Hail to Israel on her sixtieth birthday! It overwhelms my heart to think of the story of the Jewish people, the founders of traditions that have sustained the spiritual lives of over half the population of the world, not only Jews but also Christians and Muslims; brutally thrown into exile for over two thousand years; often violently persecuted; and then subjected to the inconceivable genocide of the Holocaust. To think that now at last they have returned to their chosen home is truly wonderful! Heartfelt congratulations to Thee, O Israel, on your Big Sixtieth!

In the Tibetan calendar, sixty years is a key cycle, one complete round of the twelve animals and five elements. Israel was born in the Year of the Earth Mouse, and 2008 brings us back to the Earth Mouse. It is thus a year of total renewal. So you are One Year Old again, O Israel! The best tribute we can offer you is to reflect upon your profound spiritual purpose and your vast global promise, Being a Light Unto the Nations.

Reflecting on what is known of your history, before you reached your promised land, you were nomadic, then enslaved in Egypt, then bravely escaped from that and wandered in the desert, then flourished as an empire until crushed by Mesopotamia and again by Rome. Your sacred texts and identity began to be collected under the pressure of those sufferings.

The positive side of your long exile is that you developed a higher level of awakening than the sedentary people among whom you wandered. You excelled because you were so often denied the comforts of routine ownership and agricultural cycles. You have created and invented and given so much all along, and you have developed extraordinary ways of surviving as a people with a distinctive culture in spite of living homeless.

Like the Buddhists, you have made a rich home in homelessness and preserved your vision of the higher realities of existence. The Buddhists explored this home of homelessness, national identity of identitylessness, most completely in the hidden highland of Tibet. That is why today there is this mysterious heart connection between you veteran exile souls and the newly exiled souls of Tibet.

Now as you renew your millennial return to your promised land, you have the challenge to shift from your extraordinary success in being at home in homelessness to maintaining your spiritually liberated higher vision of homelessness while happily back in your ancient home! Your meeting this challenge is essential to your solving the problem of your relations with your neighbors, actually your spiritual children, brothers and sisters in the family of your God, the Muslim and Christian Arabs who have been living in your promised land during the long period of your exile. You definitely have the ability to meet this challenge triumphantly, having mastered the many ordeals of wandering in exile for so long in so many places, recovering again and again from such horrendous sufferings, restoring again the essential gentleness of your sweet culture, and giving so generously to so many others all over the world.

The key may lie in your tradition of Jubilee, the ancient periodic cycle in which land was redistributed, and unused land accumulated by the wealthy was freely given to those in need who could again make it productive. Only through such a generous spirit and fear-transcending action can the present cycle of violence be reversed and true peace emerge. The traumas from which you emerged last century during the still ongoing violent throes of the end of the long centuries of imperialisms have marked your first sixty years, caused you continuing sufferings, and limited the shining of your light. The promise of a new century of peace, and the creativity that must respond to the global challenges before us all, has still not manifested clearly. This world has changed so dramatically —the heroes of war that were helpful in the past have not yet met the changes as heroes of peace. The heroism of peace requires another level of risk, another level of fearlessness, another level of insight.

How does the lion learn to lie down with the lamb? What inner resources must be developed to restrain her lion ’s appetites? We are confident the answers to these questions can be found within your own deepest traditions, O Israel! We are counting on you to find them, use them and then share them with us all. For all of us are still caught in similar endless cycles of violence and fear and terror. And all of us cannot triumph over them by adding yet more violence and terror. So this may be your Light unto the Nations, which you can kindle ever brighter and shine out upon us! It may be for this that your God at last recalled you to your promised land and so asked you to summon all the genius that you developed while in exile to create a home that is not founded on the homelessness of others, but upon the vision of the abundance of all creation, which patiently waits to be enjoyed by a humanity that has finally turned all swords into plowshares! So happy birthday, O divine Israel!