as preached Sunday, October 5, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
This is our first Sunday together after you formally installed me as the eighth settled minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. And so, before I begin my sermon, I want to express gratitude to everyone who helped plan, participated in, or attended the service. It was a wonderful celebration and affirmed the potential of our ministry together. Please join me in a round of applause for all those who made the installation happen.
With gratitude in our hearts, we turn to a subject that weighs heavily: the struggle between Israel and Palestine. It is a matter that I have largely avoided preaching on. I was raised as much secularly Jewish as Unitarian Universalist. I have complex emotions when it comes to the conflict.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I admired the state of Israel. The Oslo Accords, the peace process affirmed by Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, President of Palestine, seemed like a major achievement in the effort to build a more beautiful world. Stories from friends and mentors about the living in the kibbutzim made it appear that Israel was one place on Earth where the old socialist dream of true human equality remained intact. Captivated by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s description of the kibbutzim as the location where “a structurally new society” might emerge, I briefly considered making aliyah and migrating to Israel.
But then Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. His murder came shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu “was filmed speaking at a downtown Jerusalem rally above a sign … that read DEATH TO RABIN.” Netanyahu, now the longest serving Israeli prime minister, was part of the movement to villainize Rabin for daring to try to make peace with the Palestinians.
For my part, I greatly admired the slain Jewish leader as someone who was willing to try and find a way out of no way and figure out how two peoples claiming the same land might live together. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the news came that he had been killed–the way, I suppose, members of my parents’ generation recall the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Jr., Robert Kennedy, or Malcolm X.
Despite being complicit, if not directly responsible for, the assassination of Rabin, the Israeli right was able to capitalize on his death. Netanyahu was sitting in the prime minister’s office within six months. And since then Netanyahu and his allies have dominated Israeli politics–controlling the country’s government for the majority of the past twenty-five years.
My response was not to engage in the movement for Middle East peace. My family celebrated Passover using Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Freedom Seder, devoted as it was to “the chant of rebellion, liberation, travail, and the creation of a new law” and filled with warnings that “we all live under Pharaohs.” I was steeped in a form of prophetic Judaism that demanded we engage in the process of Tikkun Olam, repairing and healing the world. There were many issues to be concerned about. I chose to engage with the struggle for economic justice in the United States. It seemed to be a more immediate matter than what was happening across the ocean. Through that work I developed an anti-nationalist perspective that held that the nation state was one of the primary deformations in global politics. Philosophers like Benedict Anderson helped me understand that nations like Israel, the state of Palestine, and the United States are “imagined communities,” political entities that were created, frequently by elites, rather than natural human communities.
This is not to offer a complete autobiographical accounting of either the political perspective of my family of origin or activism over the last three decades. It is only to share that after Rabin’s assassination my politics could as easily be summarized by a t-shirt that one of my Indigenous friends used to wear, “U.S. Out of North America!” as they could be by any statement involving the state of Israel or, for that matter, the state of Palestine. On a fundamental, moral, and ideological level I disagreed as much with Fatah’s emphasis on the primacy of Palestinian nationalism over struggles for economic justice as I did with the Zionist project. I could not support Hamas’s conservative Islamist politics anymore more than I could embrace the right-wing Israeli government under Netanyahu and his allies. The first often includes the oppression of the LGBTQ community, expressed anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and is undemocratic. The second has no interest in peace, is devoted to the seizure of Palestinian land, and has repeatedly referred to the Israeli military’s repeated incursions into Gaza as “mowing the lawn.”
The noted Jewish historian Avi Shlaim has described that last phrase as “an operative metaphor [which] implies a task that has to be performed regularly and mechanically without end.” It is intended from preventing the people of Gaza from developing the necessary infrastructure to sustain prosperity.
Given the Israeli right’s interest in maintaining a certain kind of status quo–as their choice of lawn mowing for as a metaphor implies–it is not a surprise that throughout much of the last twenty years they have had a sort of de facto alliance with Hamas. Until the recent war, Netanyahu maintained a policy of allowing the transfer of money from Qatar to Gaza. His objective was to support Hamas against Fatah–the two Palestinian political factions have long been at odds–and in doing so prevent the emergence of a unified Palestinian state.
For my part, I was uninterested in the nationalist projects of Fatah, Hamas, or the Zionists. I thought, and continue to think, that the particularities of nationhood are a trap that bind working people to political elites. Nationalist elites, as we are being reminded of during our own national crisis, care little for working people’s need for daily bread. My perspective was not Israeli this or Palestine that. It was found in Eugene Pottier’s words: “Working people, let us save ourselves, / We decree common salvation!”
Common salvation, not the salvation of one nation or another nation, but the salvation of everyone. It is a perspective upheld in the values of our Unitarian Universalist Association, “every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” Within the Jewish tradition, I find it well expressed in words from the Talmud, “anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and anyone who saves a life is as if … [they] had saved an entire world.” In legalistic terms, it is best named in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Common salvation, feeling like there were neither political movements amongst the Israelis nor the Palestinians that were particularly devoted to this perspective, for most my life I have directed my attention elsewhere. I spent years working with Indigenous movements in Mexico. I organized labor unions. I committed civil disobedience and went to jail in solidarity with migrants in Arizona. I found inspiration in words from Jewish poets like Irena Klepfisz. She seemed to uphold the vision of common salvation when she wrote, “These words are dedicated to those who died / because they had no love and felt alone in the world.” Her commemorative words invoked a sense of the universal value of human life, common salvation.
Inspired by such visions, I studied to become a Unitarian Universalist minister while retaining a connection to Judaism. I celebrated Passover and Hanukkah each year. I occasionally attended temple on High Holy Days. When my son decided he wanted a Bar Mitzvah to preserve his familial connection to Judaism, I found a rabbi who was willing to teach him how to read Torah and pray on Sabbath.
And so, my life went on with the conflict between Israel and Palestine in the background. It was there but it was not something I thought about any more than the fighting in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, or the civil war in Sudan. I wonder if my experience seems familiar to you. Have you gotten on with your life while the larger world of politics–national or international–plays out in the seeming distance? I suspect it is that way for most of us.
Then came October 7th, the largest act of violence directed against Jewish people since the Shoah–the Holocaust. The images were horrifying. More than 1,200 people were killed, each death a world destroyed. Hamas militants were documented celebrating death. A recording of one emerged a few weeks later calling his mother to say, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!,” each death a world destroyed.
You might recall that my response at the time included the observation that the conflict did not start on October 7th. It has a much longer history. You may also remember that I lifted up the words of former Middle East advisor at the Pentagon Jasmime El-Gamal. She wrote, “What is happening in Israel is not ok. It is horrific. Horrendous. Outright barbaric. What is happening to Palestine under occupation is not ok. It is horrific. Horrendous. Outright barbaric. The way to right this starts with believing both those statements to be true.”
Tragically, since then, so many of us have watched in horror as Netanyahu’s right-wing government has acted as if both of those statements are not true. It has used the attack as an excuse to try and conquer all of Gaza. There is a long-standing trope in the Zionist movement, found in the words of the current government and in works like Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, that Palestinians are responsible for all of discord between the communities. Whenever difficulties erupt “their standard pattern” is to respond, in Gordis’s words, “with yet another round of violence.”
Since October 7th, it has become increasingly hard to believe such statements. More than 60,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza, each death a world destroyed. Israeli forces have leveled most of the territory, each death a world destroyed. Hospitals have been repeatedly bombed, each death a world destroyed. Journalists have been targeted, each death a world destroyed. Famine has erupted as Israel has blocked aid, each death a world destroyed. The United Nations has ruled that the Israeli government’s actions are a form of genocide, each death a world destroyed.
In an interview shortly after Israel launched its assault on Gaza the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef made a satirical point that has proven to be prophetic. Responding to the conservative ideologue Ben Shapiro’s claim, “that the way you stop terrorism is with wildly disproportionate response,” Youssef asked, “What is the going rate today for human lives?” He then proceeded to demonstrate how, throughout the last decades of the conflict, the “exchange rate for human life,” has systematically devalued the lives of Palestinians. In 2014, he pointed out, that the “exchange rate” was one Israeli life for twenty-seven Palestinian lives. In the last two years, the disjuncture has been even greater.
In theology and international diplomacy there is a whole history of what gets named just war theory. It goes back thousands of years and typically includes a belief that violent action can only be justified in defense and as a proportionate response to a harm that has been inflicted. Clearly, that principle has not been followed in Gaza. Nor, do I suspect, that any doctrine of deterrence, which argues that violent action on the part of one party can deter violence action on the part of another, will be shown to have been effectively present in the conflict. The traumas that the current generation of Gazan children have undergone is far more likely to turn them to violent tactics in their quest for liberation than it is to inspire them towards nonviolent resistance.
It seems possible, that after two years, a form of peace, an opportunity for collective healing, might be on the verge of breaking out. Netanyahu and the President of the United States, without the involvement of Hamas, have laid out the framework for a peace deal. As we worship together, negotiators for both sides are preparing to meet in Egypt. I pray, and I hope that you will join me my prayer, that their efforts will prove successful and put Israelis and Palestinians together on the path towards common salvation.
As I offer a prayer for peace, I think it is important to recognize the ways in which the conflict over there has impacted us over here. There is, of course, the numbing violence and the desensitization, the feeling that the war is a routine matter, that has wrenched many of our hearts as we have witnessed, in the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, Gazans “suffocate” inside their “land … that glimmers for the far upon the far.” The daily rhythm of atrocities can make it possible to forget that each death is a world destroyed.
The destruction of so many worlds has been accompanied by a coordinated effort to silence political and religious dissent. In the wake of widespread protests against the war on Gaza, many of those in power have conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The state of Israel and Judaism are not the same thing. The Israeli people are not the entirety of the Jewish community. It is possible to critique one without criticizing the other.
It is also possible to name the leadership and actions of Hamas as reprehensible without denouncing either Islam or the Palestinian people. Hamas and the people of Gaza are not the same thing. That should be obvious, certainly today I do not want to be held to be equivalent to the government of the United States, Texas, or even Houston–Mayor Whitmire’s ongoing assault on our city’s infrastructure is his responsibility, not mine. I suggest we extend the same courtesy to the people of Palestine.
As we do, I think we should name that in the last two years both antisemitism and Islamophobia have grown. Just this past week, during the Jewish High Holy Days, there was a lethal attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. Over the last many months anti-Muslim violence and sentiment has grown to a level not seen since the aftermath of September 11th. Yet, antisemitism has been weaponized by the President and his administration while Islamophobia has been essentially ignored.
To offer only one example, as the President has pursued his attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion on college campuses, he has struck a deal with Columbia University. It stipulates that the school “will not provide benefits … to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics.” Yet, at the same time, school has agreed to provide benefits to one specific group and hire an “additional administrator” to support them, Jewish students. It is clear that the concern that this person is supposed to address over “antisemitism issues” will primarily focus on those who speak out against Israel. Columbia is home to many Jewish students who have opposed the war. Their needs will likely go unmet by this administrator.
I share this and make the distinctions I have made because they lift up a role for our religious community in these times. We are called to proclaim a common salvation and remind the world that “every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” Each time someone dies, we should say, with the Talmud, a world is destroyed.
But more than just that, our tradition invites us to proclaim the equality of human lives. In our private lives, publicly, in this sanctuary, we can, and I encourage you to, make the distinctions between Israel and Judaism, Hamas and the Palestinians, the leaders of nations and those who reside in them. This is a part of our religious tradition. It is something that we have to offer in the times.
This brings me, at the close, to the title of my sermon, “Is there no holy land?” The conflict between Israel and Palestine is sometimes portrayed as an intractable religious struggle stretching back to time immemorial. Whatever truth there is to that, the great subtext running through my sermon has been this: any place where the universal, not the particular value of human life, is recognized is a holy land; and any place where it is not has been profaned. Our calling, in this difficult hour, is not to say that this land or that land is holy–the province of this people or that people. It is say that anywhere has the potential to be holy when we come to recognize, as the Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing taught, that we are each “a living member of the great family of all souls.”
I close with a prayer,
spirit of life and love,
known by many names,
God, Allah,
the understanding of the universal value of human life,
move through the hearts and hands
of all of us
so that we might do what we can
to build a more beautiful,
a more peaceful,
world
and live to see a lessening of conflict
between Israel and Palestine,
between all of the peoples of the world,
both here and abroad.
Shalom, peace, and Amen.
