The latest bombings in Bali remind us what an evil terror really is. The holidaymakers who were the victims came from no one country. They were engaged in no activity that could threaten anyone. Bali, one of the most beautiful places on earth, has again been defiled.

When terror strikes many people lose – some lose their lives, others their loved ones, some their sense of security, and others, like the gentle, gracious people of Bali, their livelihoods. Who then gains?

Sadly, those who organise terror have explained why they do what they do. You love life, they say. We love death. That, they believe, is why they will win. In fact, it is why they will lose.

Tonight we begin Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. And for the next ten days we will say a short but powerful prayer: Remember us for life, O King who delights in life, and write us in the book of life for your sake, for you are the God of life.

I sometimes wonder about the strange, singular people into which I was born. It has suffered much. Think of the words that treatment of Jews has added to the vocabulary of the West: exile, expulsion, forced conversion, inquisition, ghetto, pogrom, and most recently Holocaust.

They have taken their toll. The survivors were all too few. Today for every Jew alive there are a hundred Muslims and almost 200 Christians. An American writer once said that the total population of world Jewry today is smaller than the statistical error in the Chinese census. Too often my ancestors stood eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death. Many times I have asked myself why they didn’t just give up and do what their persecutors wanted them to do: convert, assimilate, disappear.

The only answer I can give is that they loved life and never lost faith in the God of life. The Jewish people is a symbol of hope, because however many times it walked through the valley of the shadow of death it never ceased to fight for the sanctity of life against what Freud called thanatos, the death instinct that lures people into violence for the sake of revenge or glory or God.

In this still young century may God help us to ensure that death shall have no dominion; and may He open our eyes to the real challenge that faces us: which is to write the world’s poor, its hungry and its underprivileged into the Book of Life.

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