Archive for June, 2006

Earlier this week Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest man, announced that he is giving $25 billion to the world’s richest man. Well, he’s not exactly giving the money to Bill Gates. He’s giving the money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization that is already the largest private foundation in...
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The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Bush Administration’s plans to try captives from the war on Islamic Fundamentalist extremists in military tribunals without considering them prisoners of war is a non-starter.  Click here to read the article in CNN. This is a major step forward in bringing America’s conduct in the "War...
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A Short Story of a Long Life is the title of my late friend Emerich Salzberger Stoessl’s z"l autobiography. Emerich was a truly remarkable person.  Born in Austria, He learned to fly in Prague and he studied aeronautical engineering in Italy at a very young age.  When WWII broke out, he joined the RAF...
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Shelach 5766 By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff Nevertheless the people, who live in the land, are strong, and the cities are walled, and very great; and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.    …Numbers 13:28 How many Palestinian children’s lives are worth one Jewish Israeli soldier’s life?  How many Iraqi children’s lives...
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Our ancestors were a bunch of whiners. God did all these amazing things for them – bringing them out slavery in Egypt, feeding them with manna that fell from the sky.  God gave them His most precious gift, the Torah.  God was with them all the way. And what do they do? They kvetch. ...
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The rabbis of two thousand years were a real bunch of radicals. When they were confronted with something in the Torah that conflicted with the sense of values and ethics they learned from the Torah itself, they resolved the issue by deciding in favor of the values over the explicit law found in the...
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