It’s the Fourth of July - The Jewish Standard

America’s turning 250!

And it seems like we can feel every one of those 91,250 days, and recently they haven’t all been good ones.

Right now, the country feels sluggish, friendless, and unhappy. We’re split internally, and our allies no longer trust us. We’re not in a good place.

But we’re also 250 years old!

We have a mixed history, some good, some bad, some dazzlingly brilliant, some insanely misguided, most although not all of it on an upward-reaching arc.

Although there is an upsurge in antisemitism recently, this country, as Rabbi Leon Morris said in this week’s cover story, is unusual if not unique in its acceptance of Jews as full citizens from the very beginning. (Not counting Israel, of course.) I always remember what Abe Foxman, z’l, used to say about antisemitism. It’s always running underground, he’d remind me. There’s a sewer below our feet. But it’s out of sight, with its stench contained, most of the time. In the last decade some of the sewer covers were lifted, and recently they’ve all been tossed aside, and the rot is aboveground. But eventually, he counseled, it’ll be shoved back down where it belongs. Our goal, then, is to hasten that return.

(It’s a huge loss to mark the 250th without Abe. I miss him, and I think — no, I know — that the world could use his hard-earned wisdom.)

We’re also the country that broke from a despotic monarch — No Kings didn’t come from nowhere — took in vast numbers of people from all over, and naturalized them. Almost everyone who is old enough to vote can vote (some felons can’t). Most of us, even the relatively unprosperous ones, are infinitely better off than poor people in other countries.

We have the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, holding her green torch above New York Harbor; she welcomed many of our grandparents and great-grandparents here.

This year, New York will celebrate the Fourth with 40 tall ships, sailing up the Narrows to the Hudson, going from the long, low Verrazano, which seems almost to skim the water, to the George Washington, one of the stunningly lovely bridges that span the majestic river, a bridge that is so soaring — its horizontal-ish cables fly up to a tower, swoop down, almost but not quite to our level as we drive across, and then fly back up again — and I am still so moved by its beauty that I can almost feel my own body soaring up over the river when I drive across it.

There will be airplanes flying overhead on the Fourth, in the kind of formations that make them look like they’re sky-dancing.

Even now, there is much to celebrate. There is much for us to do, and much to worry about, but also there is room for hope. So happy 250th birthday to all of us! (And yes, it’s true, we don’t look a day over 249…)

—JP

Opinion