yichusdik:
“If Moshe Rabeinu could make mistakes, and Dovid hamelech could make mistakes, so could the holiest people of our generation.”
This is completely true. The Torah explicitly tells us that Moshe Rabeinu, one of the greatest men of all time, made a mistake. (By Dovid Hamelech it’s not quite as simple – kol ha’omer Dovid chateh aynoh elah tu’ah.) But if you look through the Torah, you’ll find that every single person who thought that Moshe was wrong ended up on the wrong side of history, and more often then not ended up dead. Seriously, take a moment and think about all the different groups that, at one point or another, decided Moshe was wrong. Korach, Dosson and Aviram, the Miraglim, then the ones who decided to go into Eretz Yisroel after the miraglim, etc, etc, etc. All of them – dead. And the time that Moshe did indeed make a mistake, the only one who realized was Hashem. So can Gedolim make mistakes? Absolutely. But it is still far from our place to think that we can decide when that happens.
“”No one believes in godol infallibility. That accusation is merely leveled by those who don’t like being told by rabbonim on how to act. Though, I don’t know how any non-godol can purport to know when a godol is incorrect.”
So, in other words, you’ll agree that they’re not infallible, but, nonetheless, give them functional infallibility (i.e. treat them as if they are right, even if everyone else agrees that they’re wrong).
The Wolf”
Precisely. As R’ Ahron Feldman put it , disagreeing with the Gedolim does not make us heretics, merely arrogant fools (paraphrased).
lesschumras:
Do you really, honestly believe that you are smarter than pretty much all of the Gedolim of the last 100 years? If the answer to that question is no, I have no idea how you can possibly say the things you’ve just said… and if the answer is yes, you might just be the most arrogant fool I’ve ever met.
On the pre-Holocaust immigration issue, Rav Dessler wrote an extremely sharp letter against the people who had these exact taynos on the Gedolim… y’all may want to look it up.