Good morning. And an unusual morning it is, because this must be the first time in history that a rabbi has been asked to do thought for the day by an Archbishop of Canterbury, today’s guest editor. And there’s a story behind that story.

It began in one of history’s darkest nights, in 1942, as the Holocaust was taking place. It was then that a great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and a great chief Rabbi, J H Hertz, came together to create the Council of Christians and Jews, dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of religious or racial hatred.

I find it hard to describe what a transformation that was. For almost 2000 years Jews and Christians had been divided by a barrier of hostility and suspicion. Think of the words that added to the vocabulary of Europe: expulsion, inquisition, auto da fe, ghetto, pogrom. Who, knowing that history, would have predicted that it could be reversed? And yet it was. And today Jews and Christians can meet in friendship and respect, knowing that, yes, our beliefs are different, but that we are enlarged, not threatened, by that difference. I find that one of the great signals of hope in a world threatened by anger and despair. And now we must take that friendship and enlarge it, so that it embraces Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists and all the many other faiths that make up this nation, this earth.

2006 has been a difficult year for religion. All too often the face we’ve seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Somalia, Sudan, the Middle East and sometimes closer to home, has been violent, aggressive, confrontational – reminding us of Jonathan Swift’s famous words, that “we have just enough religion to make us hate one another, and not enough to make us love one another.” Loving one another across the boundaries of faith always has been the greatest challenge of the religious life.

And today humanity is facing its biggest test since the 17th century, when wars of religion scarred the face of Europe. It was then that secularism was born – not because people stopped believing in God, but because they stopped believing in the ability of people of God to live peaceably with one another.

Yet Jews and Christians have shown that it can be done; and if it can be done across one boundary it can be done across others. We really can write a new chapter in the troubled story between faiths, one that ends in friendship, the single greatest antidote to fear.

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