At this holy of holies of Jewish time, we should pause to think about our values. Rosh Hashana holds a message not just for Jews but for humanity, and not just for eternity but for here, in Britain, now.

To understand it, ask yourself a simple question: What would we expect the Torah and haftorah readings for these days to be? What is Rosh Hashana?

It is, as we say in our prayers, the anniversary of creation. Hayom harat olam - today, the universe was born.

The logical thing would be to read, on the first day, the first chapter of Bereshit "in the beginning, God created" and on the second, the next two chapters which tell about the first humans and the world as it was in the beginning.

And the haftorah? Perhaps Isaiah 45 with its declaration, "It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it".

Or Isaiah 65 with its promise of new beginnings, "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth".

Or perhaps Jeremiah 10, "But God made the earth by His power; He founded the world by His wisdom', or Jeremiah 33 with its comparison between God's covenant with creation and his covenant with the Jewish people.

Any one of these choices would be logical - and every one of them is wrong.

What do we read instead? On Day 1 we read about the birth of Isaac, and as the haftorah, Hannah's prayer for a child.

On Day 2 we read about the binding of Isaac and his deliverance. As the haftorah, we read Jeremiah 31 in which the prophet speaks of Rachel "weeping for her children" and comforts her saying, "Restrain your voice from weeping. Your children will return to their land."

All four are about parents and children, and both readings for the first day are about the birth of a child.

Why? Because the famous mishnah in Sanhedrin tells us that "a single life is like a universe".

Saving a life is like saving a universe. The birth of a life is like the birth of the universe.

So if Rosh Hashana is the anniversary of the time the universe was born, the most powerful way of reminding ourselves of that miracle is to think about the only other similar miracle we know of: The birth of a child.

I was once tempted to write to the great physicist Stephen Hawking, after reading his book A Brief History of Time.

In the closing chapter he speaks about the holy grail of science, the Unified Field Theory that would explain the structure of the universe. If we knew that, he said, we would know "the mind of God".

I wanted to tell him that from a Jewish perspective you don't need theoretical physics to come as close as we can to the mind of God. All we need is to know what it is to be a parent.

Just as a parent brings new life into the world, so God brings new life into the world. God is our parent; we are His children.

That is all we know and all we need to know about the pathos of the human situation under the sovereignty of God.

Judaism is the most child-centred of all the great faiths. The first command God gave the first humans was to have children.

Abraham was chosen to be the father of monotheism (the "Av" of Avraham means "father") so that he would "teach his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord".

Our holiest prayer, the Shema, tells us to "teach these things diligently to your children".

When God gave the Torah to Israel he gave it to them, said the sages, in the merit not of their ancestors but of their children.

The message of Rosh Hashana, and the single most important truth Britain needs to hear today, is that a civilisation is judged by the way it treats its children.

At some stage we lost sight of that truth. We put adults before children, and pleasure before responsibility. It was a terrible mistake.

The great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski showed that every society in history has had a normative family structure.

Ours is almost unique in believing that you can have sex without commitment, families without marriage, or children without the stable presence of parents. In a single generation, marriage and the family were lost. Today the number of Britons marrying has fallen to the lowest level in 111 years.

More than 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Nearly one in two children in Britain are born to unmarried parents, up from one in eight in 1980.

Twenty-six per cent of British children currently live in lone parent households. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe as well as the highest percentage of children living in single parent families.

And it is the children who suffer. A devastating UNICEF survey in February, 2007, reported that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the Western world.

They drink and smoke more, take more drugs, have more underage sex, rate their health as poorer and dislike school more than their peers in other countries.

They are more prone to failure at school, more likely to experience violence and bullying, and suffer more unhappy relationships within and outside the home. They are the least satisfied with life.

One of the worst consequences is the way children without fathers turn instead to gangs, crime and violence.

The recent spate of killings of children by other children has reminded us of something that has been building for years.

Through the television programmes I make each year for Rosh Hashana I came to know Richard Taylor, father of Damilola Taylor who was killed by a gang of youngsters in Peckham in 2000, and Frances Lawrence, widow of headteacher Philip Lawrence, murdered by a 15-year-old youth when he came to the rescue of a 13-year-old outside his school, not far from where we live.

These were terrible crimes, leaving a lasting legacy of grief. There is an old African proverb: It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a culture to value families. It takes a moral code to strengthen marriage.

Judaism survived because it never lost its love of children, and never forgot what that means by way of building homes, schools and communities to pass our values on across the generations.

A civilisation is judged by the way it treats its children.

Nowhere is this signalled more starkly than in the story particularly associated with Rosh Hashana: The binding of Isaac.

Through it, God told us for all time: I do not want you to sacrifice your children. Care for them. Love them. Teach them. Hold them as your highest joy.

That is how Judaism, the West's oldest faith, has for 4,000 years stayed young while other civilisations grew old and disappeared. Put children first. That is the message of Rosh Hashana. We need it now.

Wishing you, the readers of the Jewish Telegraph, together with Jews in Israel and throughout the world, a shanah tovah, a year of blessing, health and peace - above all, a year in which we celebrate our children, and in which our children give us pride.

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