Thanks to my mother-in-law celebrating a big birthday, we had the wonderful fortune to spend some time in Hawai’i this month. One afternoon, I insisted on a quest—and we drove from our hotel on the Kohala Coast to the tiny town of Hawi in search of what I can assure you is the best ice cream on the Big Island. (As you might imagine, my kids needed very little convincing on this one.)

The ice cream was, in fact, amazing. And, as is often the case, the drive turned out to be even more memorable than the ice cream.

As we wound our way north, we began noticing signs marking King Kamehameha’s birth and journey to hide from rival chiefs before he eventually united the Hawaiian Islands. What began as a simple family outing became an unexpected history lesson. We had set out looking for dessert and found ourselves traveling through a landscape layered with memory, conflict, resilience, and hope.

It left me with a question I’ve been carrying ever since—and, if I think about it, one that I have been carrying for decades:

How do we love a place enough to tell the truth about it?

Long before the Israelites cross into the Promised Land, Moses spends surprisingly little time describing the land itself. Instead, he worries about memory. Again and again he repeats the same warning: Take care lest you forget. Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Remember where you came from. Remember what freedom cost. The Torah seems to understand that the greatest threat to a people is not that they will lose the land, but that they will forget the story that gives the land its meaning.

Perhaps that’s true of every place we love. Perhaps memory is what keeps love from becoming nostalgia, because true memory asks us to see not only beauty, but history; not only blessings, but obligations. Judaism—and my Zionism—has never taught me that loving a place means believing it is perfect. It has taught me that loving a place means accepting responsibility for the story it is still becoming.

Later this week, we will celebrate 250 years of America. And as I do each July 4th, I’ve found myself returning to George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport. When he wrote that this new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” he wasn’t describing America as it already was. He was articulating an aspiration—a vision of what this country might yet become.

Like all great aspirations, it has always been unfinished.

America has never fully lived up to that promise, and our history tells that story plainly. But perhaps the question isn’t whether previous generations completed the work. The question is whether we understand that it is now ours.

We inherit promises that are unfinished.

We do not inherit a promise in order to admire it. We inherit it in order to extend it.

As Jews, we know something about that. We inherit not only blessings but responsibilities—not only memories but obligations. Every generation receives a story that is still being written and is asked to leave it more just, more compassionate, and more faithful than it found it.

As we celebrate Independence Day this week, I hope we can hold gratitude and honesty together. I hope we can celebrate what is worthy of celebration while telling the truth about what remains undone. And I hope we can be the kind of inheritors who understand that loving a place means helping it become more fully what it has always aspired to be.

Happy 4th!