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Good Morning,

Like many others, we have a new resident in our home, a rascal of a rescue puppy, who bounces up each morning with tail-wagging zest for life’s adventures. Her world is full of promise.

But ‘promise’ and ‘adventure’ are hardly how life looks for millions of young people at the moment. Hard for everyone, Covid effects the young in particularly dispiriting ways.

This is some of what I hear from fellow parents and young people directly
‘Online study is so isolating, so cut off from the world.’
‘It feels like the future’s been taken away.’
‘How does one begin in this new reality?’

There’s anger at feeling blamed, demonised even, for the resurgence of the virus. Beneath that is a louring sense of purposelessness, of loss of agency and control over one’s life. All this can have a corrosive impact on motivation, self-respect and mental health.

It was especially with the young in mind that I was glad to learn of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Alliance for Full Employment. It calls on all national institutions to do their utmost to prevent redundancies, halt and reverse rising unemployment and focus on job creation. I am sure there will be debates in the coming months about how achievable this is.

Writing alongside a letter of support from religious leaders across the faiths, Archbishop Justin Welby noted how, from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, purposeful work has been understood as essential to human dignity.

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote in the twelfth century of eight levels of responsibility toward social justice:

The greatest, above which there is no greater, is to support another person by endowing them with a gift or loan, by entering into a partnership with them, or by finding them employment, in order to strengthen their hand so that they will not need to be dependent upon others . . .

Times were far easier when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Still, I remember painfully how depressed and lost I was, how pointless I felt my life to be, until thoughtful people and fortunate chances helped me find my path.

It’s much harder now. That’s why, across our society, I believe we have an obligation to listen to, respect and help young people in any way we can. Archbishop Welby describes this as part of loving our neighbour. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch defines that love as doing one’s best to give others the same rights and opportunities we want and need for ourselves.

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