhood. I can’t speak for motherhood, of course, although it’s probably true for mothers as well, but if my experience is any indication, fatherhood is the experience that alters you more than any other in your life. Nothing is ever the same afterwards. It changes you even more than does marriage. After all, most of us have experienced living with other non-related persons of the same generation - roommates, flat mates, lovers – and learning to consider their needs and to accommodate ourselves to them, but these relationships are usually temporary. Even one’s relation to a spouse is not cut into stone, since divorce is relatively easy and commonplace if not painless. But you can’t divorce your children nor can they divorce you, even if one abandons the other. The relation is permanent.

How does it change us? For one thing, we learn what it feels like to be profoundly responsible for another human being. Of course in some sense we’re responsible for our spouses too but they’re not absolutely helpless at first, totally dependent on us. Before fatherhood, I imagined that one’s obligations to one’s children end when they reached eighteen, that one sort of forgets about them the way a cat does its kittens once they’re grown, that one stops worrying about them. What nonsense! One never stops worrying about one’s children, even when there’s no need to worry, even when the time comes for them to start worrying about you.

Fatherhood also gives us a stake in history, linking us to the generations that preceded us and to those that will follow. We begin to see our parents in ourselves, and later our grandparents in ourselves, and we see their characteristics in our children and grandchildren. And we become more tolerant of our parents and grandparents, forgiving them for their sins, real or perceived, hoping that our children will (eventually) do the same for us.

It’s ironic that helping to raise my children was the most important accomplishment of my life, more important than the papers and books published, more important than the dissertations directed, the students taught and counseled, the conferences attended, and the promotions received. It’s ironic because I didn’t realize how it important it was to me it at the time. I concentrated not on child-rearing but on my career. I don’t apologize; that’s just the way it was and probably would be again if I had a chance to live my life over.

Not that concentrating on child-rearing would have produced any better results. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but my children are no more neurotic than average – at any rate they’re probably less neurotic than I am - and none of them has yet to land in jail. Indeed I’m proud of each of them and proud of their children too. If I had concentrated more on being a father and less on my career, would I have been any better at fatherhood than I was? Perhaps in this case less was more.