Never doubt a work spoken by a talmid chacham you have choosen as your rav or else you have not placed all your confidences in him and aseh licha rav has not been completed. And those that don’t properly trust rabanim cannot properly trust Hashem.
Tal, this is false. You have to be on the lookout to make sure that your Rav is always true to Torah. Shabtai Tzvi led many people astray. Yes, he was a rare case, but ultimately YOU are responsible for yourself. If you find that your Rav is possibly veering away from halacha (and lets say in an extreme example says shrimp is kosher), you have to find out whats going on. Rabbonim are human – most of them are absolutely wonderful and follow halacha, but some can go astray. Trusting Hashem implicitely is very different from trusting a human being (albeit one on a higher spiritual madrega).
Rabbanim don’t speak when they are not certain. The problem is we do and therefore believe the rabbanim are like us. We speak divrei leitzanut while they speak emet and that is just the way it is though they’d never agree.
I don’t think this statement is accurate. It would be hard to verify though. While they might be much better at this than most of us, they are still human and have faults the way the rest of us do. And, if we transmit the information poorly, they won’t neccesarily understand the situation properly and give bad information. Its not that they are wrong, but ultimately, you would have followed their advice which could have been disasterous.
there are different ways to ask a Rov. One way is, as you said, to ask for an Eitzah. When you do that, you are not bound to follow what the Rov says.
You say EITZAH, I said ADVICE. I never said don’t ask, but I did say that YOU have to make the decision and that YOU are the one who lives with it. Is your Rav looking out for what’s best? YES. Does this mean he cannot be wrong? NO.
Also, my childhood Rav happens to be a doctor as well. So in that case, I could trust him if I asked him about antibiotics. But I wouldn’t ask the Rav of my shul right now because other than being a parent himself (and thus presumably having lots of ear infection experience), he is not an expert in the field. If I had a halachic medical question, then of course I would turn to my Rav. There is a great distinction.
I think GAW also had some great points.