Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

I would like to share a beautiful story about the meaning of the call of the shofar. The story is from <Chabad.org> and was adapted by Suzie Jacobson for her study sheet on <Sefaria.org> The photo above, taken by my wife, Middy in our dining room, is of a shofar that we bought in Sefat…

Often, we can be “put off” by all of the different regulations that accompany Jewish observance. We may be afraid of making a mistake, of not performing a ritual in the correct way. This may result in us not doing it at all! Or we may feel that if we do not perform all of…

Theologian Judith Plaskow writes that it is inaccurate to understand the first verse of the Shema – that God is One – as a statement of numeric specificity.  Rather, she says, monotheism is about the capacity to glimpse the ONE in and through the changing form of the many, to see the whole in and…

The American Jewish writer Abigail Pogrebin wrote an article admitting that, despite attending services regularly for 8 years she was struggling to find in the observance of Shabbat the “supposed tranquility and blissful disconnection of Shabbat, what Abraham Joshua Heschel called, “the palace in time”. She says she can’t seem to pull off Shabbat. Yet…

My Mother is at the Bridge Table  by Leslea Newman My mother is at the bridge table with Loretta, Gert and Pearl, when my father finds his way to Heaven. “Sit down, dear,” she says, patting the seat beside her and barely looking up from the hand she’s been dealt. “The game is almost through.”…

Comedian Seth Rogan  A couple of years ago, the actor and comedian Seth Rogan caused consternation across the Jewish world, when, in an interview, he asserted that as a student in Hebrew school he had been “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel….. They never tell you that ‘Oh, by the way, there were…

Gerry Mendelssohn, our congregation librarian for 40 years, was honored at our Friday night services last week. When an Englishman wants to write a poem of praise, he writes an “Ode”. When a Rabbi wants to write a song of praise, he must write a “Psalm”. But how does one write a psalm? There are…

  Rabbi Elliot Dorff tells the story of how he was once on a plane from Boston to Los Angeles when he struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to him. This man lived in Newton, a suburb of Boston in which many Jews live. Neither he nor his family was Jewish, but…

Shaar Shechem   Today is Yom Yerushalayim- Jerusalem Day. Fifty-six years ago today, Israeli forces entered the Old City of Jerusalem. For the first time in 2000 years, the Holy City of Jerusalem fell under Jewish sovereignty. Here is how it happened: When the 6-day war broke out in 1967, Israel was attacked from all sides.…

  As many of you know last Wednesday was Yom Ha-Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day, the 75th anniversary of the State of Israel’s birth as a nation.  On that day, my class from the One Year Program from Hebrew University in Jerusalem had a reunion online. In 1972 we were  mostly nineteen, twenty years old, college…