You registered many weeks ago to go to a tour of a museum http://www.rom.on.ca/index.php led by R. Slifkin. As it turns out, there's a lecture by R. Dr. Daniel Sperber at the same time, "The Challenge of Faith", and it would also mean missing the previous lecture by Dr. Marc Shapiro "The Lives of Gedolim and the Truths of History" in order to get to the museum tour in time.

http://www.torahinmotion.org/virtproglib/2...truth/index.htm

The catch is that not only are you registered for the museum tour, but also two of your kids.

Which would you go to?

Send kids and mom with a camcorder, while you attend the other two lectures.

How old are the kids? Would they enjoy the lectures or would they be bored? As a parent, my natural inclination is to do what the kids are going to find most interesting.

This is a problem I can safely say I would never have, as R. Slifkin interests me not at all, R. Sperber is a nice minhagologist but I'm not sure he's useful for anything else, and Marc Shapiro just irritates me.

Really? I really enjoyed some of R. Slifkin's books. Again, as Yehudi has said, his questions tend to better than his answers, but he raises really interesting questions. The last section of his Monsters book, about the lice thing and how they reproduce, I thought was particularly good.
R. Sperber I really, really like. I've read his Minhagei Yisrael twice (not volume 8, I don't have it) and got a lot out of it. I think his breadth of knowledge of minhagim and their development is useful.
As for Dr. Shapiro, I can see how he can be irritating, but I've read stuff of his, like his biography of Seridei Eish, and I think he's interesting. I heard him speak once about censorship, and that blew me away. He had two handouts, one handout of original works, and one handout of "revised" later works. For example, a sefer where a later edition had a haskamah of R. Kook totally deleted with only a blank space in its place. I thought that was really interesting.

I haven't the foggiest idea who either of these men are.

What about the third?

All three have wiki articles.

I don't think those questions are any more interesting than those raised by thinking ten-year olds. I only read the "Challenge of Creation," and while it had some interesting sources, they were really parperaos to anything an intelligent kid could think of. I think that if you read RSRH's letter about teaching aggadeta to children (which I had before that) and come across the right kind of Chazals, the entire book is a redunancy.

I don't know specifically to what you are referring, but if it is what I think it is, it was OK.

I never read Minhagei Yisrael, but I've heard good things. Unfortunately, his ideas about how to allow women's aliyos just turned me off.

I have a confession to make. I confused him with Menachem Kellner and his book Must A Jew Believe Anything? which I thought was a fine mix of scholarship and ameratzus.

Yeah, that's a problem, and has colored how a lot of people view him.


Oh. I actually found Dr. Kellner's book and Dr. Shapiro's book on the topic virtually identical.

I'm biased. I won't deny it. I draw conclusions about authors from their works, sometimes unfairly.

I never read Marc Shapiro, but now I guess I don't have to

In this case, it sounds like you're drawing conclusions about their scholarship and his worthwhileness based on his halachic position.


Depends what. That biography of the Seridei Eish was really interesting.

Not on his halachic position, but how he got there. His position is riddled with logical errors.

<shrug>

You could probably say that about Rightist arguments as well - very often the rabbi knows where he wants to end up, and finds a way to get there. That cuts across the spectrum.
[I've never read R. Sperber's position on aliyot].

Indeed. Last night I was reading a letter from R. Menashe Klein to the Steipler about marrying baalei teshuvah. It was so far in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that even the Cheshire Cat would've been befuddled.

Knock yourself out:
http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~kalechm/judaism/s...riat_hatora.pdf

None of the above, but if I HAD to choose it would be Sperber because minhagim fascinate me...