Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

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…

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…