Last week, I stood in Golders Green as His Majesty King Charles III arrived to meet the victims of the terrorist stabbing attack that wounded two Jewish men last month, and to see for himself the neighbourhood that has been at the heart of London’s Jewish life for over a century.
The King met the Shomrim volunteers who were first on the scene to confront the attacker. He spoke with Hatzola first responders, who treated not just those who had been stabbed in the April attack, but the terrorist as well. He spent time with other communal representatives, expressing his solidarity and steadfast support.
Outside the Jewish Care centre, a large crowd had gathered. Many shouted “Long live the King.” People made the bracha traditionally recited when you see a monarch in person – “who has given of His glory to human beings”. It was a moment of real grace in a period of British Jewish history that has been anything but.
The Britain I grew up in was safe, even comfortable, for Jews. I now understand I took that safety and comfort for granted. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in 2012, 11 per cent of British Jews saw antisemitism as a very big problem. Today that figure stands at 46 per cent. In 2025, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the UK – the second-highest annual total in its history – and the Yom Kippur attacks in Manchester last year saw the first fatal antisemitic terror attack since records began. With the arson attack on Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green in March, the Golders Green stabbings, foiled large-scale attacks, and local antisemitic incidents, Britain today is a place where Jews look over their shoulders.
The King’s visit happened a week before the Jewish festival of Shavuot, and I have found it impossible not to think about the two together. Shavuot recalls the giving of the Torah at Sinai. But what exactly was given there? Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught that the Torah established a covenant, not a contract – a distinction he returned to throughout his life, because he believed it was the key to understanding both what holds societies together and what causes them to fracture.
A covenant, he argued, is not a transaction but a commitment in kind – binding parties not through calculated self-interest but through shared identity, shared values, and shared responsibility for one another’s welfare. Na’aseh v’nishma, the Jewish people said at Sinai: we will do, and we will understand. Commitment before comprehension.
Rabbi Sacks worried that contemporary societies had allowed covenant to atrophy – that we had come to believe that law and rights and enforcement were sufficient to hold us together, without the moral culture, the shared belonging, and the habits of solidarity that no legislation can manufacture. The consequence, he argued, is a society that can compel behaviour but cannot form character. That can prosecute hatred after the fact but cannot cultivate the values that prevent it from taking root.
Watching the King in Golders Green, I felt the force of that distinction acutely. His visit was not contractually required. No law compelled it. No political calculation demanded it. The King came because a faith community he cares about had been attacked on its own streets, and he believed his presence mattered. It was a covenantal act – freely chosen, morally serious, an expression not of obligation but of belonging.
Yet a covenantal society still requires its Government to act. Contract – law, enforcement, funding, policy – is not the lesser form of commitment; it is the form that Government uniquely can and must provide. It can legislate against hate crime, fund community security, police the marches, and increase sentences for religiously aggravated offences. This Government has not done these things at the scale the moment demands – and it must. As Chief Rabbi Mirvis has said, words are no longer sufficient.
We should be clear-eyed about what contract can and cannot achieve. Law can change behaviour; it cannot change culture. It can punish those who act on their hatred; it cannot address the ideological environment in which that hatred is formed, normalised, and transmitted. For that, something covenantal is required – a genuine, sustained commitment to the dignity and safety of every minority community, not because the law demands it, but because it is who we are and who we intend to remain. As Rabbi Sacks warned: “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”
Rabbi Sacks used to say that the antidote to the world’s darkness was not optimism but hope – and that the difference between them was this: optimism is a belief that things will get better on their own; hope is the decision to act as though they can, even when the evidence is uncertain.
The King’s visit to Golders Green was an act of hope. But hope without action is sentiment. This Government has the tools, the power (even given the current political mess Labour is in), and the evidence it needs. The Jewish community is not asking to be pitied or praised for its resilience. It is asking – demanding – that the state fulfil its most basic obligation: to protect its citizens and to mean it.
Na’aseh v’nishma, the Jewish people said at Sinai: we will do, and we will understand. The time for doing is now. The question is whether the Government will do the same.
Dan Sacker is a strategic communications consultant, a trustee of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, and an inaugural cohort member of President Herzog’s Voice of the People initiative
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