‘American freedom is glorious – and difficult.’

DEAR Shiri,

You came hurtling into the world a week ago today, emerging so quickly and so without a fuss that you seemed to personify the name we gave you. In Hebrew, “Shiri” means “my song,” and it will be one of the inexpressible joys of my life to hear you sing that song as you grow from the newborn you are into the woman you will, God willing, become.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I would wish for you. And it occurs to me that I could wish for you little more than the gifts you have already received as your birthright.

You are being raised in a Jewish home where your moral, spiritual and intellectual education will be considered the central responsibility placed on your mother and me.

You have a close and loving family with a sister and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins who will cosset you. And you are an American. This is the most abstract gift you have been given – but it is a blessing as great and perhaps greater than the others.

For one thing, to be an American is to hold your own life, your own future, and your own possibilities in your own hands.

That is especially true because you are a girl. Never before in the annals of human history have females had the same sorts of choices as their male contemporaries, and never has a society changed so profoundly and so quickly to ensure that gender poses no barrier.

There are those who say gender egalitarianism has placed too great a burden on today’s men and women – who have no good models to follow when it comes to making a match and dividing their labors. The result is family instability and deep confusion.

They have a point. But that is the nature of American freedom – it’s a glorious thing, and a difficult thing. Every generation has had to find a way to deal with change while maintaining what is best and noblest in human tradition, and it hasn’t been easy for any of them.

That’s why our American blessing is also our uniquely American burden. In almost every other country in the world, there are political and cultural barriers to self-expression and self-actualization that defeat most people who want to forge a new path for themselves.

We Americans don’t have a lot to say for ourselves if we don’t make the most of our lives. The culture and class barriers that exist across the other continents have now almost all been banished by law here.

Americans who do not succeed in bettering their condition find themselves in a profoundly unpleasant place. If they don’t have the native energy or the enthusiasm or the drive or even the ambition to advance themselves, they are viewed with contempt by their fellow citizens.

America is a country that keeps score, and that can be harsh.

But there are a great many possible lives that are harsher – none more so than living under the sway of the totalitarian Islamist ideology that offers its followers a way of life far different from ours. A way of life in which you, as a girl, would be sexually mutilated, denied an education, refused permission to walk in the sun without being hidden from view, and be treated as chattel by your husband.

The challenge of my time is to try and see to it that the challenge of your time is something other – something lesser – than this monstrous evil. And that your greatest burden is to meet the wondrous challenge of being an American.

All my love,

Your father