1) Mm - sadly, Dreamwidth kind of failed at LJ integration.
2) Yes, I do think it's overly stringent, but short of taking his book and rewriting it with different standards (which would be bad in so many ways) there isn't really another book I can recommend to people.
3) Consider someone whose parents' Judaism doesn't feature tefillin. Tefillin are kind of a strange practice anyway, so it makes sense that when this person is considering taking them on, they're going to find some degree of family minhag comforting. Often enough, without that connection of "tefillin in the family," such departure from the parents' practice is too intimidating. So for some people, it's worth checking out the grandfather's tefillin; replacing the batim, or replacing the klafim, still retains enough of the original for the person to feel connected.
no subject
2) Yes, I do think it's overly stringent, but short of taking his book and rewriting it with different standards (which would be bad in so many ways) there isn't really another book I can recommend to people.
3) Consider someone whose parents' Judaism doesn't feature tefillin. Tefillin are kind of a strange practice anyway, so it makes sense that when this person is considering taking them on, they're going to find some degree of family minhag comforting. Often enough, without that connection of "tefillin in the family," such departure from the parents' practice is too intimidating. So for some people, it's worth checking out the grandfather's tefillin; replacing the batim, or replacing the klafim, still retains enough of the original for the person to feel connected.