Volunteering has been undervalued in Britain for a long time. Often it has been seen as a kind of cut-price, amateur version of work that would be better done by the state. When politicians speak about it, people hear in the background the sound of budgets being cut.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.

The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.

If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.

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

Civil society rests on moral relationships. They are covenantal rather than contractual. They are brought about not by governments but by us a husbands and wives, parents, friends and citizens, and by the knowledge of what we do and what we are makes a difference to those around us. (...) Renewing society's resources of moral energy is the program, urgent but achievable.