God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.

The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities.

There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.

We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.

Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.