It is 2017, and with it comes the opportunity to commemorate a whole series of anniversaries for events that took place in years ending with 7. In a few weeks we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, in June 1967.

In this commemoration we will celebrate the reunification of Jerusalem. We will confirm the end of our status as victims. Those of us old enough to remember will never forget when U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, listened to Nasser. Then he withdrew the U.N. buffer forces in the Sinai, thus permitting Nasser to fill the Sinai with tens of thousands of troops, tanks, and the like adding to his blockade of the Straits of Tiran, thus choking off Israel’s lifeline port, Eilat, from the world.

We will remember the indecision and the “it will all work out alright” attitude of the West. We will remember one of the most famous CIA-taped phone calls when Nasser telephoned then-King Hussein of Jordan (who later signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994) asking him why he hadn’t opened up another front in the war against Israel in the West Bank. Indeed, Israel had sent messages through the United States that it was not interested in the West Bank. Hussein told Nasser that he was not opening a front because he heard reports that the Egyptian Air Force had been destroyed on the ground during the first day of the war. Nasser said it was a lie. Hussein believed him.

This is not the only anniversary we commemorate for events that happened in years ending in 7. This is the 120th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Theodor Herzl declared, “This night I gave birth to the Jewish state.” What an amazing prophecy. He was right. Fifty-one years later, the State of Israel was established.

There is another great anniversary of a year ending in seven. This year is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or more precisely the Bolshevik or Communist coup d’etat. When that Iron Curtain descended across Europe, more than three million Jews were trapped in the Soviet Union and suffered deeply for 74 years. Nearly a million and a half were reunited with us at the end of the last century.

There is the 80th anniversary of the Peel Commission in 1937 to commemorate. In 1937, the Peel Commission, originally known as the Palestine Royal Commission, headed by Lord Peel, recommended that the League of Nations Mandate had become unworkable and recommended partition of British Mandate Palestine into two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state. The Arabs rejected it. This was to be followed by a series of tragic replications.

Here comes another year Seven Anniversary. It is the 70th anniversary of November 29, 1947, when the United Nations recommended the partition into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, and once again the Arabs rejected that.

1967 has another important commemoration, the three famous No’s of Khartoum, when the Arab League declared: No recognition; No negotiations; No peace, in the wake of Israel’s monumental victory in 1967. As Abba Eban noted at the time, where and at what other time in history have the vanquished sued for ongoing war, and the victor sued for peace?!

There is another year Seven Anniversary to commemorate. Anwar Sadat, one of the most hated names in all Israel for having launched a war against Israel and the Jewish people on Yom Kippur 1973, came to Jerusalem in 1977 recognizing Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. He got back everything he wanted. It is a pity that others haven’t learned that lesson.

After the year 2017, we get the year 2018. This will give us the opportunity to commemorate the anniversaries of events in years ending in 8. The most spectacular of those anniversaries will of course be the 70th Anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. See you then!

Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko is Rabbinic Scholar of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago.