Rav Ovadia Yosef Drops a Bomb + New Torah Class
Rav Ovadia Yosef, son of Rav Yaacov Yosef, grandson of the former Chief Rabbi of Israel whose name he bears, has a weekly radio program on which he takes questions from callers. Two weeks ago a caller brought up the covid and “flu” shots, and the fact that we hear many, many instances of heart attacks, including among children and yeshiva students, the likes of which we never heard of until now. The caller asked what Rav Yosef had to say about this and all the terrifying things that are happening.
Rav Yosef replied that “shev v’al ta’aseh adif”, which means that in cases of doubt such as these it is better to take no action, rather than actively do something which might cause harm. He continued that vaccines in general are a positive thing (sigh), but the recent shots were not sufficiently tested, and there are many problems with them. Therefore, it’s better to take no action — in other words, to refrain from taking the shots.
This is what I and others were shouting from the rooftops from day one, although it’s been a long time since there was any reasonable doubt. It’s long past time that more rabbis who aren’t actively working for the enemy do justice to their titles, and state in no uncertain terms that these shots are as forbidden as a Zyklon B shower. (The person who shared this video with me speculated that Rav Yosef has to be very careful about what he says on Israeli public radio, even as he tries to make it clear that people should not take the shots.)
Rav Yosef then added that he knows explicitly that NONE of the grandchildren of Rav Chaim Kanievsky took the shots. He then repeated this emphatically.
The host of the radio program (whose screen must have been flashing “Red Alert!) quickly said that we rely on the instructions of the Ministry of Health, and that of course there is another side to this.
“We are confused,” replied Rav Yosef ambiguously, and they went to the next call.
The clip (in Hebrew) is available
here.
On some level it is a bombshell to be told with such certainty, by a rabbi who is in a position to know, that none of Rav Kanievsky’s grandchildren took the shots, when the government and the media they control so heavily leveraged the Kanievsky name to push the accursed shots. Numerous propaganda outlets “reported” the non-existent ruling from Rav Kanievsky.
Of course, they were not actually reporting, but regurgitating what they were given to publish, touching it up a little to make it slightly different from what their colleagues in other propaganda offices were publishing for their targeted populations. They did not investigate or perform actual journalism; the government fed them information and instructions, and they dutifully “reported” it as fact.
When will any of these “media” outlets report this extremely relevant revelation about Rav Kanievsky’s grandchildren, spoken clearly from a credible source?
When will people who lie for a living become trustworthy? Never.
The truth is that this charade should never have gotten off the ground. Contrary to the belief of ignorant masses and dishonest people looking to push an agenda, a tortured one-word reply to a leading question shouted in someone’s ear in a staged video does not constitute a halachic ruling, let alone a ruling that is actually binding on anyone, let alone a ruling that is binding on the entire Jewish people.
In other words, whatever the “media” was reporting in the name of Rav Kanievsky had exactly zero halachic significance. It was all just a bunch of hot air and rhetoric.
Furthermore, even if, theoretically, all of his grandchildren did take the shots — even if they had an IV drip from the finest German pharmaceutical companies so they could be the first to take every new shot and every new booster for every conceivable medical concern — it would also have exactly zero halachic significance.
Judaism is not a cult. Those who browbeat people with the recently invented notion of “Da’as Torah”, which has become nothing more than a virtue-signaling, kosherized form of “just following orders”, might as well be idolaters, for it is not Hashem they are serving.
There is a time and place for rabbis to adjudicate matters of doubt and offer guidance — provided that they have acquired the requisite knowledge of the matter, studied the specific question carefully from multiple angles, and arrived at an honest, independent conclusion, which they have substantiated so that they their ruling can be studied and critiqued.
Sometimes these rulings are binding on an individual, and sometimes these rulings are even binding on a community that has empowered the rabbi or local Beis Din to adjudicate for them.
Under no circumstances can a rabbi — even a pious and scholarly rabbi — simply make a declaration as if it is God’s word from Sinai. Anyone who pretends otherwise is distorting the very foundations of the Torah, and is either a brainwashed cultist or a heretic. Rabbis who mislead the people in this fashion are evil and should be banished from the community until such time as we have the power to judge them and punish them as they deserve, may it be soon.
So, on the one hand, this revelation from Rav Yosef is very important, because it might wake up some people about how they have been misled, and then maybe more dominoes can fall.
On the other hand, we should all have enough of a true Torah education not to fall for cheap propaganda orchestrated by the Erev Rav establishment, and tailored by phony rabbis placed in positions of influence specifically to mislead the Jewish people.
For a crash course in this fundamental area, I recommend the following material:
Don’t just follow “Da’as Torah”; learn the Torah, really learn it. The more actual knowledge you have, the better equipped you will be to ask intelligent questions, evaluate answers, and tell the difference between a genuine rabbi and a corrupt phony.
When we care enough to acquire the knowledge, we should merit to have genuine rabbis and true Jewish leaders to guide us properly.
