The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Thank you, Martha, and thank you, Jill, for all your help with these potlucks.

Potlucks, I feel, are an important part of our community life.

If you would like to share in the community life of IMC, staying and be hanging out for those are a wonderful way.

So, as I think some of you know that ever since the Hamas invasion of Israel,

I think my public talks have been a response to that in some way or other.

And I'll continue that today.

But I'd like to do maybe a preface to it all that maybe is important to understand.

But I do so as a Buddhist teacher,

grounded in Buddhist values as I understand them.

And as someone who doesn't live with the urgency of violence that's happening in the present,

lethal violence that's happening in the present.

If I was living with that urgency, I would probably, if I was teaching at all,

I would teach maybe differently.

And coming here to speak about this today, I've become certainly alarmed by what's happening in the Middle East.

But I'm also alarmed by how divisiveness is spreading around the globe.

And that people who were friends or just kind of neutral with each other now are seen as enemies

because of the strong divide between opinions and who's right and who's wrong and who's from my side

and if you're not from my side, then clearly you're against my side.

And so to not take sides is often seen as by one of both parties as taking sides for the other side.

And it can be difficult to speak up and offer an opinion of you,

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