Reply To: I just don't get it

So here’s a delicate question that it seems every poster is tiptoeing around. I don’t know if it will be posted or edited. But it is germane to the conversation and the machlokes in Israel. Mods, I am not suggesting I have an answer, but I believe it is an important question to be asked.

At what point in our history did the guidance of our gedolim – being great people who, based on their wisdom and on the sources that are widely available to all of us in our time and place, gave tshuvos (the whole meaning of the term tshuvos, in context, strongly implies that they are answering a question that was put to them by an individual or a group, maybe people without access to the seforim and sources, or the years of yeshiva learning that our generation benefits from) turn into something completely different, i.e. a priori dictation to all of day to day decision making, ways of thinking, and even who to associate with or look at – without being asked a question about it first?

This was a wholesale change of the role of leadership in our communities. It is a relatively new thing. So the question is, why was it done? For whom, or for what circumstances? Do those circumstances prevail today? By this I mean, that you could say 180 years ago there were many who had little or no access to learning but were still within the machane, and felt that they depended on others to do their thinking for them. Now, for the most part BECAUSE of the sacrifice and the foresight of many of our gedolim, we have successive generations who are equipped to find guidance for Jewish living in our sources, who do have access to more seforim, more tshuvos, more written knowledge than previous generations dreamed of, all at their fingertips. And those who don’t are unlikely to listen to the answers OR the dictates of the gedolim anyways.

Was the idea of Daas Torah a Horaas Sho’oh? Did R’ Kotler z’l, R Kaminetzky z’l, R Feinstein z’l, The Lubavitcher Rebbe z’l, and who created the yeshiva and day school system post war in America and many others especially those who created the Torah education system in Israel , by doing so, educate generations who could go back to the previous system of shaylos utshuvos, rather than “a priori” diktat??