The universe is more than mere matter in motion. It and we were brought into being by a Creator who seeks our good.

We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.

Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.

While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.

The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.

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.

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.

Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.

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.

While we can remember the past, we cannot write the future. Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

Giving is what makes a nation great.

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

The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.