About a decade ago I found myself sitting in a conference hall in Birmingham listening to a discussion that had become familiar throughout much of the Jewish world. The keynote speakers included Naftali Bennett, then Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs, and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Both men understood that Jewish communities across the Western world faced a challenge. The difficulty was that while everybody seemed capable of describing the problem, nobody appeared entirely certain of the solution.

The problem, as it was then understood, was not anti-Semitism. At least not primarily. Nor was it security, discrimination or exclusion. If anything, the concern was precisely the opposite. For the first time in Jewish history, millions of Jews could live successful, prosperous and accepted lives without ever seriously engaging with their Jewish identity. Previous generations had worried that their children would be shut out. This generation worried that they would be welcomed in. Welcomed everywhere. Accepted so completely that they would eventually struggle to understand why they should remain attached to an inheritance that had become entirely optional.

It was Rabbi Sacks who offered the image that has remained with me ever since. He spoke of a family clearing out their late grandmother’s attic. Amid the accumulated possessions of a lifetime they discover a dusty old painting. Not recognising it, not understanding its significance and having no reason to believe it is anything other than another piece of unwanted clutter, they throw it into a skip. Only later does somebody inform them that the discarded canvas was a Rembrandt. The tragedy, he explained, was not that they had carefully examined the painting and concluded that it lacked value. The tragedy was that they never understood what they were looking at. They discarded something priceless without ever appreciating its worth. It was, he suggested, a useful metaphor for much of Jewish life in the modern West. The danger was not that young Jews were engaging seriously with Judaism and rejecting it. The danger was that many were walking away without ever having discovered what they possessed in the first place.

Looking back now, what strikes me is not simply the accuracy of Rabbi Sacks’s observation. It is the extraordinary amount of energy that the Jewish world invested in trying to solve the problem he identified. Entire........

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