Shabbat Messages

I will always, always, always choose ice cream over any other dessert. No matter how fancy, how decadent, how elaborate, a simple scoop of ice cream wins every time. Birthdays for me are no different.

But last month, putting 53 candles on a scoop of cookies and cream felt like pushing the limits of physics, so I settled for one. And as I closed my eyes to make a wish, concentrating with everything I had, I imagined it coming true. There is something tender and beautiful about a wish. It invites wonder and lets us dream beyond the boundaries of what we think is possible.

But over the years, one of my greatest teachers, Elhanan Brown, our beloved Wilshire Boulevard Temple Israel educator and true Israel inspirer, taught me to distinguish between a wish and something far more powerful: hope.

A wish, Elhanan would say, is magical. It lives outside of us. We close our eyes, we imagine, and then we wait. We are passive recipients, hoping the world bends in our direction. Hope is something entirely different. Hope is human. It lives within us. It is not passive, it is active. Hope is infectious, spreading from heart to heart and generation to generation. It empowers us, inspires us, and calls us to create. The outcome of hope is not something we wait for, it is something we build.

This Shabbat, as we celebrate Israel’s 78th birthday, we hold both miracle and responsibility in the same breath. Israel is 78 years young, vibrant and evolving, and at the very same time more than 3,000 years old, rooted in an ancient story still unfolding through us. The national anthem of the State of Israel is Hatikvah, “The Hope.” Not the wish. The hope “to be a free people in our own land.”

That vision was never simply imagined and left to chance. It was carried, cultivated, struggled for, and ultimately built by human hands and human hearts. It was created through hope, and that sacred work continues today. Israel is not finished. It is an ongoing act of creation, shaped by those who love it, wrestle with it, and believe in what it can yet become.

So this year, as we imagine 78 candles flickering before us, we will not close our eyes to make a wish. We will open them. We will open our eyes to the work still before us, to the responsibility we carry, and to the possibility that hope demands of us. Hope does not sit still. It asks us to show up, to care, to build, to repair, to dream with our hands as much as with our hearts.

May we choose hope, not as a feeling but as a practice, not as a wish but as a commitment. And may we have the courage to help shape Israel, and our world, into what we know it can be.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Eshel