In an essay for Hadassah magazine, the journalist Samuel G. Freedman quoted what he called a "remarkably perceptive prophecy about the mixed blessing of American freedom," written in 1893 by a Reform rabbi named Maurice Harris:

Those Jews are emancipated in America in the fullest sense; we are an integral part of the nation, sharing its duties and its rights, and at times indistinguishable from the Gentiles. In the large cities there are self-imposed Ghettoes, it is true, but they are created by poverty rather than religion, and their ranks are serried by many agnostic and atheistic exceptions, who, nevertheless, pass uncriticized. The religious freedom for which we have fought 3,000 years is ours at last. But there are two sides to freedom — freedom to observe, freedom to neglect. In the Ghetto, it was easier to observe; in the larger world, it is easier to neglect.

America's Independence Day is ultimately a holiday about choosing. The country's founders made a choice to live free of a monarch's whims and created a system of government that extended that freedom of choice to every American. Its citizens would be free to choose their leaders, their religion, their livelihoods. When choice was limited — by slavery, by law, by economic oppression — the system they created allowed for corrections, some minor, some revolutionary. In world where terrorists aim only to deny others the right to liberty, that system, flaws and all, has never seemed so precious.

Like Harris, many Jews worry that freedom comes with a price — that liberated from our ghettos we have decided to embrace…nothing. There is truth to that idea, but also perversity. It is an indulgence to curse the freedom that made us the people we are today, especially when America has given us the luxury to decide who we want to be tomorrow.