Date: Fri Mar 25 2005 - 07:20:46 EST
Sound familiar? Has anyone read his books?
Randy
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/science/22rabbi.html
Some excerpts:
Religion and Natural History Clash Among the Ultra-Orthodox
By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: March 22, 2005
....Twenty-three ultra-Orthodox rabbis had signed an open letter denouncing the books of Rabbi Slifkin, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli scholar and science writer. The letter read, in part: "He believes that the world is millions of years old - all nonsense! - and many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed. His books must be kept at a distance and may not be possessed or distributed." Rabbi Slifkin, the letter-writers continued, should "burn all his writings." .......
Three of Rabbi Slifkin's books, published from 2001 to 2004, were singled out in the letter or in related materials: "Mysterious Creatures," "The Science of Torah" and "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax."
Predictably, the banned books have become hits. A copy of "Science of Torah" recently sold on eBay for $125, or five times its cover price. And Rabbi Gil Student, whose company, Yashar Books, has taken over the distribution of the other two books, said he had done a year's business in a month selling them.
Rabbi Slifkin's books seek to reconcile, rather than to contrast, sacred texts with modern knowledge of the natural world.
But in the process, he has sometimes cast a critical eye on those texts. In "Mysterious Creatures," Rabbi Slifkin discussed fantastic animals mentioned in the Torah and the Talmud - among them, the unicorn and the phoenix - and suggested that, in reporting their existence, Jewish sages might have relied on the erroneous writings of ancient naturalists......
