Shabbat Sermon: Now Is the Best Time to Be Counter Cultural with Guest Speaker Rabbi Ravid Tilles

Judaism has always, from the very beginning, been a counter point to the surrounding culture. Most of us have grown up in a Jewish community that has struggled to blend our surrounding culture with our ancient tradition. But as the culture around us becomes unbearable, maybe this is the exact time to reclaim our roots!About Rabbi Ravid TillesRabbi Ravid Tilles is the School Rabbi and Director of Jewish Life and Learning at Schechter Boston. He and his wife, Yaffa, and three sons are members of the Temple Emanuel family.

Every Sunday morning, in the daily psalm, Psalm 24, we praise consistent, steady, disciplined ethical behavior:           Who may ascend the mountain of Adonai?          Who may rise in God’s sanctuary?          One who has clean hands and a pure heart. Unlike the teaching from Berakhot, that the penitent stands in a place the Tzadik cannot stand, the Sunday psalm exalts consistency, discipline and self-restraint, not struggle and growth. Tomorrow we will examine two biblical characters who embody these models. King David, who commits adultery with Bathsheba, and has her husband Uriah killed, and is chastised by the prophet Nathan. David authors Psalm 51, the words of a penitent heart. Joseph, young and single, is propositioned by his boss Potiphar’s wife, and says no repeatedly. In today’s context Joseph would be seen as a victim of repeated sexual harassment by an employer who has power over him,  but he never succumbs. The Talmud’s only question is whether he was tempted or not. Two rabbis disagree on that. But all agree he did the right thing. As we emerge from Yom Kippur to our new year, how do we assess the models presented to us by King David and Joseph? Is it possible to say yes to both? Is it possible to hold out as an ideal both the growth and struggle that come from falling and getting up; and also self-restraint, self-discipline, and consistent moral excellence? Our sacred canon contains both models. Do we?

October 2, 2025

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi wanted to find out who was best at doing conversions. They find a bear in the woods. The priest says let me give it a try. He comes back a few minutes later smiling. I told the bear how beautiful communion is, and he is coming to our mass this Wednesday morning. The minister says I’ll go next. He comes back a few minutes later smiling. I told the bear about the glory of Bible study, and he is coming to our class this Sunday at noon. The rabbi says let me give it a try. He doesn’t come back for a good long while, and when he finally does, he is bloodied, bruised, and bandaged. “In retrospect,” the rabbi says, “maybe it was not the best idea to start with circumcision.”That joke has been around forever, but I bring it up now because the laugh line is no longer so funny. To care a lot about Israel and the Jewish people this past year has been heavy and hard. And then one day, Shira and I were listening to a podcast host named Mel Robbins, who has a lot to say about how to thrive emotionally in hard times. She observed that the world has its sorrows. And so often the sorrows of the world make us sad. We internalize that pain. She asked a simple question: what are some simple hacks that we can do at home, in our everyday life, that will change our mood; that will banish our sorrows; that will make us feel good and hopeful and optimistic.

Ofir Amir is co-founder and CFO of the Tribe of Nova Foundation, established after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on the Nova Music Festival. Wounded while escaping, Ofir survived and later helped transform tragedy into a movement of healing and resilience.Before the attack, he was deeply involved in building the Nova community of music, unity, and love. Today, he co-produces the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, an international initiative honoring victims, supporting survivors, and raising funds for mental health care and Beit Nova—a permanent center for remembrance and recovery in Israel.Through his leadership and testimony, Ofir amplifies the voices of survivors and ensures their stories of courage live on.

“In the place where penitents stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand.” Berakhot 34B Last week we encountered this Talmudic teaching which privileges the struggle, the growth, the journey, the learning, of the person who realized they were not living their best life, and they embarked upon teshuvah to live a better life. This week we are going to double click on this teaching that prizes struggle and growth in two ways. One, what are the ideas behind it? We will see the perspectives of an arch rationalist (Maimonides), the Hasidic master Rebbi Nachman of Bratslov, and the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the Alter Rebbe, who authored a work called The Tanya. Each has a different interpretation as to why struggle and growth are prized. Two, what does artwork that celebrates this kind of struggle and growth look like? We will examine works of Yoko Ono, Wish Tree, Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, and Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrors. What do each of these works of art say about the journey of the soul that is teshuvah? May Shabbat Shuvah, and the teshuvah we each do in this season, bring us ever closer to the person we hope to become.

Last month I got an email that reassured me that all will be well with the world. That joy and blessing are very much alive.The email attached a photo of two women who are long-time members of our congregation. The younger one is only 103. The older one is 104. They have been friends since they were 12. Do the math, and that is one long, rich friendship. They were having lunch with their daughters. The picture is of the four of them all smiling at their lunch. Both women read the paper every day. Both women exercise every day. Both women talk to their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and friends every day. Both women are totally up on what is happening in the world. Their beautiful lives, 103 and 104 years old, and still living, feels biblical. And it is. Their lives evoke Moses who, at the end of his life at the age of 120, is described as loh khahatah eino v’loh nas lechoh, Moses’s vision was undimmed and his vigor unabated. He lives, richly, until his last breath.I had always thought that only Moses, and rare people like our 103- and 104-year old friends, get this treatment. Until I read Peter Attia’s book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, which makes the case that all of us can be Moses in the sense that all of us have more control than we might think about living richly all the years of our lives.We all know the word lifespan. Lifespan is the number of years we get to live. But Attia taught me a new word: healthspan. Healthspan is the quality of our health—physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, relational—throughout the years of our life. Attia’s main point is that what we do now can impact how we live later. What we do in our earlier years can shape not just our lifespan but our healthspan, not just the quantity of our years, but the quality of our years. The habits we live by in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s can dramatically affect the vitality of our 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. Our current practices shape our future years. And this is a decidedly Jewish issue.

An older gentlemen needed surgery for a rare medical challenge. Turns out that the best surgeon in town was his own son. As the father was about to go under, he asked to speak to his son. Yes, Dad, what is it? Son, do not be nervous. Do your best. I trust you. Just remember one thing. If it does not go well, if something happens to me on the operating table, your mother will live with you and your wife for the rest of her life.How do we navigate hard times? We all know that we are living in hard times. Is there some way to turn hard times into beautiful outcomes—in fact beautiful outcomes that only happen as a result of how we navigated those hard times?

Recently, as part of a routine medical procedure, I needed to get hooked up to an IV. Unfortunately, the nurse who did it, while very nice, had a hard time. She poked a needle into my arm and said, oh, so sorry, that didn’t work. She poked a needle into my arm a second time and said, oh, so sorry, that didn’t work either. Let me ask one of the other nurses. Another nurse came and the third time was a charm. The IV took.When the procedure was over, and I got home, I was fine, but I noticed that my arm had all these cuts and bruises. I wanted sympathy. So I went to my wife in search of that sympathy. I pointed to my right arm. I pointed to the wounds, which I called, for greater effect, lacerations, contusions, and hematomas. Shira look at these lacerations from the bungled IV attempt! Look at these contusions! I think this is a hematoma!! From the bungled IV!!I’m not sure what I was expecting. But I wasn’t expecting what I got. What I got was, Shira took one look at my arm and said: Buck up buttercup. Excuse me, I said. What did you just say? She said: Buck up buttercup.In our 42 years together, Shira had never put those three words together, ever. I had never heard them before. I wasn’t exactly sure what Buck up buttercup meant, but it did not sound like the kind of sympathy I was looking for. It sounded like she was saying: toughen up. Stop complaining. The bad news was that I did not get the sympathy I was looking for. The good news is I got something even better: a sermon topic. Is it a Jewish virtue not to complain, or is it a Jewish virtue to complain? There is a lot of Torah on complaints and complaining, and it is nuanced.

The main religious value concept for our High Holiday season is teshuvah, repentance.Given the centrality of teshuvah in Judaism, and in the Jewish calendar now, the Torah’s treatment of teshuvah is curious indeed. It appears very late in the game. There is zero mention of teshuvah in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers. Teshuvah does not appear until Deuteronomy chapter 30. Why so late?And when teshuvah finally appears, it is only after total disaster has already struck. The Israelites will have angered God so much that God will destroy the land and exile the Israelites.            The Lord uprooted them from their soil in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them            into another land, as is still the case.  (Deut. 29:27)Is teshuvah meant to be our code red response to our code red disaster?Finally, the last verse right before teshuvah is mentioned is one of the classic stumpers of the Torah.            Concealed acts concern the Lord our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and            our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching. (Deut. 29:28)What does this verse mean, and why is it inserted here, in between the expulsion of the Israelites caused by the wrath of God, and the gift of teshuvah which will allow the Israelites to return to God and to their land?What does the Torah’s treatment of teshuvah mean to how we practice it now?One possibility is that the Israelites failed deeply and have teshuvah to redeem them. So too, we fail deeply, and we have teshuvah to redeem us. The Talmud teaches that somebody who sins, who fails, who grapples, who goes through a transformation and comes back to God is at a higher level than somebody who never sinned.Over the next several weeks, we will double click on this teaching. Does our tradition really privilege transformation (I strayed, I sinned, I have come back) over a pure heart (I am disciplined, I am committed to being ethical, I did not stray)?Over the next several weeks we will examine the case for the primacy of transformation versus the case for the primacy of a pure heart.