Tonight we begin the Jewish festival of Sukkot, called in English, Tabernacles. For seven days we leave the comfort of our houses and sit in a Sukkah, basically a garden shed without a roof, with only a covering of branches and leaves.

It’s our way of re-enacting the journey of our ancestors in the days of Moses, across the desert in search of home.

For forty years they lived in tents or shacks the way some Bedouin still do today. So we too symbolically leave home and feel what it is to be vulnerable to the cold, the wind and the rain. I call it the festival of insecurity.

Religion has got itself a bad name in recent years as a source of conflict, violence, intolerance and anger. And I sometimes wonder whether what passes for faith today is what God intended it to be. For me faith is not certainty. It’s the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for You, God, are with me.

Faith isn’t finding easy answers. It’s the challenge of living with the questions and yet refusing to believe that ultimate reality is blind to my existence, deaf to my prayers.

Faith means knowing how vulnerable we are to natural disaster or the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, yet never giving up hope or abandoning the ideals that hope inspires.

Faith means knowing that I, a Jew, might have my way of life mocked by the cynics and sceptics, and yet refusing to respond in anger or rage.

Faith is a journey across the desert from here to a promised land which, like Moses, we may not enter, but a journey we undertake so that our children will be closer to the good society and their children closer still.

Faith means being homeless on Sukkot and eating the bread of affliction on Passover so that we never, ever forget the plight of the homeless and the afflicted.

Faith is not a childish, not even a childlike, search for security. It’s the knowledge that you can’t reach the land of milk and honey without what Nelson Mandela called a long walk to freedom.

The more faith we have, the less threatened we feel by the uncertainties of a changing world or the attacks of those who reject all we stand for. Faith is living in a Sukkah without fear, sheltered by the wings of the Divine presence, and warmed by His love.

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