May you live to 120 is a traditional – if optimistic – wish Orthodox Jews bestow to a loved one celebrating their birthday, echoing the age at which Moses was said to have died.

For Israel’s 60th birthday I wish her for longevity that lasts well beyond Moses. The Jewish State has survived countless wars, terrorist attacks, economic embargoes, intellectual assaults, the ongoing defection by the ever radicalizing Left (cf Jeremiah Wright), and the odd embrace by fervent Evangelicals (cf Mike Huckabee) – yet she’s thriving in a very, very unfriendly region (cf five wars and global Jihad).

On this birthday moment people are already asking about the future for Israel now that the Holocaust has also reached it’s 60 year anniversary, and the Arab wars grind onward. Does a country carved out of the husk of the now historic British Empire – and before that, the even more attic Ottoman Empire – have cause to exist?

As the young poppers on The Wire say, “mos def.”

Zionism’s work isn’t done. The dual mandate for the Jews, as biblical tradition has it – is to create a safe-haven for one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, and to be an or l’goyim, a light unto the nations. These tasks will never cease for Israel – much as America’s call to be a land of freedom and opportunity will never cease to be relevant, regardless of the conditions for the United States’ creation, the blood-soaked history of manifest destiny in the mid 19th century, the cruel injustices of slavery or the ever lasting need for true racial and gender equality.

Israel, now more than ever, retains its mandate to serve Jews and to serve mankind. It’s an everlasting process, and it’s just begun.

For the Jews:

Israel has an urgent, ongoing cause to provide a safe haven for its people around the world, like the embattled French community which has suffered kidnappings, murders, assaults and burning synagogues by Arab immigrants as recently as a few years ago; like the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Islamic states who were never treated as first class citizens, and were stripped of their property on the eve of Israel’s victory in 1948 -and who can never go back; like those fleeing virulent anti-Semitism in former Soviet states, namely Uzbekistan, that are now controlled by Islamic radicals; like the well-heeled, physically-secure Westerners moving to Israel to connect more intimately with a vibrant religion that is often fails to take root in a consumerist world society.

Simultaneous to protecting the world’s most embattled minority, Israel serves as a well spring for Jewish communal, religious and cultural life and education. The tiny county has become a place where Jews in diaspora arrive on a daily basis to recharge their batteries and deepen Jewish connections.

As for the world:

The Jewish State, Theodore Herzl’s synonym for the biblical word “Israel,” also has a mission to be a global citizen. To be a positive force in the world with an outpouring of film, literature, dance, music, science, biblical scholarship, medicine and countless innovations. Like chatting on the ‘net? Thank Israel for inventing the ICQ technology.

Today the Jewish State provides shelter, food and support for hundreds of refugees from Sudan across southern Israel. There is also a $200 million initiative to bring over 100,000 electric cars for a pilot program to green the country.

As for a contribution to human rights, the catastrophe of the West Bank occupation, which harms both Arabs and Israelis, remains a crisis to resolve – but it won’t come with talk, commissions, political deadlines or campaign oratory. It will only come from internal change within the region, which is a long way off.

Will Arab states give Palestinians citizenship instead of forcing them to live in refugee camps – like in Lebanon and Jordan – sixty years after Israel’s war of independence, thus creating external militancy? Will the Islamic world drop its decades-old anti-Semitic militarism and imperial legacy, and accept an Israel within rational, secure boundaries – and not the indefensible 1949 armistice line which Arabs attacked in 1967 and again in 1973?

Will Israel – and her unbending, uncompromising settlers – have the courage to withdraw to those boundaries? Hopefully we’ll find out before Moses’ 120 years are up.

Israel will soon approach an era when her founding fathers have left us. Shimon Peres will be 85 in August. He and his former colleagues have begun to pass their responsibilities to a new generation. As the liberal Ehud Barak, and the current, hawkish Ehud Olmert administrations attest, these newer, post-1948 leaders are barely keeping up with their predecessors legacies, from both sides of the aisle.

Their goal now for Israel’s future is to continue to make Zionism relevant This means retaining Israel as a haven for all Jews, keeping it as a land for Jewish study, activism and renewal, and contributing, eternally, to sciences and the arts as it raises the bar on what it means to be a global citizen.

Israel will continue her twin quests, but only with the fierce loyalty of her people, and the support of the entire world as we all, collectively, reach back to an ancient call to create a land where Judaism and justice can thrive for the next sixty years, and well beyond.

Zachary Thacher leads the downtown Jewish community, Kol haKfar – the Voice of the Village. He and friends blog about Israel at http://www.nearista.com