Two days ago as the chancellor was delivering his pre budget report I joined some 500 politicians, policy makers, heads of charities and religious leaders at a national poverty hearing. And it was sobering to hear first hand testimony from some of the people who live in real hardship: the homeless, the elderly, those caught in the trap of low incomes, and no less than 3.4 million children in Britain.

Ask most people where poverty is and instinctively they say: Africa. It’s as if we have a kind of moral longsightedness that allows us to see destitution in the distance quite clearly, but only vaguely if at all when it’s close. Perhaps living standards for most have moved so far so fast that we forget the people left behind.

And as I left the conference hall and walked through the streets of central London with their bright lights and shop windows full of expensive objects the sheer dissonance hit me and into my mind flashed the words: the poverty of affluence – what happens to a culture when its cathedrals are shopping centres, its sacred texts are glossy catalogues, its hymns advertising jingles, its sacred task to make us want what we don’t need.

I thought of the wonderful remark of my predecessor, the late Lord Jakobovits who used to say that the most material thing he could think of was soil, and the most spiritual thing he knew was the soul. Soil and soul he said contain almost the same letters with one difference. The material has an I, the spiritual a U. A consumer culture focuses on me and my desires. Which is why we need the counterbalance of the soul: sensitivity to the needs of others.

There’s a biblical word, Tzedakah, charity-as-justice, for which there’s no real English equivalent because we think of these as two quite different things. If someone gives you a hundred pounds because he owes it to you, that’s justice. If he does so out of generosity, that’s charity. An act can be one or the other but not both. But tzedakah means both: charity and justice, because we believe that giving isn’t an option but an obligation.

So while you’re thinking about what to give someone who has everything, think also about what you could give to those in Britain who have almost nothing; the difference a generous gesture might make. Because poverty isn’t just a place in Africa. It’s a street not far from where you live.

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