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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Thought for the Day » 2007 |
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| Festive Seasons |
| 14/12/2007 |
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Thought For The Day - 14 December 2007
The festive season is well and truly on us. Jews have celebrated Hanukkah, and Hindus Diwali, their festival of light. And soon Muslims will be observing Eid ul adha, and Christians Christmas – all of which remind us that we are living in an environment our ancestors hardly knew.
Most people at most times lived among people whose faith and way of life was like their own. Today we live in the midst of a diversity that a century ago woul... |
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| Chanukah |
| 7/12/2007 |
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Thought For The Day - 7 December 2007
Right now the Jewish community is in the midst of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights. Each night for eight days we light a candelabrum, a menorah, in memory of the one that stood in the temple in Jerusalem more than 2000 years ago.
The festival commemorates one of the world’s first and most fateful clashes of civilisations, between the two cultures that shaped the entire heritage of the west: ancient Greece and ancient Israel.
Israel... |
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| Hope is the Power of the Powerless |
| 26/9/2007 |
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Thought For The Day - 26 September 2007
Today, in the Jewish community, we’ll be putting the finishing touches to the huts, with their roofs of leaves, in which we’ll be living and eating for the next eight days. We call the hut a sukkah, in English a tabernacle, and tonight the festival of Sukkot begins.
It’s a reminder of the forty year journey of the Israelites in the days of Moses, from slavery to freedom across the wilderness. For four decades they had no permanent homes. They ... |
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| We All Make Mistakes |
| 19/9/2007 |
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Thought For The Day - 19 September 2007
It’s the most famous pun in the history of the foreign office. In 1842, Major General Sir Charles Napier, commander of the British army in India, was ordered to quell an uprising in a province called Sindh, today the region around Karachi in Pakistan. He succeeded, and sent back a message consisting of one word, Peccavi, which is the Latin for ‘I have sinned.’
Puns aside, the hardest thing to say in any language is just that: I have sinned. ... |
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