In that moment when the words ‘I am your God’ were spoken, the whole world fell silent, all creation stood still and listened. Every living being felt: ‘These words are spoken to me.’ Everything in nature realised: ‘This is my inner essence; this is who I truly am.’

This beautiful explanation, by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, takes us far beyond the understanding of the first of the Ten Commandments as a statement of religious dogma. Rather, it is the truth at the heart of all life: whoever I am, in whatever way I frame my identity, – Jew, continental, American, Russian, gardener, teacher, parent, teen – there is a deeper reality to me. That truth flows through me and through all things constantly, almost always unrecognised and unnamed, but without it I would have no breath and my heart would not beat. That truth is the sacred vitality, the divine energy, which imparts life to all that is. In that moment when God spoke, not just down from Mount Sinai but upwards from the depths of all being, this truth surged to the fore and, for one inerasable moment, united all consciousness in the one awareness: this is my God, the ‘I’ which is the core of all being and is the deepest reality of all that exists.

That moment of revelation at Sinai may or may not be historical, but it certainly is eternal, universal and all-encompassing. Only, it flows deep down and concealed, well below the loud, unceasing, constantly chafing, frequently brutal, experience of our everyday world. Noise and violence drown it out. But they cannot negate it or render it untrue. We continue to hear it, if only rarely; we to intuit it in those moments when we fall silent and not just our mind but our heart comprehends: we belong to one life you and I, fellow traveller, fellow human, fellow being, bird, sheep, tree.

Yet, despite this teaching, I find myself thinking over and again of a very different commentary on the Ten Commandments, by my much-missed teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn. In Chasing Shadows he writes of his experience in concentration camps:

‘In the intervening years I have often thought how Auschwitz-Birkenau was the denial and the perversion of all the Ten Commandments. In that Nazi empire…it was clear that:

I. God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death.

II. They fashioned for themselves idols of silver and gold and filled their world with the sigh of swastikas, the sound of Heil Hitler and the smell of burning corpses.

VI. Murder was at the heart of that culture, and killers were promoted and honoured.’

This is what can happen when we forget the sacred ‘I’ which is the heart of all life and by virtue of which all life is precious and must, in all its individuality and diversity, be recognised and respected. How different that ‘I’ is from the ‘I, not you’; the ‘I have no place for you,’ the ‘ego-nationalism,’ exclusionism and racism at the core of the worst of populist politics. How different from those tyrannical ‘I’s’ in our current world, eager to take up weapons and kill.

I fear this rise of violence and contempt, whoever it is directed against: refugees, fellow Jews, Muslims, non-Brits, nature, life itself. That is why it is so important, essential beyond anything words can convey, to listen to that voice which speaks from Sinai and, as Rabbi Yehaudah Aryeh-Leib taught, to recognise it, be silent, and know.