My understanding of Rav Moshe Feinstein is that he has an image of being normal and he views that as the ideal. He seems to view a stable functioning person as preferable to one who is always pushing for the extreme. Thus he indicates that a person should not seek out sexual stimulation nor should he even expose himself to such without need - such as having a job. But on the other hand, normal means being able to live with periodic exposure to women without losing one's spiritual equilibrium. A normal person is able to function well in a wide variety of circumstances because the balance is internal. Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky also comes to mind as being focused on being normal rather than frum.
The alternative to being normal is to focus on frumkeit. To maximize ones spiritual activities and to take these activities to the extreme. Since contact with women is spiritual harmful, one should avoid it to an extreme degree. Since Torah study is important, one should go to an extreme of hasmada - even if it messes up family relations and other spiritual goals. If davening is good - then davening with great kavanah for long times is even more desirable. Such a position is inherently unstable and difficult to maintain. It is best dealt with in large homogeneous groups where there is maximal predictability and control over the experiences one is likely to encounter. Thus focusing on frumkeit requires removing as much temptation and trials as possible to minimize the chance of failure. A person who focuses on frumkeit is playing for high stakes and also is open to high failure. If he actually sees a woman or hears an apikorus - or fails to live up to his ideal spiritual self - he can crash and be destroyed. Rav Wolbe talks about frumkeit as an instinctive selfish urge to get close to G-d which can conflict with what G-d want you to accomplish in this world. It is interesting that the major criticism of the Musar movement is that it didn't focus on being normal. The Alter of Novardok nearly destroyed the Mussar movment by acting in an atypical fashion by locking himself in a cabin after his wife died. The Mussar movment was criticized for destroying the best and brightest in the yeshiva by encouraging an extreme examination of the motivation for doing Torah and mitzva. As the result of realizing how far he was from the ideal, the best bachur in the yeshiva became a non-functioning despondent person.
Is it better to be normal or frum?
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Update: The following are excerpts which warn about identifying ideology with normal.
Dr. Moshe Koppel (Yiddishkeit without Ideology Tradition 2002) wrote
First, Yiddishkeit is not simply a set of laws but rather embodies particular perspectives on all that is important. These perspectives are manifest in a web of attitudes regarding, for example, what families and communities are supposed to look like, and in a whole host of desirable character traits. These attitudes and traits were implicit in the Torah given to us at Sinai and have taken on particular forms and emphases as a result of our collective experience over the centuries. They include generosity, humility, empathy, alienation, self-deprecating humor, civility, not taking pleasure for granted, argumentativeness, skepticism, awareness of suffering, et cetera. No point in haggling about this list-what I tell you explicitly hardly matters. Such attitudes and traits are imparted from parent to child, from teacher to student, and circulate within communities in a million subtle ways, few of them explicit. Rules can be preserved in books and filed by bureaucrats. Attitudes are implicit, deeper and more defining, but they can evaporate in a fl.ash in changing cultural conditions, especially if not manifested in actions. It is the very essence of Yiddishkeit to preserve these attitudes and pass them on.
Second, every individual has personal needs, interests, talents, character traits and social attitudes. Some of these are distinctly positive or negative and Yiddishkeit takes a firm stand for or against them, but for the most part individual proclivities are simply taken for granted as the backdrop for a life of Torah. People need to eat and to marry, to work and to earn sustenance, to enjoy art and music, to interact with others and to understand them, to defend their lives and their property, to comprehend the workings of nature and to exploit them. I could try to prove to you that Tanach and Gemara are replete with stories in which these needs are assumed and taken fully for granted. But to do so would be unnecessary: you know in your bones that the satisfaction of these needs is fundamental for normal human emotional and intellectual development.
Things sometimes get sticky when certain attitudes which you think of as inseparable from your very self are consistent with the letter of the law but somehow at odds with the attitudes that your family and community are clearly trying to pass on to you. For example, your militantly nationalistic feelings might run up against a tradition of quietism and moderation which strikes you as craven; perhaps your egalitarian tendencies will be frustrated by an unambiguously hierarchical traditional society; your interest in science is liable to be curtailed by a strong focus on Iimud Torah; your exceptional artistic abilities could be discouraged as frivolous; your focus on textual and historical aspects of Gemara might put, you outside the pale of usual yeshivish discourse; your freewheeling individualistic spirituality is likely to be constricted by a tradition of discipline and conformity; your wanderlust will be frustrated by the demand to settle down and assume traditional reponsibilities.
Let me be absolutely clear: where the demands of halakha are unambiguous, you must submit to them. But how does one navigate between much less well-defined traditional attitudes and strong personal inclinations? [...]
Because educational institutions are set up more to impart book knowledge and packaged formulations than hard-to-define attitudes, they are always driven in the direction of ideology. Herein lies their failure. Neither Haredi nor Modem Orthodox institutions have succeeded in imparting, or even sustaining, the normal heimish Yiddishkeit, full of the humor, creativity and authentic yiras shamayim that simple Jews have lived naturally in communities around the world for thousands of years. To put it another way, ordinary, knowledgeable, committed Jews have customarily spoken the language of Yiddishkeit as a first language fluently and unself-consciously. Institutions have taught students to speak the language of Yiddishkeit as a second language-awkwardly constrained by poorly internalized rules of grammar. [...]
Is it better to be normal or frum?
===============================
Update: The following are excerpts which warn about identifying ideology with normal.
Dr. Moshe Koppel (Yiddishkeit without Ideology Tradition 2002) wrote
First, Yiddishkeit is not simply a set of laws but rather embodies particular perspectives on all that is important. These perspectives are manifest in a web of attitudes regarding, for example, what families and communities are supposed to look like, and in a whole host of desirable character traits. These attitudes and traits were implicit in the Torah given to us at Sinai and have taken on particular forms and emphases as a result of our collective experience over the centuries. They include generosity, humility, empathy, alienation, self-deprecating humor, civility, not taking pleasure for granted, argumentativeness, skepticism, awareness of suffering, et cetera. No point in haggling about this list-what I tell you explicitly hardly matters. Such attitudes and traits are imparted from parent to child, from teacher to student, and circulate within communities in a million subtle ways, few of them explicit. Rules can be preserved in books and filed by bureaucrats. Attitudes are implicit, deeper and more defining, but they can evaporate in a fl.ash in changing cultural conditions, especially if not manifested in actions. It is the very essence of Yiddishkeit to preserve these attitudes and pass them on.
Second, every individual has personal needs, interests, talents, character traits and social attitudes. Some of these are distinctly positive or negative and Yiddishkeit takes a firm stand for or against them, but for the most part individual proclivities are simply taken for granted as the backdrop for a life of Torah. People need to eat and to marry, to work and to earn sustenance, to enjoy art and music, to interact with others and to understand them, to defend their lives and their property, to comprehend the workings of nature and to exploit them. I could try to prove to you that Tanach and Gemara are replete with stories in which these needs are assumed and taken fully for granted. But to do so would be unnecessary: you know in your bones that the satisfaction of these needs is fundamental for normal human emotional and intellectual development.
Things sometimes get sticky when certain attitudes which you think of as inseparable from your very self are consistent with the letter of the law but somehow at odds with the attitudes that your family and community are clearly trying to pass on to you. For example, your militantly nationalistic feelings might run up against a tradition of quietism and moderation which strikes you as craven; perhaps your egalitarian tendencies will be frustrated by an unambiguously hierarchical traditional society; your interest in science is liable to be curtailed by a strong focus on Iimud Torah; your exceptional artistic abilities could be discouraged as frivolous; your focus on textual and historical aspects of Gemara might put, you outside the pale of usual yeshivish discourse; your freewheeling individualistic spirituality is likely to be constricted by a tradition of discipline and conformity; your wanderlust will be frustrated by the demand to settle down and assume traditional reponsibilities.
Let me be absolutely clear: where the demands of halakha are unambiguous, you must submit to them. But how does one navigate between much less well-defined traditional attitudes and strong personal inclinations? [...]
Because educational institutions are set up more to impart book knowledge and packaged formulations than hard-to-define attitudes, they are always driven in the direction of ideology. Herein lies their failure. Neither Haredi nor Modem Orthodox institutions have succeeded in imparting, or even sustaining, the normal heimish Yiddishkeit, full of the humor, creativity and authentic yiras shamayim that simple Jews have lived naturally in communities around the world for thousands of years. To put it another way, ordinary, knowledgeable, committed Jews have customarily spoken the language of Yiddishkeit as a first language fluently and unself-consciously. Institutions have taught students to speak the language of Yiddishkeit as a second language-awkwardly constrained by poorly internalized rules of grammar. [...]
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