Decision making

 Good living requires good decision making. That entails gathering facts and ideas, envisioning consequences and outcomes, getting in touch with one's feelings about the choices, consulting one's instincts, hearing from experienced and sensible people and weighing it all out so that one can make not the perfect choice but the one that makes the most sense all things considered.

Decision making is hindered by neurosis, laziness, prejudice, excessive fear, and fanaticism. Fanatics don't make good decisions. They just repeat their decrees.

Let's say you have a 30 year old baal teshuvah bachelor who has no money, no way of earning a living, and no family support. He wants to get a job. He doesn't enjoy Torah learning very much anyway as the yeshivas he attended didn't teach him very well, didn't have an educational methodology for beginners. They just opened to daf beis and broke his teeth on it. He needs to get married, but the women he is meeting want a guy with a way of earning a living, which is reasonable. Should you tell him to stay in yeshiva? That's fanaticism. It's an acting out of this idea that the answer to every question of life is to study Torah in  yeshiva. I have seen this happen to people. 

In the yeshiva world, it's hard to make good decisions because all of the components of decision making are stifled. They don't gather facts. They don't care about instincts. They operate from fear. They don't balance out factors. They just yell. 

I know a guy who has post traumatic stress disorder. He had a rough life and New York was killing him. He found himself in Los Angeles where he was able to mellow out considerably. He thought of staying there, but first, as he was told to do a 1000 times, consulted with a rav who told him "You must always stay away from tumah, and Los Angeles is tuma par excellence."

Now is that measured decision making? It's a prejudice from a New York frum Jew that the only place you can live in the world is New York, a place with plenty of its own tumah. This guy's mental state wasn't considered. And the hashgacha pratis that he brought him to Los Angeles under unusual circumstances wasn't considered. All that happened was that a loud mouth blasted his prejudices and ignorance all over this poor bochur's face.

I can cite you a 100 more examples of failure to attempt good decision making in the yeshiva world. Fanatics don't make decision, they fanaticize.