Taking Ownership of a Dream: The Quiet Power Hidden in a Simple Ritual

There is one moment during Hanukkah that I wait for all year, and it doesn’t happen at the beginning of the evening, or at the end. It happens right in the middle of the last evening. After we light all eight candles and sing the songs, when the flames are already dancing and the house is filled with warm light, but before we eat the Sufganiyot, before the evening really moves on.

In that moment, we pause.

Everything is still open, still possible, not yet scattered. There is a kind of quiet that makes room for real thought. Each of us takes a small piece of paper and writes down one wish for the year ahead. Not a list. Not a plan. Just one wish. Something we want to happen.

After everyone finishes writing, we fold the notes carefully and slide them between the branches of the Hanukkiah. We let the candles keep burning, let the light stay a little longer, let the evening simply be. Only when the candles flames finally go out, we place the Hanukkiah, with all the wishes still inside, into the cupboard. There it waits for a full year, quietly, without reminders or notifications, until the next Hanukkah.

It’s easy to see this as a sweet, almost innocent tradition. A kind of a family version of New Year’s resolutions. But over the years, I’ve realized there is something much deeper here, and more importantly, something very practical.

When you look at the notes, the difference between children and adults becomes obvious. The kids wish for things that depend on luck or on someone else, I wish someone would buy me this, I wish I had that. Sometimes we hear them, sometimes we can even make those wishes come true. But we, the adults, write differently.

Our wishes don’t sound like prayers for miracles. They sound more like quiet declarations of intent. There is direction in them. There is a sense of time. And most of all, there is responsibility.

The moment those three things come together, intention, a time frame, and the act of writing it down in your own words, something starts to move. Even if I don’t think about it every day, a kind of internal compass is created. Knowing that in a year I will open that note and meet myself again means that, slowly, some of my choices, consciously or not, begin to align in that direction.

I see the same principle at work in my professional life, just under different names. In the business world, people call it OKRs or Moonshots. But at its core, it’s the same idea. Not magic. Not luck. Simply creating momentum by giving something a clear beginning, a direction, and a moment in time when you stop and look back.

Dreams don’t happen on their own. The future isn’t something we wait for, it’s something we weave. The wish inside the Hanukkiah is not the end of the process, it’s the first step. A small moment where we allow ourselves to admit what we truly want, and give it permission to start working in the background.

If there’s one thing this tradition has taught me, it’s that dreams need more than desire. They need intention, time, and a conscious decision to take ownership of them.

And that’s something you can do on any quiet evening, not only during Hanukkah.