Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

This week’s parasha is beloved by rabbis around the world because is so much in it to sermonize about! The parasha opens with the ritual of the red heifer. It is a mysterious Biblical sacrifice that has the power to purify a person who comes into contact with the dead.  Nobody understands how this mitzvah…

Billy Planer is the director of Etgar, which means “challenge” in Hebrew. I learned about him, online, through his participation in the ELI talks, a Jewish version of the TED talks. Etgar is a summer camp that takes Jewish teens to different locations in the United States. These teen agers meet people who are quite…

My father hated to go to the movies. My mother, who loved the movies, would go with friends when she wanted to see a film.  I can remember only once in my childhood when we went to the theater to watch a movie as a family.. That movie was called “The Longest Day”. When it…

Last Saturday night, we gathered in the library for our Tikun Lel Shavuot study. Rabbi Edward Friedman of Temple Bnai Israel, and Rabbi Steven Peskind of Elgin joined me and CBS member Anna Lelko and 16 others for a night of study. The practice of studying the entire night of Shavuot is based on a…

Tonight I am going to depart from my usual practice of speaking about the Torah portion for the week. Nor am I going to tie my sermon into a holiday or events on the world stage. Instead, this week I was inspired by our Bar Mitzvah, Jon Qunell.   Jon’s project consisted of selling seeds in…

This coming Sunday we have two special days on the calendar. This Sunday, of course, we celebrate Mother’s Day. That, everyone knows. But this Sunday also marks the newest of Jewish holidays, Jerusalem Day. Jerusalem Day celebrates the re-unification of the City of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty after the Six Day War in 1967. So,…

Today, the 5th of Iyar on the Jewish calendar, marks the 70th birthday of the State of Israel. As we know,  for almost 2000 years the Jewish people had been praying for G-d to return us to Zion, “to gather those who are dispersed across the four corners of the earth and lead us upright…

The ancient Romans regarded bridge building as a sacred pursuit. The position of bridge builder was an important one in ancient Rome, a city which spanned the holy Tiber River and was in need of bridges to unite the city. The ancient Romans called their priest the “pontifex” which means bridge builder. The word “Pontiff”…

This evening, in honor of the start of the Book of Leviticus in our annual Torah reading, I am going to talk about food. Food, you ask? We thought the Book of Leviticus is about sacrifices and the laws of purity! But, what are sacrifices if not food? All ancient peoples worshipped their gods by…

This week’s Torah portion finds us at the end of the Book of Exodus. Moses returns from his audience with G-d on Mount Sinai with a set of instructions on how to build the Mishkan – the portable sanctuary that the Jewish people will take with them as they leave Mt. Sinai and travel to…