The interesting thing in the Torah, is that it shows our avos and emahos with all their mailos and also their chesronos. Unlike the non-Jewish world, our tzaddikim are shown to be flawed and not god-like. We call them Tzaddikim, not because they are saints, but because they acted with tzedek, even when they made errors of judgment. Those Tzaddikim were on a higher madreiga than our rpesent day gedolim, and Hashem is very careful to show us that ANYONE even Moshe Rabeinu, ZT”L, could make a mistake in halacha, in the carrying out of ratzon Hashem. Our gedolim are subject to the same foibles, weaknesses, influences in our day, as other tzaddikim were in theirs. They are not Hashem, and they make mistakes. And it is mamesh arrogant to think otherwise, or to state that. Our gedolim are not The Pope l’havdil. We do not believe them to be infallible as Catholics believe of their spiritual leaders. Sometimes a rov comes from a mindset from his community, from his time period, from his own family minhagim, that lead him to a particular hashkafa. I have no quarrel with that, nor would I presume to be so arrogant to as to tell him he is wrong. But the fact is that when there are shivim panim laTorah, there will be seventy-ONE opinions, all of them halachically valid. And today, there may be a different type of validity to things that might have not been viewed as favorably in the shtetls of Europe, because for example, in GENERAL, women did not do certain things, whether they were Jews or not. There was a time when women did not vote, either. Is it untzniusdig for them to go out and do so nowadays?
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