A prayer rite. As for “closer to the original” — that depends which pseudo-scientist you ask 🙂 (And who says there even is an “original,” and that it’s the “correct” one??)

Ezra Fleischer was not a pseudo-scientist, but a diligent and careful philologist. He had hypotheses about the development of the Torah reading cycle, but that doesn’t make it nonsense.

See what I wrote in the last column about the pseudo-sciences. I’m trying to sharpen and clarify the point further.

>On the matter itself, I don’t see any point in returning to an ancient rite. As far as I’m concerned, you can invent a new rite that suits you better. What is sacred about a rite that once existed? If there is a rite established by an authorized institution, then it is binding. But if not, then I don’t see any special value in it.

A reason not to create a new rite could be so that some mishap does not come about through us, and we don’t end up instituting a poor text—maybe for spiritual/kabbalistic reasons, for those to whom that speaks, or simply because we might miss things that the Sages saw a great need to institute and we wouldn’t notice, for example. Also, naturally one could assume it is closer to the text of the Men of the Great Assembly, by its very antiquity and geographical proximity, if they really did institute such a text. And isn’t there value in tracing ancient customs, on the assumption (because of the decline of the generations?) that those who practiced them were more justified creators?

Why is a rite established by an authorized institution binding? It doesn’t seem to me that the Land of Israel rite is any less authoritative than any of the rites we have today.

One of the most important problems of Judaism today is the state of Jewish law, which despite everything is still “frozen in time.” And I don’t mean things like abolishing commandments, but things like what’s being discussed here—changes in liturgical text, and so on. Before modernity it was much more dynamic, but over time the tendency toward conservatism increased to the point that people are afraid to change things that even in the past were treated with doubt, that’s all. Clearly this needs to change, and it’s a shame that this is coming דווקא from those considered shallow and less religious.