This evening the Jewish community will be celebrating the festival of Succot, or Tabernacles. And it seems to me that the ancient idea of a Tabernacle contains an answer to one of the prickliest problems facing Britain today. How do you create, in a society as diverse as ours, a sense of shared identity, collective belonging?

In recent British history, there have been two models of society. The first I call the country house model. Imagine a group of asylum seekers turning up at the gate of an enormous country house. The owner comes out to greet them with a broad smile. Welcome, he says, I have hundreds of rooms. Please stay here for as long as you like. What a wonderful gesture. The only trouble is that however kind the owner is, he is the host and you are a guest. That’s how nation states were until recently. If you had a different colour or culture or creed, you didn’t, couldn’t feel fully at home.

So people tried another model. Society isn’t like a country house but like a hotel. You pay your money. In return, you receive services. And it doesn’t matter what you do in your own room so long as you don’t disturb the other guests. The only trouble with a hotel is that it never generates a sense of identity. It is where you happen to be staying, not where you belong.

Which brings us back to the Bible. Moses was faced with a problem not unlike ours. How do you turn a group of liberated slaves into a nation with a collective identity? His answer - God's answer - was beautiful and unexpected: You get them to build something together. What they built was the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary. The best way of making people feel "I belong" is to enlist them in a shared project so they can say: "I helped build this".

The Tabernacle is a symbol of society, made out of the contributions of many individuals. What they gave was unimportant; that they gave was essential. Society is the home we build together - and the more different types of people there are, the more complex and beautiful will be the structure we create.

The important thing is that we build together. A nation is made by contributions, not claims; active citizenship, not rights; what we give, not what we demand. A national identity can be made out of the contributions of many cultures, many faiths. What matters is that together we build something none of us could make alone.

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