It's the most poignant line in the Bible. God has just created a world of order and beauty. Then he sees human beings, Adam and Eve, then Cain, begin to destroy that order, until by the time of the generation of the flood the world is full of violence. And then it says, "And God regretted that he had made man on earth and it grieved him to his very core." That line has haunted me these past few days.

We grieve the victims of Beslan, the killed, the injured and the missing, the shattered families, the broken lives.

But surely our grief goes deeper still, for humanity itself that we have fallen so low - because a new kind of violence has entered our world: not violence for gain, as in crime; not violence against opponents, as in war; but violence against the innocent, office workers in the case of 9/11, holiday makers, in the case of Bali, and now against innocence itself, young children on their first day back at school. This is violence that serves no purpose, advances no cause, wins no victories, whatever the perpetrators tell themselves.

We've heard much these past years about weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological. But all along we've been looking in the wrong direction. These crimes of terror involved no sophisticated weaponry. 9/11 was done by box cutters and planes; Beslan by rifles and explosives. It's not how they were done but why they were done that we should be thinking about. They were done as symbolic gestures, designed to capture the attention of the television cameras of the world with complete indifference to lives destroyed in the process. The greatest weapon of mass destruction is the human heart.

We now know the challenge humanity faces in the 21st century: the democratisation of violence. In the past, only states could wage wars. Today any group can, so long as its imagination is evil enough, its target innocent enough, its scale spectacular enough. That is a challenge that reaches beyond politics and touches the very roots of the human condition. In our synagogues this week we'll be reading some words from the Bible that speak as directly to us as they did when first spoken, perhaps the only words strong enough to save us from ourselves: "This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life that you and your children may live."

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