Rabbi Rudavsky brought a high level of political consciousness to his pulpit, sermonizing frequently on high-intensity American political issues, such as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. He served as Rabbi during the Six-Day War (1967) and Yom Kippur War (1973) fought by Israeli against its Arab neighbors. He spoke powerfully about Israel ’s right to exist in peace and security, as well as that nation’s responsibility as a democracy to provide civil rights for all its citizens and reasonable protections for all those who lived in the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The early 1970s also saw the beginning of the American Jewish community’s major effort on behalf of Soviet Jews, another cause Rabbi Rudavsky championed.

Whereas Rabbi Cohon was a rationalist and a scholar in the European mold, Rabbi Rudavsky spoke to emotion and was quintessentially American. He worked to infuse feeling into synagogue rituals, championed new melodies, and allowed experimentation in Reform practice, especially on the part of the Confirmation class and the youth group during the Friday evening services each group led. Rabbi Rudavsky was among the first generation of Reform Rabbis who asked the entire congregation to rise for the Kaddish prayer, in solidarity with families annihilated in the Holocaust who had no family left to say Kaddish for them, and in solidarity with Jews living under repressive regimes who were not allowed to say Kaddish for their loved ones. In the schoolhouse, Rabbi Rudavsky was instrumental in creating an eighth-ninth-grade program to bridge the gap between Bar/Bat Mitzvah and Confirmation, and allowed students in that program to choose classes based on their interests, while making sure that each took at least one semester of Torah, one of history, and one of ethics within the two years. Rabbi Rudavsky also was on the forefront of performing wedding ceremonies for interfaith couples, and after leaving Temple Sinai spent much of his time doing so.  

A product of his times and his training, Rabbi Rudavsky inevitably created friction with those among the Temple Sinai family who felt uncomfortable with his political activism and the seemingly overwhelming pace of change in education, ritual, music, and other elements of synagogue life. As charismatic in his own way as Rabbi Cohon, Rabbi Rudavsky found a solid core of support among some cohorts in the congregation, mostly families of his age group (his children were approximately 7, 9, and 12 when he arrived).

When Rabbi Rudavsky left Temple Sinai in 1974 the American political scene was quieting down to some degree and people throughout the nation and within religious communities were looking to heal rifts that had formed around contentious issues. Rabbi Waldorf’s hiring brought such a healing to a somewhat fractured Temple Sinai. The turbulent Rudavsky decade was, some would argue, inevitable given the circumstances of the world and of institutional American Judaism in 1964, that whomever the synagogue had chosen as its Rabbi then would have been a man of the same time and the same training. Others say the power of Rabbi Rudavsky’s personality intensified the inevitable culture clash. Regardless, in the sweep of history, all institutions go through periods of turmoil, and the leaders present during those periods are always put to the test.