Guaranteed

One of the most important lessons I have learned over the decades is that as a frum Jew you have to make choices that help you to be happy. This is a hard religion. The whole country is jet skiing and you are sitting in your suit and tie in the same old musty shul with the same old people muttering the same old prayers for three hours and hearing a reading of that mostly incomprehensible Torah portion once again. After that, you go to a kiddush where you eat some greasy kugel and hear a rabbi tell you how important it is to study Torah, just like he did last week and the week before and every week of the year before that. Then you sit at a Shabbos table for three hours and eat baked chicken and say a short vort that might interest you and might not. Then you sit in your apartment for four hours and try to read. Then it's off to afternoon davening. It really can be drag.

It certainly would help if you were living in a place that suited you, earning your parnassah in a field that interests you, pursuing a religious derech and studying the parts of the Torah that speak to you, and being married to somebody who is a match for you.

I have never met a yeshivish rabbi who grasped any of that. To them, you stay in yeshiva and engage in Talmudic pilpul on yeshivish mesechtas as long as you can, grab any parnassah that earns you the most money so you can support Torah study, marry the most fertile and wealthy woman who is machshiv Torah study, and live near a yeshiva where they engage in Talmudic pilpul. Maybe to them that's happiness. It's the only life they have ever known and I suppose they became rabbis because they enjoy it on some level.

They take a big gamble assuming that every Jew is the same way. I know numerous people who have fallen away who might not have if they had perused the religion and the life that supports it with some eye toward suitability to the individual.

Modern Orthodox rabbis are no better, at least not for men. Lots of flexibility is employed for the women, but the men are treated much the same in the Modern Orthodox world as the Yeshiva world. I once told a Modern Orthodox rabbi that I can understand all the efforts to make the religion more palatable for women, but that I would like to see the same effort applied to men. He said, "I don't know what you are talking about," and walked away. In the MO world, any pressure to study more Torah than is reasonable is replaced by the pressure to move to Israel and be slaughtered in the army. It's all pressure. If you are unhappy they mock you for it, which is not a solution. 

It's not that I need rabbis to direct me to suitable endeavors. It's that I'm told to defer to them for my life decisions and every f'ing time that I have done that, they have nixed my plans. My plans are not outlandish. But these guys are so narrow minded and so ignorant about the world, that everything that doesn't match exactly their life experience sounds outlandish to them.

Happiness isn't just about attitude. It's also about choices, about environment, about life style. Would you be happy working in a coal mine if you just adjusted your attitude? Part of the art of life is coming up with creative solutions and putting in the work to make them happen. I did that many times. Rabbis ruined it every single time.

The unhappiness of parents affects children. They start to see life and the Jewish religion through that lens. I'll bet that there are scores off off-the-derech children that were raised by parents who were disappointed with their lives, but didn't have to be. However, rabbis got in the way.

I don't go to them anymore. The famous music artist Bob Dylan said that if you have a dream, you have to keep it yourself, because if you tell somebody about it, they'll kill it. 

He wasn't talking about rabbis. If he only knew. With them dream murder is guaranteed.