Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

I’m going to open my sermon tonight with a trivia question. Everyone but Mark Sperling is invited to participate. No professionals allowed! Here is the question. Do you know the word in the English language that is most understood around the world? When you say this word, people in Europe understand it, people in South…

Despite living in Chicagoland since 2008 I had not been to Wrigley Field until 12 days ago. If Middy and I were going to see one Chicago Cubs game this season, that game last Sunday, August 12, was the one to see. Many of you saw the game on national TV or read about it and certainly…

Did you know that when we are awake, our brain generates 23 watts of energy, enough energy to light up a room? And that by simply opening our eyes, 75 percent of our brains’ energy is activated? Perhaps that is why this week’s parasha opens with the Hebrew word “Re’eh” which means “see”.  The Torah…

Earlier this week, Mali Sharon, a fellow congregant, called me to ask if she could share a story with our congregation at Friday night services. Mali had recently returned from Bayreuth, composer Richard Wagner’s home in Germany. She was in Bayreuth to see her son Yuval conduct an opera at the famous Bayreuth Music Festival.…

In 2008, researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan published a study to try to understand why putting an animal on the label of a bottle of wine – a kangaroo or a duck for example — more than doubled the wine’s sales in the United States!  This strategy goes against…

 I and other Chicagoland Rabbis walked carefully, single file, down the narrow, dark and musty passage of the cavern that was part of the Jewish Catacombs of Rome. These catacombs are the ancient burial place of the Jewish community that lived in Rome before, during and well after, the time of Jesus. Above and to the sides…

In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses assembles the Israelites and recounts the past forty years of their experience together.  As we know that experience includes the miracles of the plagues in Egypt and the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea.   “Yet the Eternal has not given you a mind to understand or eyes…

I was browsing through the stacks in our synagogue library this week when I came across a book published ten years ago by one Lita Epstein. I had never heard of the author but I was intrigued by the title of the book:   If You Can’t Say Anything Nice, Say it in Yiddish: The Book…

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…