Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

Did you know that Sitting can be harmful to your health? An analysis of 13 studies of sitting time and activity levels found that those who sat for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity had a risk of dying similar to the risks of dying posed by obesity and smoking. People…

That great 19th Century African American educator Booker T. Washington exemplified the power of a simple and modest spirit. A story is told of a day when Washington, then a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, happened to pass the mansion of a wealthy woman as he walked to work. The woman did not recognize…

Last year Rabbi Joseph Ozerowski from the Jewish Healing Network gave a three-part seminar to our Congregation, on “Bikur Cholim”, the mitzvah of visiting the sick. The seminar was designed to increase our awareness of this mitzvah and study some of the classical Jewish texts on the subject. We also hoped that Rabbi Ozerowski would…

In her book Traveling Mercies, Some Thoughts on Faith, American novelist Anne Lamott writes: I was remembering an old story the other day about a man getting drunk at a bar in Alaska.  He’s telling the bartender how he recently lost whatever faith he’d had after his twin-engine plane crashed in the tundra. “Yeah,” he says…

In her 2002 album, entitled “Halos and Horns” Dolly Parton sings a ballad about an old mountain woman who people come to see from miles around. This woman had a special gift. As Dolly Parton tells it: In a little pouch of burlap Tied with a piece of twine There were bones all shapes and…

We woke up on Thursday morning to the sickening news that 12 people had been killed by a gunman inside a California country-western dance bar that was hosting an event for college students. The painful, undeniable fact is that becoming the victim of gun violence in the United States has become a part of our…

Stephen Heyman is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Yanna, moved to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh from Paris, France two years ago. Both he and his wife were technically Jewish but had no idea of what that meant. They had never attended services at a synagogue or had a…

I sent the following internet message to CBS congregants on October 31  My Dear Congregants, Middy and I were leaving Israel Saturday night when we read the shocking news about a gunman in Pittsburgh who had killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We had spent the week in Israel…

On Monday evening, October 29 our congregation gathered in our sanctuary to honor and remember the eleven Jewish men and women slain at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Below are my remarks at that ceremony. My Dear Friends, We come together this evening, devastated, shaken, angry, and in disbelief over  the destruction perpetrated…

Reaching Out To One Another There is nothing that comes easier to us than speech.  And yet, our tradition understands how fraught speech actually is — how hard it is to speak words that build up and enrich and not words that put down and devalue; how hard it is to speak words that heal…