I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.

We have lots of heroes today - sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us. They are the people who really shape our lives.

The first of the request prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole.

Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? Unpopular cuts? How about just a little miracle, an overnight increase in gold reserves, a new oil field, or the next world-changing communications technology? Surely that's not too much to ask.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.