Succot is a first Jewish memory; my father was a wonderful Succah maker. My family have inherited his booth-building passion.

If Yom Kippur takes us up to heaven, Succot brings us down to earth. If Yom Kippur leads us to the Holy of Holies of the spirit, Succot reconnects us with the soil.

Long before the building of huts with sheaves and leaves and branches became associated with our ancestors’ forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Succot was an ancient harvest festival.

‘Festival’ may not be the right word; succot, booths or shelters, were a farming necessity in lands where the sun beat relentlessly onto the fields. Thus, the first mention of a succah in the Bible has nothing to do with what we now call Tabernacles; it refers to the shelters Jacob built to allow his cattle to rest in the shade.

It is just this earthiness which makes me love and respect the festival.

Succot is a celebration of our bond with the earth, a festival of gratitude. To ensure we experience it personally, Nicky and I have long chosen seeds, tended the young plants, watched them grow and, if they thrived, ensured we left the last pickings of beans and courgettes, kohlrabi and pumpkins, for the Succah. Last year we even had just one home-grown watermelon (the magic size of a tennis ball) to share among our 27 guests in miniature slices.

We were only following ancient custom: the Talmud refers to hanging sheaves of corn, flasks of wine and plums (or their equivalent) in the festival booth. These basic foodstuffs were eloquent with a directness our supermarket generation has half-forgotten: ‘Thank you for the gifts of the soil. Without the rain, the insects, and the right weather we could not live’.

For, as the festival prayers make clear, we are utterly dependent. The two-thousand-year-old chants were not written in remote academies. They were composed by farmer-poets who knew the land, understood in the stomach the meaning of flood and drought: ‘Save man and beast, restore the soil, protect the trees which shelter us from desolation, O God who holds the world suspended over the void’. (I shared this text at the Succah in Trafalgar Square last night.)

This awareness of dependence underlines the bond not just between humans and nature, but also between ourselves, as families, communities and faiths.

‘Hide me in your Succah during evil days’, goes the Psalm. It sounds like a bad prayer. What could be a worse place to hide than a hut of sticks and branches? But that’s the point. True safety in any society is not when we need bunkers, but when we can dwell together, outside, protected only by the thin walls of makeshift celebratory huts because we understand that we will all only survive if we recognise together the shared gifts of this earth.

That is precisely what isn’t happening today, when only the strong doors of the synagogue in Halle kept the attacker out, and when he vented his rage on unprotected passers-by.

If I had to choose, I might say that our world needs the teachings of Succot even more urgently than those of Yom Kippur.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we must make our peace with one another. The Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish Law composed by Joseph Caro in the middle of the sixteenth century in Safed, devotes a whole section to this difficult subject.

We should apologise even if we only hurt the other person with words. If we caused them loss or other quantifiable harm, we need to make good. If our sincere apology is not initially accepted, we should offer it a second and a third time.

To withhold acceptance of an apology is considered hard-hearted, unless the wrong inflicted on us is grievous and beyond healing. Even then, though, says the Shulchan Aruch, it is an act of mercy and kindness to receive an honest and remorseful apology with good grace. It is worth remembering Nelson Mandela’s counsel that to hold on to resentment and bitterness is like drinking a cup of poison and expecting our opponent to die.

I’m often asked what to do if it’s difficult or impossible to offer our apology face-to-face. We want to come clean with both the person we have hurt and with our own conscience. But sometimes that person is not accessible to us.

If he or she is no longer alive, the tradition is to speak our heart at the graveside. If life has driven us apart through a painful shared history no one is eager to revisit, or if we have uttered disparaging words but the other person is not necessarily aware of this, we can only speak truth to our own heart and to God, or to a trusted friend, and resolve to learn for the sake of the future. What we are not entitled to do is to hurt another person further (‘You may not remember, but…’) in order to salve our own conscience. Life, sadly, usually has unfinished business.

All that said, this is not primarily the way I feel about these days before Yom Kippur. Rather, I experience them as precious days, days of appreciation. I think about my family, especially my wife and children. Somehow, the heightened sense of life’s fragility, of the brief, wonderful, uncertain privilege of time, of each holiday and ordinary day shared, deepens my awareness of them. What goes through my heart is gratitude, the wish to acknowledge what I owe to them, and to my friends, to my community, to tens of people whom I have encountered, whose poetry I have taken to heart.

Apology follows, in thought more often than word. I regret the ways I have hurt you.

I imagine my reactions are typical.

Then our ‘I’m sorry’, flows from love as in Naomi Shemer’s song ‘I haven’t loved enough’: ‘I haven’t told you, appreciated you, given back to you or life, enough’. Thus sorrow and remorse become part not only of contrition but of blessing, for a beautiful but deeply challenging world which urgently needs our faithful loving kindness and enduring care.

Gmar Chatimah Tovah

Few of us find it easy to say the simple words, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.’ They’re humiliating. They taste like cowardice and feel like defeat. But the real failure of courage probably lies in the inability to get them over our lips.

Maimonides explains that the true penitent ‘changes his name, as if to say, “I’m different now; I’m not the same person as the man who did those deeds”.’

There are two ways to read those words. They can sound like denial: ‘Me? Do that? It can’t have been me. The real me, the me as I like to think of me, never does things like that.’ We may well manage to convince ourselves, maintaining the fiction of who we fancy ourselves to be, while our actual deeds run along after us, calling out vainly in the voices of those we’ve ignored and bruised but who never quite manage to catch the attention of our conscience.

What Maimonides means to say is clearly the opposite: ‘I’m truly different now. I’ve struggled with what I did; I’ve learnt from it and I’ve changed.’

This is heart-work and it’s hard. It takes honesty and courage.

The Torah opens a beautiful short section on Teshuvah, return or repentance, with a simple but telling clause: vahasheivotah el levavecha. It’s often translated as ‘You shall lay this to your heart’, yet it can equally mean ‘Take yourself back to your heart’.

That is where the journey of Teshuvah, return, has to start. It may be prompted by remorse of a specific action. For example, someone once told me, ‘I never believed I was capable of hitting another person. I was utterly shocked by what I’d done.’ During the London riots, many people were horrified afterwards by the thefts they themselves had, in the heat and incitement of the moment, committed.

Remorse occurs when we find the honesty and courage to bring our actions to the awareness of our heart and say and feel: ‘I did’. It’s a deeply uncomfortable experience.

Yet it’s also a moment of hope. For now the resolve to learn, do better, become a better person, the best person we are capable of being, is not merely a thought or general intention. It glows in the core of our being; burns with a fire which has the power to transform the memory of those very actions of which we feel most ashamed into our most powerful teachers for the future. We never, ever want to do the same again. We have learnt, in our very gut and soul.

Teshuvah, the belief in our capacity to change, to ‘return’ to being the person we want to and can be, is a profound affirmation of the human spirit. It begins in the heart and from there grows to embrace our relationships with each other, with injustice and cruelty, with nature and God’s world itself.

But it starts with taking uncomfortable and inconvenient truths to heart.