In two days time we'll start celebrating the Jewish festival of Pesach, Passover, when we tell the story of the exodus and the long walk of the Israelites from slavery to freedom. It's one of Western civilization's great narratives of hope.

But there's one thing about Passover that made all the difference. It's the story we teach our children. It takes place not in the synagogue but in the home. And we can't begin telling the story until a child, or the youngest person present, asks a question. My earliest memories go back to those evenings when we sat around the table in my grandparents house and it was my turn to ask Mah nishtanah, Why is this night different? For that moment, though I was only three or four at the time, all eyes turned to me.

What a gift that was: of memory and identity, the gift of knowing that you are a part of a story that goes back to the mists of time. It was as if someone had given me a book with a hundred chapters, each in a different handwriting, and said: each of those chapters was written by one of your ancestors and soon the time will come when you will write your own.

If anything kept the Jewish people alive through centuries of dispersion and persecution, it was this: education as the conversation between the generations, passing on to the future not just our genes but our hopes and ideals, our aspirations and dreams.

Looking at our culture today I sometimes wonder what happened to that idea: that we have a duty to teach our children the story of where we came from, where we are going to, and what happened on the way. Without a collective story there is no collective identity.

Especially at times like now, in the run up to a general election, you can sometimes feel that politics is about delivering services, in which parties compete to offer the best deal. But if that's all there is, society becomes a hotel not a home; somewhere where you pay for services, not a place where you belong. That leads to tensions, sometimes economic, sometimes ethnic or religious, that politics alone can't resolve.

We need to recover a sense of national identity, all the larger and more inclusive because it now includes so many different voices and accents. Britain isn't just a collection of competing interest groups. It's the story of our native or adoptive past, whose next chapter we're about to write together.

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