Developing our potential

Matzav has an interesting article by Rav Zev Leff titled Rav Leff On Parshas Bereishis: Why is it “In the Beginning?”

Eretz Yisrael provides a setting where we can develop our potential to be a uniquely sanctified nation. (This, it should be noted, is the very antithesis of secular Zionism, which envisions Eretz Yisrael as a setting for us to develop at long last into a nation like all other nations.)
Read full article: http://matzav.com/rav-leff-on-parshas-bereishis-why-is-it-in-the-beginning-4


Jeffrey Folks writes about atheists in an article titled Prohibiting Cheerleaders the Free Exercise of Religion.

This, of course, was not what our Founders intended by the First Amendment "church and state" clause. What the clause prohibits is "the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." What atheist groups are attempting to do, with the full cooperation of Obama's Justice Department, is precisely what the Constitution disallows: the prohibition of religion expression. Had they intended to forbid the free exercise of religion, the Founders would not have justified independence on the basis of rights with which all men are "endowed by their Creator." Nor would they not have concluded the Declaration with "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." Nor would leaders like George Washington have invoked God dozens of times in their inaugural and farewell addresses to the American people.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/prohibiting_cheerleaders_the_free_exercise_of_religion.html#ixzz28clH00fJ

Early in the summer of 1952, after his first year of dental school at Emory University in Atlanta, Perry Brickman received a letter from the dean. It informed him that he had flunked out.

Mr. Brickman was mystified. He had been a B-plus student in biology as an Emory undergraduate and had earned early admission to dental school. He had never failed a course in his life.

Over the next few weeks of that summer, Mr. Brickman found out that three of his classmates had also been failed. All of them happened to be Jewish. Yet instead of fighting back, Mr. Brickman and his friends searched for other dental schools and swallowed a shame that lasted decades.

Continue reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/education/emory-confronts-legacy-of-bias-against-jews-in-dental-school.html?src=me&ref=general

Good Yom Tov!