Meltzer is the rabbi of Ohr Shalom Synagogue in Bankers Hill and a lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religion at SDSU. He lives in University City.
I love the Fourth of July. It represents the myth of America that is so inspiring, and for one day I choose to celebrate it in as uncomplicated a manner as I can. When I was a little kid in Akron, Ohio, the Fourth meant going to watch the parade — fire trucks and high school marching bands. The Fourth meant going to the park to play with my West Akron Little League friends. If we were lucky, it also meant a trip to Cleveland to watch our favorite baseball team, led by Buddy Bell. I was still too young, naive and privileged to be troubled by the team’s name or its highly inappropriate cheers.
Then we moved to San Diego. The Fourth of July parade became the San Diego Symphony Concert Under the Stars at the old Aztec Bowl. West Akron Little League became Cowles Mountain Little League. And I ditched the American League with its “never coming to the National League” designated hitter, and became a Padres fan for life. Buddy Bell was upgraded to Dave Winfield, and the best Fourths were spent at the Murph.
The Fourth of July, American independence and the liberty to which it aspires, have always been part of my personal mythology — the stories I long to be true, even if they are not.
Thanksgiving weekend of my freshman year of college, I met my Akron grandparents at my aunt’s house in New York. She is now happily a San Diegan. One night we took the ferry to Staten Island for dinner. As we were sailing by the feet of the Statue of Liberty, my grandfather stared at the statue and he told me his story: how a young child in antisemitic Poland walked out of Bialystok, and ultimately sailed steerage across the Atlantic in search of freedom.
With eyes focused on the beautiful copper lady, my grandfather told me about looking to the horizon, waiting, anticipating, hoping, until finally he could see the tip of her torch, the spikes of her crown, and then America.
Not all Jews were so lucky. The hateful immigration acts of the 1920s shut down Jewish immigration just as fascism was about to rise in Europe, and millions who could have been saved weren’t. My grandfather’s own cousin, with whom he lived in Bialystok, left Europe too late to enter the United States, and instead became a citizen of Mexico. His grandson now lives in San Diego.
Part of my Fourth celebration includes reading “The New Colossus” — the poem by American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus emblazoned on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. I am the descendant of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” I remind myself, every year of my obligation to ensure that her torch burns brightly, and that “from her beacon-hand glows worldwide welcome.”
Jews aren’t the only group who have suffered discrimination in their “yearning to be free.” Immigrants from China were banned beginning in 1882, and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1943.
So, every year, I recite “The New Colossus” and reflect on how close to the truth that myth has proven for millions, and how far from the truth to so many more.
I believe deeply that the soul of America lies in the distance between our myths and our lived reality. And it is not only about an immigration system that has lived up to the myth for some, and failed for others. It is about an America in which so much progress has been made, and so much more remains to accomplish.
That little kid, who never saw two men hold hands walking down the street, is now a rabbi who stands beneath the Jewish wedding canopy (chuppah) as a new family is created and the couple kisses — and sometimes it is a man and a woman, sometimes two men, sometimes two women, sometimes one or both partners are queer, or transgender, or nonbinary, and always as the two become one family, the reality of America moves a little closer to the glory of our myth.
That little kid went to a diverse school and noticed a strong correlation between skin color and where a student lived and what their parents did for a living. That little kid now teaches at San Diego State University and credits SDSU and the California State education system for its efforts to make a college degree accessible to all. At SDSU, roughly 2 out of 5 students are first in their family to enroll in college. Every year at graduation, the reality of America moves a little closer to the glory of our myth.
College may be more accessible, but poverty is real. SDSU has a program to provide food for students who are food insecure. America is making education more accessible, but not accessible enough to go to school and to eat.
On the Fourth, we must also acknowledge that our history of racism, and our failure to eradicate it, is the greatest disconnect between our myth and reality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” We are an America in which the majority of signers to the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Four of our first five presidents owned slaves. Apparently what is self-evident to some is different than what is self-evident to others.
Living in the space between myth and reality every year on the Fourth, part of my ritual is reading the Black American poet Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again.”
He explores for us the myth that never was, but for which we should all long and strive.
“O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe. / (There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Happy Fourth of July.
