My Talmud class has been going for almost 40 years; it’s been a stable feature throughout my rabbinate, ‘Thursday mornings at 9.30,’ and I love it. Luckily, many of the participants love it too, and some have been there for all, or almost all, that time.

As anyone who studies Talmud knows, some passages are difficult, some are intense with a logic hard to unpick, some are morally inspiring, some are ethically challenging, lots are full of issues we still struggle with today, some spring straight from the page to the heart, and some are simply beautiful.

It was such a section that we hit upon yesterday, Berachot 16b – 17a, a daf, or page, about peace and hope which we fortuitously arrived at on the anniversary of VE Day, and amidst the troubles that beset our people and our world. The passage consists of the supplications that rabbis of the Talmud would add after they had completed their amidah, their obligatory communal prayer. Their words reach out to us across almost two millennia because what they longed for then, we long for too today.

Rabbi Elazar used to say: ‘Our God, may it be your will to cause love, fellowship, peace and friendship to dwell wherever we are apportioned.’ Perhaps even then communities were known for their fractiousness. Or maybe, as I prefer to believe, Rabbi Elazar was only reflecting back to God the comradely reality he experienced around him, together with the wish that it should continue thus.

He adds a stirring thought which none of the other rabbis include in quite the same way: ‘May our heart, when we rise in the morning, be filled with longing to experience awe before your name [and presence].’ Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, one gets up still weary, with a headache, not quite all there, or anxious. But on certain mornings, as dawn breaks a deep sense of wonder fills one’s spirit, as if, as the Zohar puts it, one’s soul had been taken by God on a visit to the Garden of Eden in the night.

Rabbi Yochanan’s prayer is more down to earth. He beseeches heaven to take note of how grim human life and the lot of the Jewish People can be, and calls on God ‘to clothe yourself in your mercy, garb yourself in your might, cover yourself in your loving kindness, gird yourself with your graciousness, and summon your qualities of goodness and humility.’ It’s as if there’s a conflict even within God: be tough with the world, or gentle and forbearing? Be kind to us, God, Rabbi Yochanan pleads, just as one’s partner might say during a bad patch: ‘I just need you to be nice to me today.’

Rabbi Chiya’s prayer is different again: ‘May it be your will, God, that your Torah be our occupation and that our hearts don’t become depressed or our vision darkened.’ Those words are so simple, and so close to the bone: Down here on earth it’s hard to keep our spirits up, so help us maintain a sense of hope and purpose and guide us in your Torah’s laws of justice and compassion.

‘What’s the take-away?’ one of the participants asked me after we had studied those prayers. Part of me wanted to answer, ‘Plus ca change! It was the same old world back then as it is now.’

But there’s a better response. Those teachers, immersed in Torah, well understood the challenges of the human condition and faced their difficulties with honesty, courage, and the hope that, somehow, the world would be guided by God in the direction of harmony and compassion.

That’s why their supplications speak to us today, not just as if they were, but because they truly are, our own.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. I apologise to my American friends for not sending greetings sooner.

‘Thank you’ makes the world go round. If every relationship was graced by the words ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’, not just mouthed but truly meant, humanity would be in a different place. How often I’ve heard it said, with a worn-down sigh: ‘If only he’d just showed some appreciation!’

I’d describe myself as ‘average’ at saying thank you. I admit, I have thought much about it of late. Worry interrupts the nights. There’s anxiety over what’s happening in Israel and around it, worry for friends and colleagues whose children are in combat, worry for the suffering, for what the grim present holds for the unfolding future. There’s anguish over the human sorrows I hear by day, which I’m powerless to relieve and go round and round in my head by night. There’s fear for our beautiful world. Our baby hedgehog Iggy, rescued two weeks ago, will it, please God, make it? It’s a personalised question, epitomising a universal angst.

So the words ‘thank you’ come as rescue. Notice what’s good! Appreciate everything! Don’t miss a chance to say so! I know people who, every night before bed, count five things they’ve been grateful for that day. It’s a good practice; it internalises the habit of gratitude.

Hebrew has at least two ways of saying ‘thank you’. The first is Todah, from the root indicating recognition. Hakkarat hatov, acknowledging the good, is a mitzvah. There’s a special blessing for it: ‘Blessed are you, God, hatov vehameitiv, who is good and does good.’ Setting theology aside, it’s a way of saying thank you to life. Thank you generates generosity; we want to give to others what life has gifted to us.

My second word is baruch, blessed. The rabbis teach that enjoying the fruits of this world without first saying a blessing is a form of theft. A blessing says: ‘This is special; I don’t take it for granted.’ Maybe it’s only an apple, but blessings stop us from thinking things are only or merely, and there are plenty of people for whom an apple, ‘a whole apple just for me,’ would be a miracle.

Judaism is a religion of blessings and thanksgivings. Each festival, over every new item of clothing, for each first seasonal fruit, we say Shehecheyanu: blessed be God who has kept us alive and brought us to this time.

Yet, paradoxically, perhaps the greatest moment of blessing I’ve witnessed was in a hospice. I was asked to see a couple in their thirties whom I’d never met before. The young man was dying and had requested a chaplain to pray with.

I slipped into the side-room with no idea what to say. But the man made it simple. ‘We’ve loved our time together. Tell us a prayer about the love of life.’ I stumbled quickly into a verse from Psalms. I think it was ‘How great, God, are your works.’

I got no further before the man took over. ‘Yes,’ he said, turning to his wife, ‘We’ve had wonderful walks, in the Lake District, the mountains. In London, too. We enjoy city-wandering, old churches, hidden paths.’ Thus they spoke together for two or three minutes, holding hands, smiling at each other.

Then, quite suddenly, the young man turned back to me, his face still calm: ‘Now say a prayer for life’s ending, because it’s over.’

In those grace-filled moments there was no ‘we didn’t have’; there was only thanksgiving.

This happened twenty-five years ago. It’s my teacher to this day.

Yesterday someone asked me the million-dollar question, ‘How do you find strength in times of personal and collective suffering?’ Only, ‘a million dollars’ is not enough: this is a matter beyond all price, at the very core of life.

I had no chance to ask, ‘Why are you asking?’ no opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what pain lay behind the request, and no way to escape responding.

Which of us knows the answer to such a raw and penetrating question in these cruel times (to which I make no specific reference in what follows)? What can one say? One can only speak from one’s heart and pray that one’s words will be true, that, in the unknown heart-space where they land, they will, at least, not cause further hurt.

There’s deep strength in our ancient prayers. I say Shema, Listen! – the opening of Judaism’s twice daily meditation. It’s not about what I mean when I cover my eyes and utter the words. It’s the presences which meet me. I enter a timeless soul-space; without speech or gesture they greet me, our ancestors, generation before generation, who’ve lived through all the travails and tribulations of history. They take my consciousness into their custodianship. For a blessed moment, I am a drop of water drawn into a great pool of spirit, and all the anxious thoughts of my ‘I’ are obliterated, washed clean. This happens for me only rarely. But that’s enough, because I know that this can be, that this is so.

There’s another way to follow the path of Listen. Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, taught that God speaks in two ways in our world. One is Torah, the language of Judaism’s, and humanity’s, great spiritual traditions. The other is creation, life itself. These two modes are in truth one, because through both, if we are aware, we can hear the ceaseless flow of sacred life, ‘in the chirping of the birds, the lowing of cows and the tumult of human discourse.’ (Esh Kodesh, Warsaw Ghetto, July 1942) Therefore I tell myself:  Stop and listen. I say in my heart, ‘You there, goldfinch, squirrel, beech-leaf,’ and, recognising that they belong to the source of all life, am calmed and strengthened in the knowledge that I belong there too.

Sometimes, it’s nothing at all; no effort, no intention. It’s simply what the beloved speaks in The Song of Songs: ‘I sleep, but my heart wakes.’ For precious moments I live from my heart, not my head, and know the Psalmist’s truth: ‘To You, God, silence is praise.’

Therefore, my most urgent prayer to God, people, all the life around me is simply: don’t shut yourself off when I seek you.

But the challenge does not lie elsewhere. It’s in myself. No passport or permission is required to visit the places where God’s spirit flows. Access, the only access, is through our own consciousness and heart.

Here lies the challenge: how do I find the way to myself? How do I still myself enough to listen when I say Listen. That’s why I often say when people ask me about inner strength: What brings a touch of calm into your day? Yoga, prayer, dog-walk, coffee, friends, music, park-walk, crossword, swimming, moments of pure nothing? Do it! Because that’s what takes you to your unique entrance to the pathway to the infinite, the inexhaustible and unfathomable, the source of strength and life.

This all sounds very private. But it’s about community and friendship too because they give us the space, support and encouragement to seek to what lies beyond all space, the spirit from which we draw the strength to live, to care and love.