We have a serious epidemic of Erev Rav distorting the Torah. They have tricked many Jews to commit grave sins and endanger their very lives. I don't know what these Erev Rav did to earn blind obedience – the very notion is antithetical to the Torah, and fittingly based on more distorted Torah sources – but it needs to stop.

Even the greatest rabbis can make an honest mistake at times; they are human and imperfect like everyone else. Any rabbi worth the title will be grateful when someone brings the error to his attention, and will rush to correct himself. Catching a rabbi in a mistake is not grounds to dismiss him as an Erev Rav, particularly if he is honest and humble about it.

However, when a rabbi distorts the Torah to push an agenda, it's a different ballgame. This is not a time to show deference, for he is destroying the very foundations on which our society rests. This is especially true if he rests on his laurels and refuses to engage those who question him. Such a person has exposed himself as a megaleh panim b'Torah, and his crime outweighs his merits. Indeed, the greater his prominence, the more damage he can cause with such corruption. His prominence is not a reason to whitewash his corruption, but even more of a reason to oppose him head on.

Rabbis have been distorting the Torah right and left on behalf of the pharmaceutical oligarchy, and, more recently, to promote a worldwide lashon hara campaign against Chaim Walder (see here, here, and here). The Torah is unequivocally against them in both cases, as I have demonstrated extensively. It's not even a debate; their position would have been dead on arrival if they didn't have positions of prominence – which they no longer deserve – and a corrupt propaganda machine squarely on their side.

Here are two additional Torah sources which vindicate my harsh words against these Erev Rav. I encourage everyone to confront them with this information, without deference or fear, and demand an explanation. If you want to be rid of the Erev Rav once and for all, you need to do something about it.

*

Many rabbis have falsely claimed that we must follow the presumed majority of doctors if they tell us to get injected with who-knows-what. They provided neither context nor nuance for this incredible expansion of the power of doctors over all our lives. Just like that, if a bunch of doctors can be bribed, blackmailed, or fooled into pushing a pharmaceutical product, we have no choice but to take it.

There is neither Torah basis nor historical precedent for doctors having such far-reaching authority over the Jewish people. The Torah does not authorize doctors to give instructions to the masses, only to individuals. Even the cases in which an individual must follow the advice of a doctor – or a collective of doctors – are severely limited. Bodily autonomy is sacrosanct in the Torah, whether your ignorant, paranoid neighbor likes it or not.

Nevertheless, the Erev Rav were given a job to do – make it work – and they did it. They needed to find sources that doctors have some role in society, then take these sources out of context and blow them out of proportion. That's what they always do. They depend on the average person being too lazy to look into it themselves, too simple to tell the difference, or too afraid to challenge them. That's how they get away with it.

One of their favorite sources was the halacha that one who is ill must eat on Yom Kippur if even a minority of doctors believes that fasting may endanger his life. Aha! We have to listen to the doctors and protect our health. Take the shots!

Their sleight of hand is so amateurish that it's a wonder anyone fell for this. As I noted in this rebuttal of one such rabbinic magician, who was defending another, a doctor is indeed empowered to rule leniently for an ill patient that the prohibition of eating on Yom Kippur should be relaxed to protect his life. Attempting to derive from here that doctors can mandate that everyone, including perfectly healthy people, must inject themselves with experimental drugs – all of which have clear risks and unknowns, unlike eating some food on Yom Kippur – is a total mystery, and a corruption of the Torah.

The claim that this source means what they claim it means is so patently absurd that it doesn't require a rebuttal. Nevertheless, I recently came across the following comment from the Pischei Teshuva that is too good not to share. It is a passing comment in Shulchan Aruch Even HaEzer 13 near the end of the siman:

דבעלמא אין האמנם לרופא אלא לספק עלינו ויהיה ספק פיקוח נפש דדוחה שבת ויום הכיפורים

In general there is no trust for a doctor except to bring doubt upon us, and there would then be a possibility of saving a life that would push aside Shabbos and Yom Kippur.

In other words, we trust a doctor to the extent that we will administer medical care on Shabbos or feed a person on Yom Kippur based on his concerns. That's pretty much it. A doctor has zero authority to make rules for healthy people, and extremely limited authority when it comes to unhealthy people – even if he holds the majority opinion. Patients are not prisoners, and are not beholden to a referendum when it comes to their personal care.

The Pischei Teshuva clearly writes that doctors have credibility only to permit us to take precautions on behalf of sick people. They have no credibility to declare that a pharmaceutical product is “safe and effective”, nor that anyone or everyone is obligated to be injected with it. They have no credibility to decide that we must close our shuls and yeshivos, imprison people in their homes, obstruct our respiratory pathways with hideous masks, keep a distance from other human beings, or go to other insane extremes to prevent the spread of an illness of any kind.

Doctors have no such trust. Period. They never did and they never will. Any rabbi who claims otherwise is responsible for spiritually and physically harming his followers, and disgracing the Torah, and should be banished from our midst.