Our organizations can do a better job and yeshivas and day schools must do a better job. They must come to reject the rejectionist spirit that turns away students who do not fully meet the religious standards the school promotes. Too many schools and too many principals fail to see the Judaic potential in students. They fail to see because they do not want to see that there are students who come from marginal homes where there is a determination to grow at least incrementally in Jewish commitment. Our schools want perfect students and this quest epitomizes what is imperfect in too many of those schools.
As I wrote years ago in this space, if Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol would come to us as they were before they embraced religious life, overwhelmingly our schools would turn them down because they were not sufficiently frum.
