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We’ve just celebrated the Jewish festival of Shavuot, when Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

Dutch friends once told me how during building excavations in their home town close to the German border, a single stone was found from a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. On it were just two Hebrew words: lo tirzach – Thou shalt not murder.

The commandment is familiar to us all. Yet too often we ponder it too late. It should stand not as an epitaph over the death camps and killing fields of history, but as an urgent warning for the future. All true faith instructs us to care for life. ‘Live by my word,’ teaches Judaism’s most sacred text, the Torah, which the mystics represent as the tree of life.

Indeed, it isn’t only human life which we must cherish more truly.

In Chernobyl Prayer, the Nobel prize winning author Svetlana Alexievich records the testimony of Sergey Gurin, a cameraman who documented the nuclear disaster. What haunts him most is the destruction of nature. ‘We can kill every living thing, it isn’t a fantasy any more,’ he says.

‘Why couldn’t you help the animals left behind,’ a small boy asks him. He has no answer. He wants to make a film about the world, entirely from the perspective of the animals. Perhaps they are more our equals, and less inferior to us humans with our wanton capacity to kill, than we have liked to think.

God, implant the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in all our hearts so that we obey them in all our deeds.