‘Without a vision", says the Book of Proverbs, "the people perish". Of no people is this truer than of Jews.
Historically we were supremely the people of prophetic vision, who defined our identity and predicated our survival on the power of ideas - ideas about covenant, the rule of law, justice, compassion, the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of human life, about memory, history and hope, ideas at once spiritual and practical that eventually transformed the world.
But the application of these ideas to where we are, here and now, is rarely self- evident. At every significant juncture of our history, Jews have paused to reflect on the questions Akavya ben Mahalalel said we should each ask: Where are we coming from? Where are we going to? And, to whom are we accountable?
That is what happened in the days of Moses, Joshua, Josiah and Ezra. It happened again in the first century CE in the days of Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai. It happened after the Spanish Expulsion, and again in the 19th century as Jews reflected on their place in the new nation states of Europe. It is a process in which we have to engage now. We no longer have the pillar of cloud and fire that guided our ancestors through the wilderness. But we still need our spiritual-intellectual equivalent of a satellite navigation system.
The essays contained in this booklet, all of which originally appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, are abridged from six lectures I gave in 2007-08 under the heading of Future Tense: On Jews, Judaism and Israel in the 21st century. Those lectures arose from a strong feeling that the Jewish people in Israel and the diaspora have been through difficult times since that Shabbat morning eight years ago when the new Western millennium dawned.
These have been years in which the peace process on which Israel had been embarked since 1993 fell apart. Israel suffered wave after wave of suicide bombings, to the extent that many parents in Israel wondered each morning, when they kissed their children goodbye as they climbed into the school bus, whether they would ever see them again. For Israelis it was a living nightmare.
At the same time Israel has come under another form of attack, this time in the media and academies of the world, NGOs and professional bodies, unions and even some churches, ranging from condemnations to bans and boycotts. No nation looks its best when trying to defend itself against terror, yet there was a widespread feeling that Israel was being treated disproportionately badly. Natan Sharansky defined it in terms of 3D's: double standards, delegitimation and demonisation. It felt like a genuine existential threat to the future of the state of Israel, the place where our people was born in ancient times and reborn in ours.
There was also the phenomenon of the new antisemitism, continuous with but significantly different from the old. It was directed not against Jews as individuals but against the Jewish state, reminding us of the words spoken in the French Revolutionary Assembly in 1789 by the Count of Clermont-Tonerre: "To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing."
The new wave began in Britain in a terrible way. In 2000, a young yeshivah student was sitting in a bus in north London, studying a volume of Talmud, when he was attacked by a stranger and stabbed 22 times.
He was lucky to survive. The new antisemitism is antisemitism, not anti-Zionism, for its targets are Jewish, not Israeli. When a synagogue is bombed in Djerba or Istanbul, or a Jewish school burned to the ground in France, when a French Chief Rabbi has to issue a warning to Jews not to wear yarmulkes or other identifying marks of Jewish identity in the street, then this has little to do with Israel and everything to do with Jewish life.
One of the reasons for these essays was to set these phenomena in context. These are not the worst of times for Jews. In some ways they are among the best. Despite everything, Israel continues to flourish. Anglo-Jewry, two years ago celebrating its 350th anniversary, is in the midst of a Jewish renaissance.
We have built more Jewish day schools in recent years than at any previous time in Anglo Jewish history, as the Commission on Jewish Schools (the Wagner Report) recently showed. Cultural events have proliferated: Jewish Book Week, the Jewish Music Festival, arts and film festivals, a new Jewish cultural centre, and a projected if scaled-down community centre. Limmud, the Jewish educational festival, is unique in the Jewish world and has been exported by now to 46 venues outside Britain from California to Moscow and to Israel itself.
Anglo-Jewish support for Israel, despite some intense internal arguments, remains strong, and few of those who were there will forget the 2002 rally at Trafalgar Square and the smaller though still lively celebrations there this summer for Israel's 60th anniversary. We continue to send a higher proportion of our young people on study schemes to Israel than almost any other diaspora community.
Most astonishingly, Anglo Jewry, having suffered a half century of year-on-year demographic decline, actually began to grow from 2001 to today, with more Jewish weddings, more Jewish children being born, and fewer Jews dying. Much of this growth was due to what is sometimes called the Charedi community, and that too is a cause for celebration, for they have contributed significantly to the intensification of Jewish life today.
Anglo-Jewry responded earlier and more creatively than almost any other diaspora community to the challenge of Jewish continuity: how to secure the Jewish future. All it takes is a quick tour round our schools to know that this will be stronger, more knowledgeable and committed than in the past.
Not only is the Jewish community strong within itself, it also has good relations with other faith communities, many of which look to us as a model of how to achieve the delicate balance of integration without assimilation. The relationship goes deeper than this, for not only are Jews respected; so too is Judaism.
Our faith is admired for the strength of the Jewish home, the vitality of our communities, the professionalism of our welfare facilities, the passion of our debates and the exuberance of our celebrations. People respect the networks of support Jews have for people at times of crisis or grief. Our schools are admired for their ethos as well as their academic excellence. Tzedakah, our commitment to share what we have with those who have less, continues to inspire.
For all that, though, we need a vision, if we are to set antisemitism, Israel and Jewish continuity in a wider context, and that is what I have tried to do here.
That wider context is easy to spell out. From the fall of Jerusalem in the first century until the birth of Israel in 1948, Jews were dispersed, everywhere a minority, without a state, political power, often without civic rights, always without civic equality. Max Weber called them a pariah people.
That changed in modern times, beginning with the French Revolution. Jews were now expected to become an integral part of the new nation states of Europe. Yet it was just this period, the age of Enlightenment and Emancipation, that witnessed the birth of racial antisemitism. It was an age of tension that shook European Jewry to its foundations.
The trauma culminated in the Holocaust. Essentially the years that followed, between 1945 and 2000, were a period of recovery and new beginnings, the most important of which by far was the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. In 1939, 80 per cent of world Jewry lived in Europe; now less than 20 per cent do so. The astonishing fact is that Jews did recover. We have today what Jews have never had before, simultaneously, in 4,000 years of history: independence and statehood in Israel, freedom and equality in the diaspora.
Yet we live - Jews and non-Jews alike - in the midst of a vortex of forces that have made our world more uncertain than at any time in the past half-century. The impact of information technology, the world economy and global warming have transformed the world at unprecedented speed. The international political arena is beset by dangers, with rogue states, failed states, civil wars and the spread of terror. Four ancient civilisations, Islam, Russia, India and China, have begun to reassert themselves. Religion, sometimes in extreme and militant forms, has re-entered the arena of world history, with unpredictable consequences. As so often in the past, Jews, especially in Israel, find themselves on the front line of global tensions. The question is: are Jews, Judaism and Israel safe in this newly destabilised world?
The best answer was given by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in a famous line that has been turned into a children's song: "The whole world is like a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is never to be afraid." Jews have faced more uncertainty, for longer, than any other people in history. Faith sustained us in the past; it will do so in the future.
What I am arguing for in all these essays is confidence. We can fight antisemitism (essay 2). We can make the case for Israel (essay 3). Judaism properly understood, as a society-building faith, can transform Israel into a Jewish state, not just a state for Jews (essay 4). We can meet the intellectual and ethical challenges of today (essay 5). In all of these battles we will have allies and friends, and it is important that we go out to make them. But to have confidence, it is essential that we understand who we are and why.
Judaism holds a message not just for Jews. Abraham was told, in his first recorded encounter with God, that "through you all the families on earth will be blessed". Moses called Torah "your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations". Isaiah said we were "a light for the nations" and "a covenant for the peoples". Zechariah foresaw the day when non-Jews would say to Jews, "Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you."
What is that message? In the last essay I argue that Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind. Jews, a tiny people who only ever had a tiny land, have survived every persecution, outlived every empire, and turned every autumn of tragedy into a spring of rebirth. Judaism is a religion of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual, of tzedakah and chessed, justice and compassion. It is a religion of the family, marriage, and the love between husband and wife, parents and children. It is a religion of schools, education and the life of the mind. It is a faith that focuses on life itself as the gift of God.
Andrew Marr once wrote: "The Jews really have been different; they have enriched the world and challenged it." There is too much negativity in Jewish life today, and too much fear. It can lead us to feel embattled and alone. We are not alone. We have enemies, but we also have good and true friends. We need to live our Jewish life more fully, study our heritage more profoundly, inhale our faith more deeply, and wear our identity more proudly.
To repeat: For the first time in 4,000 years we have independence and statehood in Israel, freedom and equality in the diaspora. We carry with us the knowledge that we outlived all our enemies, who, seeking to destroy us, destroyed themselves. Our task is to be a symbol of hope in a world of fear. I can think of none higher.
The essays collected together here for the first time were first published in the JC as six monthly essays, and are based on the Chief Rabbi's Future Tense lecture series. The lectures will be published at full length in May 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99)