A Society In Which There Are High

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.

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.

People Are Feeling And Sensing A Return Of Anti-semitism - Even In Europe, Which, Seventy Years After The Holocaust, Is A Very Scary Thing. I Think They Are Feeling That Israel Is Very Isolated And Doesn't Always Get What They See As Fair Treatment In The European Media.

Jews Survived All The Defeats, Expulsions, Persecutions And Pogroms, The Centuries In Which They Were Regarded As A Pariah People, Even The Holocaust Itself, Because They Never Gave Up The Faith That One Day They Would Be Free To Live As Jews Without Fear.

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.