BS”D
What does it say that when a lot of frum Jews get together they create a culture that is so unappealing to intelligent, free thinking people?
I am sorry, but I think that you are grossly underestimating the frum world.
The frum world is full of intelligent, free thinking people.
What is more, as I am seeing in the mixed community I am about to leave for a much frummer one, it is the frum people who created a culture that appeals to a lot of intelligent, free thinking people.
However, especially in an open, “kiruv” community, this culture attracts a whole mix of people, from people who are truly sincere to people who are looking for a quick fix of status or feeling respected or whatever, so they are frum on the outside and in reality retain the crude secular culture of the shkootzim who surround us.
The ones who are just along for the ride are the ones who are making a mess of things. They muck up the society which we built, but because we have ahavas Yisroel, and the builders of the community want to be as inclusive as possible, we cannot throw anyone out and we have to find a level where everyone feels welcome (after all, the strongest people can do well on their own whereas the weaker people need to have the feeling that the community institutions give them).
In my particular soon to be former community, it is half-hearted “mekuravim” who want to have their cake and eat it too that bring down the level of the community to the lowest common denominator. Here it is excusable because this is a post-Communist society and the people have for the most part been educated under Communism or during the chaotic early 90’s. The problems will pass in a generation or so as people start to grow and will no longer look up to the present “mekuravim” as role models but rather will follow a small but growing group of more earnest baalei tshuva who in turn will bring up the transition generation (or they will set up new institutions and leave the present ones to the old guard).
In the US the problem is that we have copied the materialistic ways of the gaudy, new today old tomorrow McSociety around us and some have taken it to the point that the McSociety is the ikar and Yiddishkeit is the tofel even though they look like frum Yidden on the outside.
Basically, then, it is people who are just going through the motions who are making the mess. And that makes it far harder for sincere people to shine through; the noisiest people are always the ones doing the wrong thing and a tiny bit of this group are even “frummer than thou”, making it a point of keeping some very public mitzvah behiddur while keeping very unexemplary standards of Yiddishkeit behind closed doors.
You may not have learned in a school that was right for you, and maybe it was geared toward or dominated by the frum-for-show crowd (that was the case in a lot of places because that crowd had the very illusory gelt before the credit crunch hit their mortgage schemes and left them high and dry and unable to pay the monthly lease on their Lexuses), but if you go to a place where there are a LOT of sincere, frum people who indeed think and are truly ehrlich, you will not be able to make the statement which I quoted above.
Gitty, from what I heard, though I was never there, I think you would be well served to give Aish Kodesh in Woodmere a try. (Caveat: I cannot read a map for the life of me and I could be way off as to the distance between where I think you are and Woodmere, L.I. but I am sure you could find a place to stay there for a Shabbos if they do not actually have a Shabbaton from time to time).
No “box” of conformity there, no rigidity, people are not overly materialistic, and it is a place where people think and explore and grow together.