One Man's Maverick is Another Man's Bore

A few years ago I had an interesting conversation with a certain Rav. This Rav is a tremendous talmid chacham with tremendous breadth of thought, but he is basically in the charedi world. He didn't object to any specific view of mine, but he criticized me for the totality of them. He said to me, "Look, it's okay for a person to have one or two radical views, but why do you have to have so many?" The world being billions of years old, evolution, no global flood, Chazal being wrong about spontaneous generation, Moshe not being ten cubits tall, Rashi being a corporealist, etc., etc., etc. Why do I have to always be a radical?

My response was that in the intellectual circles into which I was (at that time) moving towards - frum academics and frum people who subscribe to their rationalist approach - nothing that I say is remotely radical. All the aforementioned views are completely normative. In fact, in these circles, I am considered as a person who has not contributed any original or interesting ideas.

It was interesting to see how taken aback he was.