Professor Marc Shapiro responded to my inquiry: “The election of Rabbi David Lau is a bad joke. He is only 46 or 47 years old, and is not regarded as a great talmid chacham. So the Ashkenazi chief rabbi is once again just a crown rabbi, not a halakhic authority. If all you want is a chief rabbi who can give a good speech then I am sure Rabbi David Lau is fine, but if you want a chief rabbi who is a gadol be-Yisrael then the whole thing is a joke. There was a really great Torah scholar running for chief rabbi, R. Yaakov Shapiro, but the people who vote for these positions are not interested in electing the greatest Torah scholar.
“Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef is on the other hand a truly great scholar and if he carries on the halakhic tradition of his father it will be a positive thing. However, he has shown a tendency to bend to the will of the Ashkenazic haredim.”
