As the countdown ticks ever closer to some form of confrontation with Iraq, I've rarely known Britain so divided. Many passionately believe that war is misconceived and morally wrong. It'll cause suffering to the Iraqi people. It will create chaos there and destabilise the Middle East. It will incite anger and give birth to yet more terror.

But there are those who, with no less passion, no less moral principle, are convinced that unless we confront tyranny and terror, not only will we be perpetuating the suffering of the Iraqi people. We'll be storing up, if not for us then for our children, a future in which weapons of mass destruction with global reach are in the hands of those who care nothing for the sanctity of life, and who have no qualms about the mass murder of the innocent.

In such a situation it may seem idiosyncratic to quote some of the opening lines of the Bible, but it's there that we find a remarkable idea usually lost in translation.

We read: 'And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and separated the light from the darkness, and called the light "day" and the darkness "night".' But then the Bible doesn't go on to say what we would have expected it to say: 'there was day and then night,' or 'there was light and then darkness.' It uses two words we haven't met before: 'And there was evening and there was morning. And what we miss in translation is that the Hebrew word for evening, erev, means a mixture of light and dark; and the word for morning, boker, means breaking through; as the first rays of the sun pierce the shroud of night.

What the Bible is telling us with great subtlety is that that whereas for G-d there may be black and white, human time is lived in shades of gray, mixtures of light and dark. Which is why the great decisions are so difficult and need so much foresight and courage. Clashes between right and wrong are easy. But often, like now, the clash is between two wrongs, neither of which we would choose in an ideal world, but between which, given the world as it is, we must decide.

That's why I pray not only that G-d give our leaders wisdom in the days that lie ahead, but that He gives us too the generosity of spirit to unite in our vision of a safer, more just, less brutal world, even as we differ on how to get there.

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