the forced rav

I have watched many people take on a person as their personal leader, or rav, simply because the local synagogue committee appointed him to be the guy who sits in the front of the room, tell over a few brief thoughts on the parsha, and make minor decisions on shul decorum.  It's the rare person we call rabbi that has any training in counseling. And it's just as rare for anybody who is called rabbi to have studied any more than a small portion of the Talmud. He could have gone to yeshiva for decades and worked only on a few chapters of a few tractates. The Talmud consists of over 5,400 pages. He might have looked superficially at 10% of it, and in many yeshivas they skip over the aggadata, the parts containing wisdom for life. Rather, they engage in abstract argumentation over the derivation of halachas, and don't even discuss practical halacha. He might have studied 15 minutes of musar a day, and he probably didn't even do that. You hear that he studied at the Mir and just assume that makes him a scholar. The MIr has 5,000 students who study by themselves with the benefit of a class a week. They sit at their schtenders and study a few pages of the Gemara on their own. How is he equipped to be in charge of your life? People assume if a Jewish man is employed as the rabbi of a shul or as a teacher in a school that he is a true talmid chochom, a student of Torah wisdom, and the typical person likewise assumes that whoever he is married to is qualified to be a rebbetzin or counselor of women. All he has to do is get people to call him rabbi or rosh yeshiva and he's got the authority. People fall to their knees when they hear those titles, but they are not necessarily deserved. Iin our generation, they do not automatically indicate qualification for mentorship or authority over your life. People just toss around the lingo, the popular phrases and sentiments that they heard in yeshiva and around town, and pose as authorities. The new baal teshuvah usually can't see through this. Even people who have been frum all their lives can't see through it. They have been beaten down for so long, told to obey, ordered to not question. They may have literally been slapped around when they were in school for daring to question, threated with gehennom. This is not uncommon. So because they follow, you follow.