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.