Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

A Tale of Two Cities It happened in Jerusalem this week, in a religious neighborhood called Har Nof. It could easily have happened here – but did not. What happened at Har Nof, of course, was the murder of four Jews in the midst of their morning prayers and one Druze policeman who tried to…

To Choose to Be Jewish This evening I am going to talk about two people. One of these people chose Judaism. The other person did not choose Judaism, but wished he had. In my experience, people come to Judaism for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they fall in love with a Jewish person and want…

“For I have chosen him so that he will instruct his children and his household after him that they may keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” I was perusing the newspaper a few months ago when my eye caught the obituary of a man named Leo Bretholz. The name…

We Are All Immigrants One of the great pleasures of being a rabbi in Chicagoland is the opportunity to hear scholars from all parts of the world who come to our area to speak. That pleasure is only surpassed by sharing what I have learned with you, my congregation. This past Thursday I had the…

“Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what G-d and angels know of us.” Thomas Paine Speaking Up Monica Lewinsky was back in the news this week. She spoke at a forum, hosted by Forbes Magazine, to a group of a thousand entrepreneurs under the age of thirty. She spoke eloquently…

Forgiving our Worst Selves Had I been a rabbi in the Middle Ages, charged with the task of choosing a prayer that would open the services of the holiest day of the Jewish year for the next thousand years, I might not have chosen the Kol Nidre.  The Kol Nidre is not even a prayer…

Our Promised Land Yitzchak Epstein was the first to understand the challenge. Back in 1907, Epstein, a writer, linguist and pioneer in the instruction of Modern Hebrew, published an essay entitled “The Hidden Question.” Epstein was a Zionist. He supported the settlement of Jews in Palestine.  He noticed that one issue had been completely ignored…

Finding Spirituality in the Most “Unlikely” Places I used to wear my yarmulke on airplanes but I stopped a few years ago. Wearing my yarmulke would guarantee meeting some very interesting people. There was the Afro American minister who went on a Jewish Federation mission to Israel and returned with a greater understanding of what…

Take Off Our Shoes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, wrote a book a number of years ago called Kaddish. It is a meditation on the year that he spent attending synagogue reciting Mourners Kaddish for his father.  He writes, “It occurred to me today that I might spend a whole year…

Something momentous has happened in Naperville, and I want to share that with you this evening.  I have been attending a class called “Total Body Fitness” twice a week for the past six years at Edward Fitness Center. It is taught by a woman named Kathy Lee – she has a last name, but nobody…