Blogs

There Is Every Reason To Hold On To Hope

You might think that beating cancer five times have turned Rabbi Jaffe into an unrealistically optimistic person. Someone who thinks fighting and winning against the odds is possible simply because he has. That maybe God was merciful to him, and some...

Hanging on to Hope Through a Serious Illness

In 1978, I entered the New York City Marathon wearing a T-shirt proclaiming me “The Running Rabbi.” I was just as tireless in my calling as a rabbi in Newburgh, New York. I led a march against the Klan, rallied to free Soviet Jews, and visited ou...

My Special Eleven Day Mission to See the Iran Hostages

The BBC interviewed me for a Documentary Special about my visit to the 52 hostages held captive in Iran and released after 444 days in January 1981, when President Reagan invited me to greet the liberated Americans in a White House Ceremony. Below is...

Finding Courage

What does courage look like? Each spring, an award is given to a person who has made a significant contribution to the world. This past spring, a woman was nominated who had spent many years of her life hiding her personal identity, and who had, at l...

If I Should Meet God

A disciple came to his rabbi and lamented: “Rabbi, I have all these terrible thoughts. I am even afraid to say them. I feel absolutely terrible that I can even think these thoughts. Rabbi, I simply cannot believe. Sometimes I even think that God do...

Joan Rivers and the Key to Happiness

Joan Rivers, may peace be upon her, once asked her business manager: “How much money do I have in the bank because I want it delivered to my house by the end of the day. I want to touch it!” She was also famously quoted as saying: “People say t...

Overcoming Depression

Pain, medicine, and depression were overwhelming me. The doctors told me I was winning my battle with leukemia, but I felt I was losing emotionally. The depression that had overtaken me seemed worse than physical disease. As a rabbi I thought I had b...

Who is Truly Religious?

These days I wonder if people who choose wounding and hurtful words wrestle with their demons. In the Jewish tradition, when we wake up in the morning we say: “Let me be swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of the Holy One.” We re...

To Live Without Regret

Joan Didion writes:” “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. An ordinary instant”. It happened to me when I went from the indestructible “Running Rabbi” to needing a blood transfusion because I was so weak. As I lay in my hospital b...

What to Wish For

A Russian short story portrays an aristocrat who has only a few days to live. When he replays the tape of his life in his mind he realizes he has wasted most of his life in the pursuit of wealth and power devoid of real meaning. He is desperate to re...

Unlocking Your Inner Strength in a Crisis

In June 2013, feeling great, I was on a family vacation, walking in the Adirondacks, when my oncologist called with the alarming news that a routine test showed that my lymphoma had returned in a more aggressive form. My wife and I sat anxiously hold...

What a Dying Christian Taught a Rabbi

When the doctors and nurses saw how depressed I was from the fevers and gnawing pain it worried them and they came to my hospital room to challenge me saying: “Why not be a rabbi and offer encouragement to your fellow patients?” But first we want...

I Would Be Happy If Only…

Maybe I had to endure serious illness in order to help people find meaning and strength in adversity. In the words of Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer.” Finding meaning requires that we overco...

Making Our Lives Matter

When I was diagnosed with leukemia I thought, “Why not me?” As a rabbi visiting patients for so many years, I realized that no one is immune and anyone can get sick – the rich and the poor, the young and the old. My childhood nickname was “Su...

Words of Wisdom from “The Running Rabbi” on Facing Illness and Adversity

In 1978, I bounded across the finish line of the New York City Marathon sporting a t-shirt with my logo “The Running Rabbi.” I’d never been sick a day in my life and I felt indestructible. That was then. My illusion was shattered six years late...

Overcoming Loneliness

A Rabbi said: “The way we usually approach loneliness is mostly by avoiding it, because we have all seen lonely people sitting next to other lonely people on lonely park benches, and they are the people we would least like to be. So we shy away fro...

A Key to Living Longer and Stronger – the Attitude of Gratitude

In the early 1990s one of the great medical research exercises of modern times took place. It became known as the Nun Study. Some 700 American nuns agreed to allow their records to be accessed by a research team investigating the process of aging and...

There Is a God

Over a hundred years ago in the town of Berditchev, there lived the saintly Rabbi Levi Yitzchak. One day he ordered the town crier to come to him. “What is your wish?” he asked the rabbi. “Go to every storekeeper and shopkeeper in the market pl...

Coronavirus-A Time of Opportunity

A colleague has offered comforting words. We all need some healing of our souls. The fear and uncertainty caused by the Coronavirus has stressed and strained us all. Let us take the opportunity to find the peace we need to restore some sense of balan...

Help Us to See the Light Amidst the Darkness

My colleague and Spiritual Leader, Rabbi Arnold Gluck, has offered inspiration and courage at a time when we are fearful and anxious and we don’t know what tomorrow may bring. “Now, more than ever, we need each other. We need the calming reass...

Doing the Right Thing

A rabbi has taught that doing the right thing is a prized religious value. And recently, science has aligned with God, Doing the right thing, the good thing, the decent thing, turns out to be good for the do-er as well. Ariana Huffngton quotes the ph...

Why Am I Here? What Is My Purpose?

Why am I here? What is my purpose? How can I find meaning in my life? A group of followers came to study with their Spiritual Leader and found him sitting and weeping. They tried to console him. “Why are you crying?” they asked. “When I was you...

Rabbi Hirshel Jaffe - Inspirational & Motivational Speaker

Email Me

marathonrabbi@aol.com

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914 272 5682