Tomorrow night we’ll begin celebrating the Jewish festival of Shavuot, known in english as pentecost. And it recalls the time 33 centuries ago when the Israelites on their way from slavery to freedom received their great moment of revelation. Standing at the foot of Mount Sinai they heard God’s voice proclaim the ten commandments – still perhaps the most famous short summary of the moral life.

Moving to today, though, the ten commandments have suffered an eclipse. Observing the Sabbath and not taking the Lord’s name in vain are not our strong points. And as for not coveting our neighbour’s possessions – our consumer culture seems to be built on the opposite. In fact the very idea that there are basic rules of morality sounds strange to our post-modern ears. Some years ago an American writer said that if the Bible were being written today it would say: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Relax.”

Yet it seems to me that there is an abiding truth behind that revelation so long ago – namely that a free society is not only a political achievement; it’s a moral one as well. Without some shared code of what we may not do, the fabric of our life together begins to unravel. And it does so in two opposite directions.

On the one hand there are those who argue that there are no moral laws at all. We have a right to do whatever we choose to do with minimal interference from others. And on the other, there are those who claim that we have a duty to do whatever our religion commands us to do even if that involves depriving others of their rights, sometimes even of their lives.

And these two opposites live off one another. The secularists can brand all religious people as fanatics; while religious people can decry the secularists as immoral, even decadent. The result is to turn society from a place of shared values into an arena of conflict, sometimes violent as in Iraq, sometimes merely abrasive as in the liberal democracies of Europe today.

Without some basic agreement on what, for the sake of living peaceably together, we may not do, we really will face some form of cultural civil war. So whether it’s the ten commandments or some contemporary equivalent, we do need shared rules. A free society rests on moral foundations, on the things we agree not to do so that my freedom does not come at the cost of yours.

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