Death of the Patriarch: Patriarchal / Matriarchal Mentality

Rabbi Ze'ev Chaim Lifshitz

Translated: Dr. Sara Nathan

Classification is a permanent feature of human development, appearing even before intelligence.  As early as the pre-thinking stage of childhood, an infant can separate the categories of familiar and unfamiliar.  At approximately eight months, infants develop the ability to recognize a permanent feature, and to relate to it as to a familiar category: They will then smile at familiar people and show suspicion and distrust in the presence of new faces, projecting hostility, crying when strangers arrive, relaxing only when they have gone.  It is no exaggeration to make the claim that it is at this early stage that hatred is born, or that the ability to hate begins with classification.

At a later stage, familiar/unfamiliar distinctions require logic to support them, and logic demands a value system as its basis.  Eventually, all this becomes compressed into the respectable framework of ideals.  It not be unfair to reverse conventional assumptions and suggest that good/evil distinctions are actually not the basis for human judgment as is commonly assumed, but rather that they are merely the tool that serves the human need to classify. 

The need to justify such feelings and to seek out the objective values that will support these, appears only later, as a stage of adolescence.  During infancy and childhood one feels no need to justify likes and dislikes.  Egocentric survival mechanisms determine these: Whoever causes me pleasure is good; whoever causes me pain is bad.  At this stage, values do not merit their own independent existence.  Most very young children measure good and bad according to subjective emotion.

In the later stages of childhood, as socialization occurs (approximately from age seven to adolescence) the need to classify intensifies. Its activity widens to include the social environment beyond the family circle.  The child has become a student.  He must cope with the rules of a game called school.  In many instances, this game is played by rules that transform into rigid law.  The game then turns into a threatening reality based upon reward and punishment.  The good/bad classification, at this stage, is fed by the reward/punishment distinction: Bad is understood as whoever gets punished.  Good is understood as whoever gets rewarded. 

Systems of academic testing and assessment exploit this distinction as their source of power: A good mark is a reward; a bad mark is a punishment.  Individual assume a numerical status: He is a one hundred student, she is a seventy, the other is a fifty or below – meaning to say "It were better for him had he not been created", having been stripped of worth.  He was not quick enough; his reflexes failed to adjust to the inhuman method. Its inhumanness is perhaps the secret of its longevity, for it is wonderfully simple and direct. Some educators appreciate the refuge it offers them from the complex value judgments that are demanded of them if they would truly and fairly assess an individual student's qualities.

Arriving home from school, eight-year-old Avi informs his mother that Yossi has been a bad boy today.  Why?  Because the teacher punished him.  Why did she punish him?  Because David threw a tangerine peel on the floor.  Mother does not understand. If David threw a tangerine peel on the floor, why is Yossi a bad boy?  Because Yossi got punished.  Whoever gets punished is a bad boy, Avi explains philosophically.  



Results are the litmus test of value: Avi is demonstrating solid – even admirable – biological survival skills.  He is even supported by sociologists, historians, and those of the Protestant faith.  The Protestant faith maintains that everything is managed by the Creator, Who continues, perpetually to run His world.  A successful person who has achieved his goals, is clearly beloved by the Creator.  His very success is proof of this; there is no need to investigate the moral basis of his achievements.  Money has no smell, it would seem, according to a true Protestant.  According to this perception, an utterly corrupt person who has achieved impressive material gains, may judge himself utterly righteous.  He may bask in the pleasure of his success, for his very success is the soundest proof of his righteousness.  The obvious does not need to be proven...which is why success has so many friends. 

Yet how often does success elude the one who asks too many moral questions.  How often does it slip through his grasp, and evade his piercing eyes.  How often does he wonder how the successful person has managed to accumulate all his money.  "Well though, if God granted him wealth, surely he deserves it.  Who am I to doubt the ways of the Creator? Everyone knows they are based upon justice...”  It is worth keeping eight-year-old Avi in mind if we wish to evaluate this belief system appropriately. We would do well to recall the childish basis of a “judging-by-the-results” philosophy.

The Birth of Mentality

People form their sense of reality through an encounter between their inborn traits and their environmental conditions.  For example, in a society that values learning, an action-oriented person is constantly dealing with society's expectations of academic perseverance and excellence, as they conflict with his own need for activity and tangible achievement; he constantly feels an inner need to organize and to arrange and to achieve practical, action-based goals.  These energies fail to find expression in the learning environment in which he finds himself.  Yet they do not go away.  Inborn traits and needs do not relax their grip simply because one's environment refuses to recognize them.  Instead, a conflict forms.  The values and ideals of the environment that are incompatible with one's inborn character fail to contribute to the building of the self image, and difficulties arise in one's developing sense of identity.  



One begins to feel that one does not quite belong anywhere.  One of life's two fundamental sensations – the need to belong, as well as the need for freedom - is lacking.  The need to belong is not being fulfilled.  This is a form of deprivation that causes restlessness in the developing personality.  Personal creativity and personal expression are inhibited.  Such birth pangs in the attempt to develop one's own unique personality effectively create a different personality, one that is not compatible with the original personality with which one was born.  Conflict then becomes intrinsic to one's inner experience.  


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As with Individuals, So with Cultures

Just as the unique, inborn character of every individual must be recognized and legitimized, so must we recognize and grant full legitimate rights to behavior patterns that are created by the existential encounter of a people with their environment, that is to say, their response patterns that have formed out of their environmental stimuli.  These include perceptions of morality, values, rules governing interpersonal behavior, and attitudes toward tribal, religious, and cultural authority.  The accumulation of these behavioral components as they encounter one another, as they penetrate and take root in the depths of the individual personality, create an individualized personal matrix that is called - mentality.  Mentality pushes itself to the front of the line of behavioral responses to become one’s calling card.  One's mentality is what shapes one's first instinctive response when faced with conflict and existential distress.

To the liberal, all human beings are 'tabula rasa', a blank slate. Humans are thought of as top-level industrial products. They can be quite impressive at times, but they are devoid of intrinsic individual character.  They all have the same neutral mentality and they will react identically to the same input.  If they do not, they must pretend to.  Those who are capable of meeting these ruthlessly Draconian pre-conditions imposed by liberal society, who can cast off their inborn uniqueness, who can give up the mentality that makes them different, who can place themselves in the category of a neutral stranger, may be acknowledged by the liberal.  For the liberal determines which differentness is worthy of his kindness – which differentness is to be accepted and which differentness is to be rejected as threatening his absolute rule over all the tabula rasas. 

Differentness that is unfortunate enough to be rejected must be educated by force, through punishments that are anchored in the law. Such differentness must be re-formed into an equilateral square that will abide by the dictatorial expectations of the liberal system.  An individual is caught in a double standard: Equality and individual rights abound on the surface of liberal society, yet beneath lies a despot's indifference to the mentality that grew out of one's childhood home and one's indigenous culture.  The liberal calls considerations of individual mentality a racist crime deserving of the worst possible epithet.

Patriarchal and Matriarchal Mentalities

Truth to tell, the liberal himself does not volunteer to place himself on the blank slate.  For the sake of his own rights he is a zealous warrior.  It is the other that has to be accepted, as an act of loving-kindness, on the condition that the other shall adapt himself to the dictator's character.  Sometimes the dictator is called King.  Sometimes he is called The People or The Salt of the Earth, depending upon current verbal requirements.  It is part of a dictator's apparatus of control: To determine what the stranger may or may not utter according to the law of the “politically correct.”

The human need to classify reality, to separate it into categories surfaces time and again.  Basic morality, deeply rooted in all who are created in God's image, determines the primary category: good versus evil.  However, egocentricism inevitably sets in, and the good becomes, of course, us.  The bad obviously is them, the strangers. 

This distinction manifests itself consistently, appearing, seeming to disappear and then reappearing again, even at the most primitive levels. The jungle's law of survival: In the jungle, "us" and "them" corresponds to powerful versus weak.  Here is Nietzsche’s distinction: The noble savage.  He is a good and powerful being.  Because he is powerful, he does not need to justify his position.  In contrast, there are the weak, who are also the base.  Pressed by their inferior position, they invent the idea of morality: A moral person is required to pity the weak.  Their purpose in inventing the spurious concept of morality is in order to undermine, bewilder and incapacitate the weak brains of their otherwise dangerous, physically powerful adversaries.

Following Nietzche's basic distinction, one finds that a division of categories has developed in humanity's cultural field.  Patriarchal cultures correspond to the noble savage.  They usually derive from indigenous, tribal cultures.  Matriarchal cultures correspond to Nietzsche’s weak but clever inventors of moral claims.  They usually derive from cultures that have been detached and uprooted from their origins.  Religions seem to attach more to a tribal culture, and technological societies more to a western culture, but this last is a superficial distinction, and not constant.  There are no specific features that make one cultural type more conducive to religion than another.  The main goal, for both cultural types, remains what it has always been: Power.  



The tribal societies make no effort to conceal the fact that their goal is to acquire power by force, because they have remained in contact with their natural origins.  It is the sophisticated technological societies that invent various guises. They must contrive to conceal the hunger for power that lurks behind the smooth veneer of the blank slate.  
In attempting to define the brute-force character of the patriarch and the 'might is right' assumption that supports his operative tactics, we may acquire some notion of how vastly different these are from the matriarch's method of social enforcement.

The Parallel is Unavoidable:

Stages of Cultural Development

Stages of Cognitive Development in Children

Studying variation in cultural and governmental systems, one finds oneself inevitably classifying cultures according to developmental levels, just as one classifies groups of children of different ages according to their developmental levels.  This is not merely a question of borrowing models from other disciplines.  Confirmed Piagetian though I am, I maintain that anyone familiar with the models of child development will be struck by the extent to which cultural patterns correspond to and are influenced by the stages of child development.  It is quite possible that there is a particular developmental stage that predominates in each culture, which determines its characteristic essence.  This may be the key to the locked chest that guards the secret of diversity in cultural behavior patterns.  



The description of developmental stages in children's cognition, as formulated by intelligence researcher Jean Piaget, has proven its importance in broad applications and multi-disciplinary research contexts, among these, artificial intelligence and research of the brain.  Why should we not apply this same rather astonishing model to the disciplines of political science and cultural anthropology?

Mass Culture

The Piagetian model becomes especially important when dealing with a culture of the masses.  The phenomenon of mass psychology has been investigated by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Elias Canetti.  His description of the character of the mass is uncannily accurate.
Canetti found that the central feature of mass culture was use of the lowest common denominator for the public forum: Cultural concepts that are “catchy” and superficial, numerical quantity that is emphasized at the expense of individual quality, and the common public realm that devours the uniquely individual private realm.  The mass culture is a “rating” culture - values are judged by their popular rating level.  Classification follows two-dimensional categories: Black or white.  The present exists in a vacuum, without a past or a future.  More precisely, time's components detach from one another; the present detaches from the past and from its own continuity into the future. 

Mass culture characteristics include some of the following: A lack of unity or cohesion, an extremely short memory, illogical, inconsistent thinking, and glaring contradictions that are a vertitable insult to the intelligence.  Among other things, there are severe contradictions between stated ideals and actual realities, between the people and their elected leaders' promises.  The result of all this is a form of government that is neither consistent in its overall idea, nor rooted in any past - neither in the immediate electoral past nor in the distant cultural past.  Acting in contradiction to professed ideals tends to be standard government procedure.  Leaders elected in order to fulfill the expectations of their constituency betray those expectations: “Things look different from here,” a charismatic leader explains without a trace of shame as he proceeds to do the exact opposite of what he has been elected to do.

Some Childish Features of the Mass Culture

• A tendency toward narrow vision, perceptions that are not encompassing. 

• A child's view of things, limited to immediate, even instantaneous impressions. 

• Aperception is the dominant feature, i.e., observation through pre-intelligence impressions. 

• There is no analysis of causes, roots or other component factors of a situation.

• An inability to encompass a three-dimensional perspective.  Children ignore those aspects of a situation that are not active at the moment of interaction.  Adult members of a mass culture can tend to exhibit similarly limited cognitive tendencies.

• An inability to withstand pressure: slackness in personal convictions, a tendency to submit to the stronger vector, to identify with whatever power exerts more force, to prefer that power above all other values.  Withstanding pressure is a criterion for maturity, an indicator of adult response. 

I participated in a study conducted by Piaget that attempted to determine the stages of children's cognitive development in relation to perceptions of the law: How does the leg al perspective develop? Around which cognitive stages does it consolidate?  Piaget investigated this by studying children's attitude to the rules regulating their play in the game of marbles.  The study found that a pre-law stage exists and predominates until approximately six years old.  At six, socialization begins. That is to say that a new need is born: The need to belong.  (I have found that the ability to fulfill one's need for belonging, as well as the ability to fulfill one's need for freedom, together form the basis of a healthy existence.  A deficiency in the fulfillment of either of these needs can significantly limit the quality of one's life experience.)  At the earliest stages the children were limited by their own egocentrism, which narrowed their scope and limited the extent of their perceptions.  Being entirely absorbed in the struggle for survival and ruled utterly by their instincts, their perception of the meaning of rules in a game reflected a purely egocentric mode.  When Piaget asked a group of children under the age of six which of them had been the winner in the marbles game, each child pointed to himself.  No one paid the slightest attention to any sort of rule-governed conventions. As they played, they made up their own rules.  
 At age six, Piaget encountered an entirely different phenomenon: The prevailing mode was an absolute reverence for the rules of the game.  Six-year-olds were asked who had made up the rules of the game. They replied, “God”.  Children who had no religious upbringing attributed the rules to the government or to the king.  When Piaget suggested that perhaps the rules could be changed, they were appalled.  Such a sacrilegious notion was rejected point-blank.

From age ten, the attitude toward authority gradually relaxes.  From an absolute concept, it is demoted to the status of a phenomenon perceived in a social context.  When asked who decides the rules of the game, ten-year-olds will refer you to the thirteen-year-olds, for they are the oldest children in the school.  The ten-year-olds respectfully vest the thirteen-year-olds with the authority to change the rules of the game in any way that they deem appropriate.

At age thirteen the authority to create rules is placed on the children's own shoulders.  Who invented the rules of the game?  We did; we ourselves, children our own age.  May the rules be changed?  Why not?  As long as all the players agree!  (We stand tremulous with awe, privileged witnesses at the scene of democracy being born!)  At this age one discovers the beginning of the ability to abstract.  There is a new awareness of rules as well as an understanding of the role played by the law.  Most important of all, they have discovered that the law is relative.

This is the ladder – or perhaps the mine-field – through which the law must pass: From the first stage – an egocentric, pre-social stage, through a second stage – the perception of law as a reality in itself:  The law is the supreme authority. It owes nothing to humanity, containing no human values, no human needs that it is required to protect from unlawful violation.  In this second-stage perception of the law, human beings are not mutually obligated to one another.  The other plays no role; one must bow to the law, and adapt oneself humbly, unilaterally, to its dictates.  Obviously if awareness is arrested at this stage of legal perception, it turns eventually into an instrument of oppression, to be wielded by those who choose to “take the law into their own hands.” Thus gangs, mafiosi and miscellaneous dictators are born, both inside and outside of the democratic regime.  It is astonishing and puzzling to discover that the birth of cultural preceptions of the law seems to parallel the stages of child development so closely as to attain what seems like complete correlation.

  It is unfortunately difficult to point to any developed society that has attained the third stage, that has developed an understanding of the law's relativity, let alone one that has developed an understanding of the more advanced stages.  For indeed, more advanced stages do exist in healthy samples of cognitive development.  
Studies conducted by Lawrence Kohlberg in California examined children’s cognitive development as it continues into adolescence.  (Piaget’s research studied cognitive development only until the beginning of adolescence, and then stopped there.  I once asked Piaget about the later continuation of cognitive development, with regard to the qualitative intelligence that develops during later adolescence and that continues indefinitely.  He was clearly taken aback.  He had never considered the possibility of an intelligence that was not technically ordered or not determined by a technical system of organization.).  Kohlberg investigated the process of cognitive development of legal perception and discovered that an even more advanced stage is eventually attained in cognitively developed adolescents.

At this higher stage, the law is perceived to be valid only if it serves human interests, and even this is not enough.  The law must also serve and address ultimate values, universal moral values, religious values and national values.  It is only when one reaches this higher stage of cognitive development that one becomes capable of grasping the meaning of such sophisticated legal concepts as “a demonstrably unreasonable law.”  This legal category continues to this day to be controversial.  Kohlberg found that only five percent of the student population he examined - and only from among the most academically outstanding - had attained this stage of understanding - that the value of the law is relative to higher values.  How are we to explain the infrequency of this stage of legal maturity?  Why is legal development among the majority of the population arrested at a much earlier stage?

A case of arrested development at an early stage can perhaps be explained by the fact that many adolescents find it difficult to progress from the stage of quantitative skills and mechanical/technical cognition to the stage of qualitative perception.  Based on Kohlberg's findings and our own research, it appears that qualitative perception is the next stage on the developmental continuum, appearing in mid-adolescence approximately, after the quantitative and mechanical/technical cognitive skills have been largely acquired.  



Qualitative thinking includes intuition, creative imagination and most importantly, the ability to express human intelligence.  Human intelligence is the stage of encounter at which human sensitivity meets rational, reality-based thought.  
Only those who are fastidious about forming their opinions can ever reach this stage.  It is not the lot of the masses.  What is absorbed at the mass level is only the lowest common human denominator.  The highest level that the mass culture can address is the childish intermediate stage, which features all the characteristics described above including superficial, two-dimensional, short-term point of view.  The mass conception rejects anything original, is hostile towards the unconventional, and measures values according to the general consensus, determined by public opinion polls and ratings. 

The result of the mass culture is the creation of an unbridgeable gap between patriarchal and matriarchal mentalities.  Both of these mentalities are controlled by a juvenile thought process, which creates an existential gap between "Doing" and "Being:"

The Patriarch is created by the attraction to power, which tends to absorb all other values.  This means that in a patriarchal culture, whoever is strong is also handsome, just, and good.  Whoever is weak has no moral right to exist.  The law is not a reality unto itself.  Whoever is strong is also the legal authority – he himself embodies the law, his word is the law. 

The weak individual's most fervent desire in a patriarchal culture is to be taken under the sheltering protection of the strong.  Finding favor in the eyes of the powerful grants one everything one can possibly desire: protection, personal security and even the ability to exploit one’s own power as a protected weak individual against those who are truly weak and unprotected, those whose status in a patriarchal society is one of abandoned slaves whom no master protects.

Whoever views those individuals enjoying protected slave status as poor unfortunates who have been robbed of their freedom is very far from an accurate understanding of the patriarchal mentality.  A person with a slave mentality cherishes as his goal the replacement of his less strong master with a stronger and more generous master.  The assumption that a slave with a patriarchal mentality secretly cherishes dreams of rebellion and is perpetually tormented by the brooding frustration of a caged wild animal indicates ignorance of that bizarre but fullly documented phenomenon known as “identifying with the aggressor,” to wit, the kidnapped girl who falls in love with her robber-kidnapper to the point that she refuses to be set free.  



The Torah teaches us this principle in the law of eved nirtsa, the slave who is punished by having his ear pierced.  What was his crime?  He refuses to be set free on the grounds that “I love my master.”  Such a choice arises from an undeveloped, childish perception.  Its symptoms are choosing dependency and fearing liberation, or pure belonging with no freedom.  The Torah accepts the choice that this slave has made, but most reluctantly; the Torah wishes to teach us that to buy one's security at the cost of one's freedom is to pay too high a price.  Nevertheless, the Torah is acknowledging the fact that some people desire this.

 The values that accompany the “I love my master” stage consist mainly of admiration for the strong man, as mentioned.  He represents authority.  Authority is not a value in itself, but rather an expression of the strong man's personal power.  Law is no more than the direct expression of the ruling tyrant's arbitrary will.  The highest value is honor, which arises out of and mingles with cruelty and an absence of any compassion for the weak.  Revenge is valued highly in that it expresses the restoration of offended honor.  The greater the revenge, the harsher the cruelty, the more one's offended honor has been restored and the brighter shines the cruel avenger’s reputation.  Feelings of compassion are interpreted as weakness in that they express a yielding of one's position, an admission that one's rival’s claim may be just.  An objective perspective on the concept of justice is unheard of.  Attitudes are polarized: One either belongs (to a stronger master) or one enjoys a unilateral freedom that expresses itself in wanton moral abandon that knows no inhibitions.  In a patriarchal society there is no room for the inner personal intention, for the emotion, or for any human dimension whatsoever.  The test is in the results: The ability to consolidate power and impose rule, to vanquish the weak, and to maintain an oppressive regime that will hold the conquered enemy in check.  



According our terminology and definitions, a negative correlation exists between "Doing" and "Being."  "Doing" ignores "Being."  In a patriarchal society, one performs objective actions at the expense of subjective human beings.  Only objects have value in that an object is the concluding link in a chain of events, in which each link is the objective result of the previous link.  Therefore the object is the only thing that matters – hence a mechanical, power-based system in which the bigger gears activate the smaller gears.  Mechanical systems do not contain personal intentions, personal needs, personal goals or free will.  A mechanical system is blind.  It activates and exerts control over others, and others also activate and exert control over it.  It is not an existence that contains qualities and values.

For its own reasons and by no coincidence, the matriarchal culture has also adopted a mechanical system.  Indeed, matriarchal cultures today have become the leading exponent of technical/mechanical expression, which seems odd when we consider how the matriarchal culture expounds the values of "Being", vastly preferring them to the values of "Doing".  "Being" is supposedly the supreme value upon which the matriarchal culture is based.  Supposedly?  Indeed, because a contradiction exists.  The matriarchal culture has engraved love, mercy, and understanding for others upon its banner.  Tolerance, feelings, and personal meanings are chief among its concerns.  If so, how did it get trapped onto a mechanical/technical course?  How did it become the supremely technocratic culture, which stars business, bureaucracy, and the dry letter of the law?  Clearly this bears investigating.

It seems to me that such indications – in which we find objects being granted full-blown citizenship in a culture that is supposedly suffused with subjective meanings and qualities – initially made their appearance in the matriarchal culture only as post facto necessities, as appendices attached to the footnotes.  However, through a process of forced encroachment, the objects gradually found themselves occupying center stage.  What forced this process?  Apparently, the quest for justice cannot suffice with good intentions alone.  To attain a compatible, complementary relationship between two contradictory elements, such as between a subject and an object, or between subjective intentions and objective results, one requires a third element that will reconcile their intrinsic contradiction.
 This assertion is based on a Talmudic dictum: “When two scriptures contradict one another [their contradiction cannot be resolved] until a third scripture comes and resolve them.”  This elusive key – the third scripture – is apparently not to be found hidden behind the curtains of the Theater of the Absurd known as existential reality.  It is not to be found in the ancient East nor in the progressive, sophisticated West.  Both are beset by difficulties on the rocky road toward their coveted ideal of justice.  Left with no choice, both cultures heave themselves up on the life raft known as brute force.  



The Patriarch seized power clothed in the image of man.  He created an idol, the masked graven image of power.  Though its outer form was human, it had been emptied of its humanness.  The matriarchal culture – religion of love and mercy – arising from the ruins of a defeated patriarchal culture, seems to be a child fleeing an angry father who has cast him off.  Overwhelmed by existential distress, the child clings to its mother’s apron.  It is not insignificant that the Christian counterreaction to the law of power made its appearance just as the sun was setting on the Roman Empire, which had attained the absolute peak of power, only to be crushed by the vandalism of primitive tribes.  The Patriarch had disappointed.  It had showed the other face of power: Defeat. From the top, the only way to go is down.  Loss of faith in (patriarchal) power triggered a flight to the mother's warm, loving bosom.  



Both sides are thus characterized by immaturity.  Eight-year-old Avi's acceptance of the notion that Yossi was a bad boy today solely on the basis of the fact that Yossi was punished – despite the fact that Avi is fully aware that it was David and not Yossi who did wrong, is a phenomenon of the childish stage.  As the child advances into adolescence, this phenomenon develops toward a tendency to transfer guilt away from the one who perpetrated the crime and toward the one who intended to perpetrate the crime.  The former emphasizes the detached object (objective results) while the latter emphasizes the subject (subjective intentions) in a manner that is completely detached from the object. 

Christianity was winning the field abandoned by the Roman Empire until it encountered a dead-end: The atrophy of western culture, now helpless in the face of vandalism by human-seeming beasts rising out of the Arabian Desert.  As primitive guerilla warfare takes pot shots at advanced western technology, victory is turned into rout.  At this point the discussion ceases to be theoretical. It becomes instead a feverish search for the root of the problem.  The question is reduced to its simplest form: To be or not to be... 



The most salient characteristic of western culture is the childish response:
 Early on in the first stages of the matriarchal culture's development, obstacles were already piling up.  Though born and bred to the mysteries of subjective experience and supposedly well-versed in all subjective human needs, the Matriarch's path nevertheless grew muddled as it struggled toward realizing the ideal subjective experience, failing (obviously) to attain any objective experience.  Subjective religions began to proliferate in the matriarchal culture, masquerading as meaningful spiritual visions, persuading the matriarchal culture to feel hostile toward objective experience and to eventually divorce itself entirely from physical reality.  Reality was blamed for limiting spirituality's possibilities; why, it could cause one altogether to lose one's godliness and plummet from the dimension of height.  



Gnosticism thus seized control over the territory of the dimension of height (the dimension of spirituality) and blocked it from connecting to objective reality in any manner whatsoever.  This fear of actualizing spirituality through tangible means, this recoil from the idea of limiting spirituality and making it something prosaic by bringing it into real-life, has consistently prevented the matriarchal culture from attaining any level of union between the subject and the object.  Subjective inner intentions are thus severely limited, being denied any opportunity of actualization; they are forbidden to be transformed into tangible presence through objective real-world practical action.  Yet it is only through such union, in which subjective experience is actualized through objective experience, that one may access the dimensions of height and depth.



We find therefore that both approaches, whether matriarchal or patriarchal, remained fixed into their two-dimensional reality, detached either from the freedom that is afforded by height or from the solid rootedness that is afforded by depth.  They were left with religions that lacked the requisite vertical structure, never comprehending "Jacob's ladder” that was “set firmly upon the ground", based and rooted in earthly laws, yet nevertheless spanned the vertical trajectory, "its top reaching up to the heavens."

Reciprocity



Jacob's ladder is indispensable in that a gap yawns between heaven and earth which can be bridged only through reciprocity - a principle Judaism introduced to the world.  How did it come about that Judaism's monotheistic daughters lost this element that their mother/mentor had given them?  Mentality shapes religion, and religion shapes mentality, in constant, re-circling motion.  Islam was devoured by physical reality, becoming a tool in the hands of brute force, while Christianity lost its hold upon reality, abandoning physical reality to the rule of technocratic systems.  In both of these religions, no reciprocity was ever developed between the physical and the spiritual.



The unique role played by religion differs from one religion to the next.  The religions that existed before Judaism made its appearance, bringing monotheism into the world, were an expression of paganism and derived from the survival instincts.  Paganism expresses human terror at confronting the titanic forces of nature, which threaten to obliterate human existence.  The pagan gods were representative figures, to which human beings attributed their own intimate and familiar traits, wishes, and even weaknesses.  These figures served to bring the forces of nature closer to human understanding, wrenching them away from the realm of the unknown. 

Fear of the unknown creates the territory of mystery and mysticism. In this territory, the unknown is allegedly explained and accounted for.  We might say that one of the main functions of religion is to reduce the dimensions of mystery.  The mysterious unknown is charted and mapped out, it is assigned to a functional system of rules and regulations and laws of the game, which compensate the obedient, which are circumvented by the clever, and which instruct the believer in the way to adopt an attitude of ingratiating submissiveness toward all of the menacing threatening powers-that-be.  



Monotheism?  



The above accounts for much of the content of religion.  It explains the anthropomorphist tendencies of religions, even within those religions that are called monotheistic, but which have actually split away from the monotheistic ideal to become either of the two basic forces of human nature: Christianity chose to express the matriarchal force of human nature, and Islam – the patriarchal force.  Each expressed its force unilaterally, ignoring everything that tended toward the opposite direction.  (Progress from the most primitive pagan stage to a higher stage can perhaps be detected in the fact that the “monotheistic” religions chose to express human forces rather than physical forces.  Nevertheless, due to their one-sided emphasis, they were not a real expression of monotheism, which must be all-inclusive.)  Each led a limping, one-legged monotheism that grew further and further away from the balance and harmony envisioned by the Jewish ideal.  



And now, a story:  



During the nineteen eighties, the Truman Institute of Jerusalem's Hebrew University hosted an international symposium on the subject of the family.  Among other issues discussed was the attitude of religion to the family.  The Kadi (Islamic judge) of Acre was asked to describe the family according to the principles of Islam.  Father Pierre Du Bois, head of the Franciscan Order, at the time also head of the Philosophy Department at the Hebrew University, was asked to describe the family according to Christian principles.  The Jewish perception was entrusted to yours truly...

The Kadi is on my right, and the Catholic priest is on my left.  The Kadi rises, and speaks glowingly in praise of the value of honor, as the supreme value that serves as the foundation upon which the family rests.  Honor is represented by the father.  He is the highest authority; his word is the law of the home.  All obey the father, including the mother and the progeny.  Corporal punishment for disobedience is acceptable and has proven effective.  The Kadi continues to speak in increasingly superlative terms, describing the ultimate family ideal, while the priest whispers in my ear of the cruelty and lovelessness that permeate the atmosphere of the Moslem family.  I nod my head, indicating agreement.

Father Pierre Du Bois rises next, and describes the love, the feelings of compassion and empathy that imbue the Christian family, in which the mother takes the central role, lavishing encouragement and support upon her progeny.  As he speaks, the Kadi whispers in my ear about the lack of discipline, the laxness and the lawlessness that debilitate the Christian family, which is not founded on honor or authority.  I nod my head in agreement, obviously.

When I spoke, I described the family cell as a microcosm structured along the same lines as the macrocosm of the universe.  The universe macrocosm is divided between patriarchal and matriarchal elements, and so in the family microcosm as well, with the father representing the patriarchal element, and the mother representing the matriarchal element.  

Although the patriarchal element ruled the culture of humanity until the decline of the Roman Empire, which embodied the height of the power culture, and which controlled the large part of the civilized world, history nevertheless witnessed its collapse.  The Roman Empire fell to the Vandals, barbaric tribes under savage rule.  These decided the fate of civilization's great empire with its formal systems of government, with its organized power hierarchy, with its great and clumsy bureaucracy for enforcing the strong arm of its laws over its slave nations.  It was not the great force of rebellion, in which the oppressed rise up to overthrow their oppressors that was the undoing of the Roman Empire, but rather the simple phenomenon of disorder undoing order.  



Entropy is perpetually winning this victory; it is the law of physics that determines that all things move from an integrated state to a disintegrated state.  The law of entropy applies to all physical cycles, whether organic, inorganic, vegetable, animal, or human.  This rule, immortalized in the Torah as “man does not live on bread [physical prowess] alone” has proven its truth time and again.

In the first chapter of the Bible, in Genesis, the name of God is given as Elokim, which expresses judgment.  In the second chapter, the two names of the Creator appear joined: Ado-nai, Elokim.  Ado-nai is the name used for the trait of compassion, and it appears side by side with Elokim, the name used for the trait of judgment.  In its sacred way, the Oral Torah explains and interprets what is meant by the phrase in the Written Torah. Rashi quotes the Talmud: "The Holy, Blessed One saw that the world could not stand up to the measure of judgment.  He therefore rose and mingled a measure of compassion into the measure of judgment.”  Note that there is no description of one of the measures overwhelming or dominating the other, but rather of one drawing nearer to the other, of both joining one another side by side to mingle in a complementary relationship.  



Thus it was at the creation, and thus it is in the creation of every family unit.  No balance can prevail between the measure of compassion and the measure of judgment if the father is the sole ruler and decision maker, if he does not accept a partnership of rule with the mother, who can activate the measure of compassion, and bestow - out of her feelings of love - the understanding, compassion and patience that her tender progeny require for their development.  It is too difficult for children to identify with a father’s principles when they are conveyed through force and through disciplinary pressure.  Mother acts as the digestive system, enabling the children to absorb and internalize the law that is handed down by Father.  Father represents authority, principles and values.  He must preserve the foundations and the framework, serving as the vessel that preserves the uniqueness that characterizes his family.  This uniqueness is what separates the qualitative private space from the quantitative public space.  Mother's role is to create human connections and personal relationships, to activate the human, interpersonal aspect of the emotions.  The children absorb their father's abstract principles by emotionally identifying with their mother.

Although one can never attain balance as long as the measure of judgment refuses to respect the measure of compassion, the same is true in the opposite direction. There can be no balance if the measure of compassion refuses to accept, digest and internalize the measure of judgment.  This explains the otherwise incomprehensible fact that juvenile delinquency is not the exclusive lot of the economically distressed.  It divides equally between the patriarchal populations of the economically distressed, and the matriarchal populations whose pampered children are lavished with everything their hearts could possibly desire.  The former turned to crime because the law of the strong arm was their daily fare, and the latter because a life of overindulged egoism has taught them to take for granted that all their desires must automatically be fulfilled.  The moment a wish is denied, they resort to force, for they have never been taught to consider the other person.  What with this and that, both cultures have managed to contribute a criminal population, though it is amazing how each criminal population derives from an opposite cause.



Both sides seem in need of a single, supreme, unifying authority in order to arbitrate their conflict, according to the Talmudic principle: "When two scriptures contradict each other, a third scripture must be introduced in order resolve them.” 

The flowering of Christianity – religion of the Matriarch – followed close upon the heels of the patriarchal culture's collapse.  It had been a culture of exploitation, reveling in the pleasures of wealth produced by millions of slave laborers.  It was supremely confident, for it had attained the height of power - a place from which one can only step down.  When it lost the protection of power, it fled, to seek protection under Mother's apron.  The matriarchal religion embraced its children (who had lost their faith in their own power) freed them from feelings of guilt and responsibility for their own free choices, and offered them protection at no cost and no effort.  One could properly interpret this offering of protection as a mother's weapon that she uses to gain power over her child, exploiting the moment of weakness.

It must be mentioned that upon hearing these words, the Catholic priest rose courageously before the entire gathering, which included representatives from every part of the world, and admitted openly that Christianity had lost the truth – that had just been heard – as a result of the fact that it had disconnected and distanced itself from Judaism.

Both monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, share a common denominator, despite their polar distance and their adversarial postures.  Religion, and this means any religion that is the work of human hands, will always be the secret place where power struggles hide, where weakness is exploited, where figures of religious authority capitalize on the distresses of existence and the fears that paralyze human beings, as they stand helplessly facing the titanic forces of nature.  



The attempt to illuminate the mysteries of existence by shedding the light of knowledge upon them has managed to light the darkness in only a few isolated corners.  Although science has assisted somewhat in reducing the dimensions of mystery, somehow mystery still looms, as dark and frightening as ever.  Human beings' attempts to alleviate their fears result in the practice of confronting fear through the instrument of religion.  Thus, religions are born, from the outer fringes of the barrier that blocks the human effort toward knowledge.



One religion takes the mysteries of power while the other takes the mysteries of motherhood.  The latter espouses the mysteries of love, of limitless compassion that ignores and denies the existence of brute force, that pretends there is no evil.  All alike are deserving of love if not pity.  This is an attitude that ignores individual differences and individual uniqueness, that expresses contempt for and rejects the individual's right to be different.  In this way, Christianity dominated the individual, compelling the individual to disappear into the great melting pot, the great religious meat grinder.  The mysterious ever-looming threat of an imminent Judgment Day proved effective time and again.  Brandishing the whip of reward and retribution, the framework of free choice was canceled, human control over the human fate was suspended, and human beings were coerced into renouncing their free will. 

A power mechanism was thus born, of a magnitude never before matched: It was called - the mob, the blind flock.  At the head of the flock, a dictator would take his stand, devoid of conscience, ruthless and cruel, who would wield the tool of reward and punishment according to his capricious wish, and do with the mob as he pleased.  Matriarchal Christianity thus amassed power by adopting the weapons of the patriarchal societies, yet concealing these brutal weapons beneath a veil of love, pity, and charity.  



If we can separate the various subtleties of difference that divide Christianity from Islam, we may be able to offer an explanation for the sophisticated veil of hypocrisy that masks Christianity's power struggle, in contrast to the undisguised vulgarity of Islam's brutal struggle for power.

Mentality Enters the Arena



The difference that creates the deep divide, which separates Islam from Christianity, lies in the mentality that shapes the culture.  First, foremost, and commanding center stage, is the difference in attitudes toward women.  This difference spans polar extremes from one culture to another.
Researchers have attempted to point to the development of science as the decisive factor dividing the two cultures. This approach is unable to account for the flourishing culture of scientific research and development that characterized Islam during the Middle Ages, an era in which Christianity was experiencing the “Dark Ages” of scientific ignorance.  It is the attitude towards women, specifically, that appears most adequate to account for the difference, in that require the element of science is not nearly profound or broad enough to account for the flourishing of western culture in stark contrast with Islamic culture’s decline.  We must broaden our scope to cover eastern culture as a whole and to find factors with roots that go deeper than religion. Following Bernard Lewis, as he attempts to separate between Islamic culture and Arab mentality in The Crisis of Islam (Holy War and Unholy Terror), we are confronted with his central question: How is it that there are great nations in Islam that live peacefully, while other Islamic nations are perpetually steeped in war, conflict, assassinations both internal and external, and a history that "lives by the sword" even when the sword is not needed.  Consider too that Islam is a religion so dominant as to push national factors aside, whereas Christianity has tended to remain on the outskirts of national life.  Thus Christianity has been able to constitute the natioanl religion in many nations of Europe, without causing their national characteristics to become blurred.  Sharing a religion in common does not automatically denote sharing a common culture. In Belgium, France, parts of Germany, Poland and many other countries, each country maintains its national uniqueness, despite the fact that they share the same faith. 

Lewis maintains that in relation to Islam there is a clear explanation: There exists an Arabic Islam and a non-Arabic Islam.  Millions of Indians and Indonesians are members of the Moslem faith, yet are by no means members of the Arab nation.  The Moslems of the Far East are nearly devoid of aggressiveness, despite outsiders' persistent attempts to light the fires of fanaticism under them. 
The above distinction between mentality and religion seems to indicate that mentality runs deeper than religion and is not influenced by it.  The Arab mentality, steeped in its patriarchal essence, delights in embracing Islam’s dearth of spiritual values and eagerly adopts Islam’s fanatical patriarchal attitude, whereas these two components of Islam have consistently failed to penetrate the quiet mentality of the Far East.

Relationship of East to West

The East lives close to nature.  Eastern wisdom focuses on the efficient exploitation of natural law.  One of an eastern mentality would never try to ignore a law of nature; one does not alienate from one's own sensitivity to nature's requirements.  A Bedouin does not try to flatten a hump in the ground or smooth out a sharp change in grade, or dig a hole in order to alter the topographical conditions for his own purposes. Instead, he will seek other means by which to live peaceably with, rather than against the powers of nature.  Wisdom may be found in the east. Technology, however, is absent.   Technological sophistication belongs specifically to the matriarchal west.

The very opposite picture was seen during the Middle Ages, when Islam was the great conqueror and the great scientific achiever.  Suddenly Islam retreated, leaving a vacuum in its wake that was quickly filled by the west, which surpassed Islam, and left its achievements far behind.  The west was clever enough to build an advanced fleet of ships whereas Islam arrested its own progress by adhering to outdated sailing techniques, continuing to produce ships whose speed and size were very limited.  Technology's victory was clear-cut and absolute. 

Why did Islam fail in the sphere of technology?  Why did it not compete with the west? It appears that as long as technology remained bound to its human dimensions, the patriarch's power, arrogance and ambition assisted his progress in scientific spheres as well.  However, the moment technology diverged from its human dimensions and rose into the abstract dimension, a sphere in which personal power is irrelevant, eastern wisdom lost its control over it.  Mega-organization and abstraction took over science, growing increasingly on a scale and at a rate and in quantities that made control over them pass out of human hands, growing past human ability and beyond, into the realm of abstract laws and formulas.  The abstract realm is well-suited to the western mentality, because the matriarch does not connect to a concrete power struggle.

  It was precisely because the west detached theory from earthly practice, precisely because it emphasized the spiritual at the expense of the material, precisely because it reasoned that the earthly was too limited – exactly this mentality that introduced an extreme dualism and a total conflict between spirit and matter – it was this tendency that sent the west soaring into the wide open spaces of abstract reasoning, even as the east sank further into stagnation, and ever further into forms of mysticism that contained no objective definitions or tangible boundaries.  
 The victory of rational mind over mysticism brought great benefit and progress to science, but perhaps some harm to human beings.  Traveling the technological route detached man from himself and from his own natural dimensions, leaving him far behind, hobbling desperately to keep up, bowing and kneeling before the technological imperative.  

The technological imperative is empty of human values or ideals.  Dualism had raised the level of hypocrisy to grotesque dimensions, bringing hatred up to peak levels, creating the monstrous phenomena we all know, whose shudders we still recognize from the not so distant past.  Sophisticated moral and political theories promise sophisticated solutions to the problems of existence: Liberalism, legal bodies whose alleged goal is true justice, brotherly love and equal rights for all those who are and who are not created in God's image – all of these are lies, if sophisticated ones.  They have shown themselves to be mere demagoguery, empty words designed to trap the naive.



All of these represented the result of a process of abstraction that had grown increasingly distant from the natural human condition while growing increasingly involved with a virtual reality that operated according to laws remote from human feelings and human senses.  The patriarchal mentality felt both threatened and offended by the spectacular success of the west.  In its frustration and rage it created a natural weapon with which to strike at the technological weapon.



War versus Terror



The abstract west, being so sophisticated as to ignore nature, eliminates any natural obstacles that it encounters.  It does this simply and without any undue waste of time, using explosives that have grown to monstrous proportions.  An engineer with a pacifist spirit returned from reserve duty and poured out his frustration out to me: I sit in an air-conditioned room.  In front of me is a panel full of complex electronic instruments that don't look any different from the ones in my civilian laboratory.  In both situations I use a computer.  I am cool and collected as I press all the right buttons.  I am disturbed by the thought that by pressing a button while on reserve duty, I am sending a missile of immense destructive power to a remote target, removed from the field of sight and sound, which will penetrate a multi-story building and eliminate it from the face of the earth.



Easterners are very far from any ability to confront adversaries in such a manner.  For this reason they have had to invent other methods that are more compatible with their mentality.  They therefore exploit field conditions. They use cunning, flexibility, and the famous imperturbable patience of the east: The east makes its peace with the limitations of space and time - by circumventing them.  They have created guerilla tactics, attacking the clumsy enemy's tail from behind, bringing him to his knees by ingenious use of time and space as a psychological weapon. 

The west, confident of its own power, deliberately ignores and expresses contempt for the psychological weapon.  Nevertheless, this weapon shrewdly exploits the enemy's own weapons against itself, cleverly turning weapons into weaknesses.  The east exploits the great bureaucratic western mechanism for his own ends: The guerilla child of the patriarchal mentality demands democracy and civil rights: He cites all the blindly dogmatic theories, all the lofty ideals that are so characteristic of western culture, which ignore and are utterly detached from prosaic realities.  The mentality of the east plays these dogmatic ideals against the west for all they are worth.  True to character, the matriarchal west invites the enemy in, allowing him to penetrate through the cracks it has created with its own hands, to be used against itself.  (Consider the leftist phenomenon, for example.)  



The tyrannical racism of the west, whose sin lay in ignoring and expressing contempt for the eastern mentality, has boomeranged. Humiliating rout has been the outcome in most confrontations between the west and guerilla warfare.  It was so in Algeria, so in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so when the mighty Israeli Defense Force faced the Hezbollah in Lebanon: Short-range victory and long-range defeat.  He who laughs last, laughs best.



It behooves us to recognize the patriarchal adversary and his guerilla tactics.  We must never take him lightly nor may we despise his style.  We must study his tactical methods and learn his strategies and tactical devices.  The guerilla is not overly sophisticated.  The truth of the matter is that his strength lies in his simplicity. 

The guiding principle of guerilla warfare: Exploit the given field, the conditions here and now, and most of all, exploit the conditions of the enemy.  Use behind the scenes activity, use the surprise factor, control the immediate conditions, plus harbor an absolute contempt for such limitations as ideology, morality, rules of play, past agreements, international treaties and all those other legal constructs that obligate only the weak, in the mind of the eastern mentality.

The place: The entire world - there are no boundaries. 

The time: Forever. 

Time, too, has no boundaries.  (The infinite patience of the desert dweller is foreign to a child of western culture.)  Grab all you can, and take as much advantage of the rules of the enemy's game as possible.  (Rules of the game are perceived as weakness by a child of the patriarchal culture.  A mighty man need not obey any rule that does not express his own direct will.  He himself embodies the law.)  The victory goes not to the one who has the most effective weapon, but to the one who knows how to exploit it and steal it. 

From the above, we may gain understanding into the process by which the legal system, the communications media, and the public's right to know have become the undoing of the west.  The guerilla fighter's weapons are mystery, deceit, and exploitation of the secrecy that the enemy fails to maintain.  The enemy's secrecy is undermined because the enemy believes that the public has the right to know, especially since the leader of the matriarch is dependent upon the opinion of the public.  They are the source of his power, and they have the right to know everything, and he must always look nice in public.



This attitude toward the rules of the game applies to the rules of morality and religion as well.  Guerilla leaders, and the most dangerous guerilla fighters, are priests of religion.  Since religion is the cynical exploitation of the faith of the people, in pursuit of a single goal - to increase power and to win, to be mighty and to wipe out the enemy - this mission is turned into a goal sanctified by religion, a sacred method of worship.



So Leave the Masses Alone: Target the Leaders.


The guerilla mentality's weak point is the mindless mob.  Oblivious, they are a blind flock led by a bloodthirsty leader who is drunk on the sensation of his own unlimited power, drugged on the sensations of an “ego trip” that only gathers momentum.  The mass has a slave mentality.  It does not discern the nature of the goal.  The leader is the sole determiner of the goal.  If you would like to subjugate a patriarchal culture, eliminate its leaders, put in a puppet leader who is under your protection, and you have conquered your goal, but take care never to appear weak or lenient.  The heavier the weight of your rule upon your citizens, the more loyal they will be to you.  This cynical perspective that would be rejected out of hand by any child of western mentality, and decried as illiberal, short-ranged and not even serious, is the only one capable of bringing rehabilitation and tranquility to patriarchal societies, whether African or Middle Eastern.  It would be wise to accept this as the realpolitik that will bring lasting quiet to the region.  "Peace" may have to be postponed for the era of the Messiah.



The transition from one mentality to another is a prolonged process spanning four generations: "The fourth generation shall return here." Both Jewish sources and the conclusions of anthropological research support this claim.  To attempt to speed the process arbitrarily complicates more than it solves.  Ignoring mentality, as the liberal approach dreams to do, can bring catastrophe.



In the massive immigrations that took place during the early years of the Jewish State, it occurred to Ben Gurion – who possessed the mentality of a dictator – to create a "melting pot" of immigration, and house the immigrants in mixtures: Immigrants from the east were placed close together with immigrants from the west.  Within a short time these mixed settlements fell apart with a great crash, having given rise to serious conflicts between the various ethnic groups.  During the period of the first settlements following the Six Day War, I was asked to assist with similar difficulties that had arisen and that were now threatening to undo the newly formed settlements of Judea and Samaria.  Here too the tensions had been caused due to differences in mentality within a mixed population – between the new immigrants and the native Israelis.  Tensions were aggravated considerably by the leaders of both sides who possessed different mentalities.  Distancing the leaders of one of the sides restored peace.  Here too the artificial attempt to speed integration had missed its mark.

Negative Integration

In a patriarchal culture, the individual is placed within a framework of tradition, which is joined to rules of reward and punishment, to the opinion of the public and to the ruler. None of these recognize an individual's right to privacy.  The framework is of a tribal character.  Everything transpires within an extended family, including business and entertainment – everything takes place in company.  When an individual is outside of the framework, he feels that he lacks "belonging".  He loses his self-confidence, as well as his capacity for self-expression and creativity. 

When an individual from a tribal society loses hold of the conditions required to relate to a framework, he finds it difficult to fill this vacuum.  He finds it a painful struggle – the effort to internalize the general rules of the game of life and the autonomous laws by which everyone must abide, one's social situation notwithstanding, as the western individual is taught to do.  He does not feel that he has a duty and a responsibility towards himself, as does the individual who is a member of a matriarchal society.  (See above for definition of the mother's role in enabling the child to digest and internalize values, to accept and incorporate the rules of forbidden and permissible within the public space.  Mother custom-tailors objective, autonomous laws to her child's ability to identify with them.)  Matriarchal society educates the individual to personal responsibility, personal accountability, and personal conscience.

A society that educates toward self-control and views self-control as an educational goal may allow itself – in truth, it is actually obligated – to create an atmosphere of personal liberty and free choice.  The relationship between "belonging" and "freedom" is a relationship between container and content.  Only within such a relationship are these two conflicting elements reconciled.  When they do not enjoy such a relationship, when one is severed from the other, the ensuing conflict destroys both.  In a patriarchal society, the duty of "belonging" takes over the right to freedom.  The individual does not develop self-control and free will, so long as compulsion and coercion crouch over him from the outside environment.  For this reason, the child of a patriarchal culture who emigrates to a matriarchal culture experiences the worst of both worlds: He loses on every count. 

He interprets the atmosphere of liberty that pervades his new society as an indication of wanton lawless abandon, as being allowed to grab all you can, as a competitive challenge.  There is no need to consider any laws, because all the laws of the matriarchal society are vague and ethereal.  They have no substance, meaning they do not have the figure of a ruler standing behind them.  Such an individual fears the policeman, not the traffic signal.  It is a familiar syndrome: A complete lack of consideration for the other driver, the use of driving as a weapon that expresses one's personal of power rather than simply a means of transportation.



During the era of the State of Israel's “return to nature,” during its period of youth movements and youth rebellions, the child of patriarchal immigrants found himself freed of the duty to honor his father and mother and even freed of the need to consider their values.  It seemed to him that the boundaries had been burst in all directions.  The fine line separating sanity from insanity had never had a place in his inner, private world.  Those subtle border that define the litmus test of sanity do not exist in a patriarchal culture, where the litmus test is confined to honoring the will of the ruler and submitting to him.  In a patriarchal culture, there is no room for psychology.  Hence the lack of effectiveness of psychological treatment as long as one fails to relate to the individual client's inner world, where his cultural mentality is enacted.  One finds that the inner world of the child of a patriarchal culture is empty of self-rule and indeed devoid of any self-defined authority as a determiner of behavior. 

Instead of sensitivity, there is emotionalism.  Sensitivity expresses the quality of an emotion, whereas emotionalism expresses the power of the emotion.  If one fails to make this distinction, one may never attain a genuine understanding of the inner world of the children of patriarchal societies.  The "hippy" phenomenon, which chose a lifestyle that was close to nature in an attempt to free itself from social rules that it despised, must be clearly distinguished as reflective of the children of a matriarchal culture.  Their merging into this new life style in no way deviated from their cultural process.  It was an organic continuation of their previous development.  For the child of the matriarchal culture, expressions of change and rebellion do not extract the price of needless destructiveness.  In contrast, for a child of the patriarchal culture, to rebel in this way is to burst the barriers of good taste and in most cases to cross the border where human decency breaks down, to deteriorate to a savagery that verges on animalism.  Since self-rein is not a component of this type of personality, when external reins are slackened, it may deviate beyond the boundaries of human decency.



Behavior that deviates from the moral principles of the matriarchal society triggers a chain reaction of self-defense on the part of the matriarchal society, which in turn triggers a reaction of indignation on the part of the child of the patriarchal immigrants, who then claims socio-economic deprivation, these claims being simultaneously accompanied by aggressive rebellious behavior.  The desired response at this point would be a tolerant, long-range educational approach whose goal would be mutual rapprochement, understanding and respect – a process that may very well require a few generations.  This phenomenon must be recognized and understood before it can be solved.



A society such as Israel that is composed of multiple cultures brings about encounters that result in conflicts that could supply an entire literature.  Responses to these conflicts range from the imaginative to the unpredictable, and defy all attempts to create clearly definable norms.  Viewing this phenomenon from a perspective of mentality may provide the key to its analysis.



One God, One Husband

Women's status in a patriarchal culture is interpreted as clearly inferior by a member of the matriarchal culture.  Strange as it may seem, a woman in a patriarchal society does not feel inferior in the least.  The reverse is true.  She feels withering contempt for a husband who does not treat her as his private property.  A husband who grants her the right to decide, who is lenient with her, allowing her to neglect her duties – as the servant who must carry out his orders – will lose his masculine status in her eyes, and his attractiveness to her as a woman.  Very soon, this husband will find his wife behaving in ways designed to aggravate him, not at all in keeping with his gentle attitude to her.  She will attempt to provoke him, to arouse his aggressiveness, which, for her, signals the fascinating, macho – real – masculinity.  The infrastructure of male-female relationships in a patriarchal society is based upon service in exchange for protection, rather than on mutual feeling as in a matriarchal society.  Service/protection relations are measured by activity rather than by any involvement of an inner, personal nature.  What informs a woman's mentality in a patriarchal society is a framework of normative behavior that is determined by her duties/privileges.  



The concept of "one God, one husband” is drawn from a Catholic view of the male-female relationship, in which the absolute authority of the Divine has a representative or deputy on this earth.  In the microcosmic cycle, the husband fulfills this role.  Just as it is inconceivable to contravene the authority of the Divine, so is it inconceivable to release a woman from her husband's authority.  For this reason, Catholicism finds the concept of divorce difficult to digest.  One can see that patriarchal elements have been mingled into certain ostensibly matriarchal societies.

Strange as it might seem, this never-sever attitude obtains as well in Jewish families that have lived in Catholic countries.  Not as a result of attachment to Catholicism obviously, but as a socio-cultural factor that has created a mentality of absolute faithfulness and devotion between both sides of the pair.  It seems that the more a Jewish cultural group is originally and uniquely Jewish, meaning the more it has focused on the study of Torah as its primary pursuit – the more that group is able to free itself from the influences of its host culture, to mold an independent Jewish mentality for itself.  Of this, more later.  



A radically matriarchal Jewish mentality developed in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that the Eastern European Jews were immersed among believers of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths.  This was because they were utterly rooted in their Jewish culture, in which the study of Torah and the observance of mitsvot comprised the main part.  Their posture of non-involvement toward the host culture was extreme: They ignored it entirely.  Most of them did not speak the local language, though they had lived in the same place for generations.  Anti-Semitic laws of a wickedly pervasive, Draconian nature restricted Jews from working in the professions or owning property.  These laws severely reduced occupational options for the men, and compelled the women to bear the burden of earning a livelihood.  "Money talks", and when the burden of income falls on the wife's shoulders, it is only natural that she should also take up the reins of government.  A talented husband found self-expression through Torah study.  The wife – whose husband's achievements in a cultural sphere that was difficult and challenging were a source of pride to her – gladly took the struggle for existence upon herself, but also the reins of government.  Thus was born a husband-wife relationship built upon a role division that shared no common denominators.  It was spirit versus matter.



It should be noted that such a relationship is soundly anchored in the root culture of Judaism, in which "Yisachar-Zevulun" relations hold a legitimate and highly respected position.  The substance of this relationship is based on a business contract drawn up between wealth and scholarship: The wealthy one commits himself to supplying the material needs of the one who is preoccupied with Torah learning.  The latter renounces half of the reward he merits for the mitsva of his Torah learning in favor of the wealthy one, who is preoccupied with amassing a fortune for both of them.  The one who is receiving support does not feel humiliated, and the one who is providing support does not feel that he is providing support.  A mutual and reciprocal relationship is born based upon values.  It involves two antithetical elements that lack any common denominator.  Spirit versus matter are merged into a perfect whole, expressing the Jewish ideal in its true splendor. 

Indeed, this is the original character of the Jewish mentality, when it has not been influenced by the habits of nature, by weakness of character, and by outside influences that are never put to the test of values or personal needs.  An authentic Jewish mentality is created out of a center core of values and ideals, the source of which are Torah and mitsvot.  The influence of values and ideals counteracts the instinctive tendency towards imitation, towards being swept up by the influences of the environment.  To the extent that values and ideals are lacking, mentality is shaped by natural elements, such as environmental influence, which neutralizes the uniqueness of the individual personality.  In such cases, a husband who is not successful at Torah scholarship, and also ineffectual at earning a living, becomes a punching bag for his overworked wife.  These types of relationships, which were not so rare in Jewish society, created the mentality of an aggressive and domineering wife harassing a husband whose position within the family framework was marginal.



While such a controlling woman would obviously feel no need to join a feminist movement, the amazing fact is that the women's liberation movement did actually grow out of precisely this context, within a society of just this mentality.  Perhaps appetite increases with eating, or perhaps liberty has its own momentum.  In any case, it would be worthwhile - in a society that contains such a varied immigrant population - to create an organization aimed at protecting battered wives and husbands, to take the place of feminism. 

Imagine the scene (and the tears of laughter that will ensue): A typical Israeli apartment building.  One door faces another.  Behind the first door live a matriarchal couple, and behind the second door live a patriarchal couple.  Suddenly a wounded husband is kicked violently out of one door, a battered wife out of the other.  We will leave their meeting on the stairs to the reader's imagination.  The entire outcome is predictable, except for one question: Will they - can they rise above their mentality?  Can they put aside internalized traditions, habits, and reflex response tendencies that have accumulated over generations?



Corrected Mentality



It is only in the third generation, and especially in the fourth generation, that we find a new and corrected mentality, in which all that is good and beautiful in one adversary encounters all that is good and beautiful in the other.  Pessimistic mentalities (Yes, pessimism and optimism seem to be a function of mentality as well.  There is no evidence of a genetic basis for these tendencies...)  will warn of a second possibility: Everything that is negative and undesirable in one adversary will encounter everything negative and undesirable in the other.  As of today, the pessimist will have an easy time of it, drawing up great fistfuls of evidence, mainly from Israeli drivers.  The optimist will be happy to support his view from the positive behaviors of Israeli couples, who are either third or fourth generation native Israelis.  He will have difficulty proving his point with second generation couples, because in their case, obstacles in the inter-gender minefield haunt the marriage idyll, shortening its life and speeding its demise.



In the Political Sphere



Once we have understood the dynamics of mentality, we are better equipped to understand the deeply complex nature of the political sphere.  We can understand that an attempt to arbitrarily force our own political solutions on another culture is fraught with risk, and its chance for success fragile indeed.  Grab a patriarchal might-is-right society by the hair and throw it into the melting pot of the matriarchal bosom, and you set the stage for bloodshed, sponsored by enlightened liberalism.  Yet behead the patriarchal snake, and you bring calm and contentment to the masses, within the matriarch's authoritative bosom.  If you can wait patiently for a few generations, your chances increase for livable results:

In the span of time, the hard shell of patriarchal mentality softens to become more permeable.  Certain messages emanating from the matriarchal bosom – such as guilt feelings – gradually penetrate, plus a handful of human emotions – pity, love – and suddenly they are not met with contempt or viewed as a sign of weakness by the grim patriarch.  It is only at this stage that a mutual relationship becomes possible. It is only at this stage that we may begin to use reciprocity as a formula to create a balanced relationship between both sides.  The attempt to speed the process – to force a formula of reciprocity upon conflicting parties when one side does not even recognize the phenomenon of reciprocity – ignores the organic processes of cultural evolution. 

Such attempts have crashed in the smoke of battle, with much reciprocity of spilled blood.  In the wake of the tragic crash, no constructive formulas for reciprocity have resulted.  Logic did not play the decisive role, as one may well imagine.  We are left in the present political moment with a precarious balance of dread, which may collapse at any excuse, at the first sign of weakness on either side.  Calm it certainly is not.  Calm and tranquility grow out of a process that is built by time, and that is devoted to instilling the value of reciprocity, and mostly, by trying to understand, rather than just respect, what is different.


The Effect of Religion on Mentality



Morality and religion stroll arm in arm only in the Jewish religion.  The declared goal of Judaism is not to make life easy.  "Oy, my creature urges...and oy, my Creator urges..." comments the Talmud. It wishes to teach us that a human being must occupy two realities simultaneously, and must deal with two confrontations at one and the same moment: Self versus Creator, and Self versus the realities of existence.  Judaism embraces both realities and imprints its stamp upon both.  Confronting the realities of existence presents a moral challenge.  Confronting the reality of the Divine presents a spiritual goal: Connecting to God – dvaikut.  How is it done?  “Let all your [confrontations with reality] be for the sake of heaven".



Yet the religious way of relating never pushes the moral imperative aside in Judaism.  "Love your friend as yourself – this is the great rule of the Torah,” combines both the moral and the religious imperative.  

To support this claim – and to account for the fact that the "great rule" seems entirely moral and interpersonal, and not religious in the least – we must examine some basic premises of Judaism:

Reality is the tangible reflection of God's will.  However, this reflection does not move from God to reality in a direct line.  It is intercepted by human beings, who serve as mediators, who create the connection between the higher worlds and the lower worlds.  How a human being relates to this task determines the direction that the created universe will take - for better or for worse.  This is a rather profound subject, and the Talmud in Brachot 61:1 devotes considerable discussion to it.



Morality gets a new face when it is embraced by religion and given a place of honor.  The effort to split morality from religion, to delete the element of Divine authority from the moral imperative, to force morality to stand on its own (an effort in which various liberal theories have invested) has never been successful.  Existential reality confronts human beings with severe moral challenges.  These challenges, when there is no umbrella of supreme authority, compel human beings to regress, to fall back on the egotistical attitudes dictated by their survival instincts.  Morality is slain on this battlefield where the survival instincts and the moral imperative meet.   Morality’s tendency to disintegrate at a moment of crisis is what brought the religions to banish the moral imperative from their midst, and to replace it with the religious imperative.

 A religious imperative is a compulsory imperative, based on force, arbitrarily exerted by an almighty power.  The challenge of free choice is entirely absent.  One must simply obey the religious imperative.  One's ability to exercise judgment in areas requiring human insight and human sensitivity is never put to the test.  Yet the subtle realm of interpersonal interaction is the most critical area.  It calls upon the finest qualities a human being has to offer. 

In Judaism, the religious imperative, "the great rule of the Torah" compels you to relate to the other as to "yourself".  This means that your relationship to the other must be based upon reciprocity.  In other words, God commands you to be as sensitive to the other as you are to yourself.  This imperative raises human beings above their ego, making them capable of balanced judgment in the dense moral thicket of conflicting interests that separate the self from the other. 

In the absence of the higher perspective, in the absence of a Divine source, the moral imperative has no teeth.  We are left exposed to every temptation posed by existence, and we must face them unarmed.  Into this moral vacuum, existential fears creep, infiltrating our self.  These fears are fed by the mythology of our culture, by the dragons and ghosts and demons that populate it. 

Mythology in many cultures is a folktale industry: Terrifying tales penetrate the human soul, through lullabies and bedtime stories that are absorbed into one's consciousness from the earliest dawn of childhood.  Therefore, a comprehensive investigation of mentality in a particular culture would require a thorough familiarity with its mythology, including the national and moral values that permeate it. 

A casual glance through world mythology – Arab folktales such as "A Thousand and One Nights", or "The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales", which is the childhood source that shapes the German mentality, or the lullabies of England and France – will testify to raw human materials drenched with blood and steeped in cruelty.  Their topics are of the battle for survival, power struggles, and tales of cunning and intrigue.

 On the other hand, delving into Torah tales and Talmudic legends, we find that in-depth analysis of moral and spiritual values is mainstream, standard fare.  Towering spiritual figures, moral giants of such epic proportions as to evoke the ministering angels, stroll serenely through the pages of classic Jewish literature.  From their lips, pearls of wisdom gently fall, telling of humanity and of the universe.  It is upon these values that every Jewish "heder" child is raised, since time immemorial.  Morality is combined with halacha – the religious imperative.  Human sensitivity for the other, expressing morality, is solidly anchored within such halachot as "lifnim mishurat hadin", doing more than the strict letter of the law requires, and "ve'asita hayashar vehatov", [beyond the halacha] "do all that is right and good".  These principles guide human behavior, leaving no vacuum, no empty space into which existential fears and their accompanying mythologies can creep.


Mythology as the Forbear of Mentality



Judaism does not cast its burden on morality alone.  The halachot, the legal requirements of Judaism, are inexorably demanding, and these shed a Divine authority over all aspects of existence.  There are prohibitions relating to eating, and there are commandments relating to festive eating as an obligatory mitsva. Religious requirements accompany one all one's life, faithful guardians hovering protectively over the human equilibrium, over the sacred balance between creature and Creator.  No other religion penetrates so deeply into the issue of eating, one of the central expressions of the survival instincts, and one of the strongest influences over the creature urges. 

This may be the origin of the concept of the "Jewish kitchen:"  There is no Christian or Moslem kitchen.  Both Christianity and Islam have abandoned eating, one of the leading determinants of behavior, to the field of mentality.  Characteristic eating patterns have developed according to national mentality.  There are Chinese restaurants, French cuisine, and Italian dishes in abundance, but they reflect mentality; they are both the cause of their mentality and the effect.  Only Judaism can present eating patterns that are shaped by the Jewish religion.

 This may explain the Jewish preference for eating in contrast with the Christian preference for drinking.  The Jewish religion does not recoil from confronting the physical.  On the contrary.  A Jewish guest is requested to honor the host by saying the blessing on the refreshments that are served, an action that imbues material reality with an atmosphere of sanctity.  Wine, too, that noblest and most dangerous of drinks, is used to serve the cause of sanctity.  Playing a starring role in every "feast of mitsva", it symbolizes our sanctifying the physical.  



Among Moslems, wine is prohibited in that it adversely affects one's power of control, over oneself and over one's own existence.  This prohibition expresses a negative attitude toward wine.  However, the retreat from physical matter then creates a vacuum, which is very quickly filled with the savagery of existential brute force, which creates the mentality that controls the Moslem personality.  It is an underground mentality – for the use of the rulers only.  A bottle of Israeli wine is the most effective bribe, opening all the doors to the omnipotent Moslem ruler, as every expert knows.



Unlike the Moslem, whose drive for power is supported by the principles of his religion, Christianity preaches self-effacement opposite the Lord.  Human weakness is considered a level of religious realization, a form of righteousness.  Every means of weakness is permitted, with alcoholic beverages playing the lead.  It should be noted that a religion that preaches self-effacement does not sit well with human nature, for human beings confront their existence.  Thus the religious blandishments that persuade believers to embrace weakness remain relegated to the category of unenforced rules.  In practice, a vacuum is created, and into this empty space, mentality infiltrates, formed by a brutal mythology.  This mentality is based upon aggression, and it is incompatible with Christianity's framework of religious requirement.  Duplicity develops: Religion up above and a wildly rearing animal, abandoned to its instincts, down below.  Within this intrinsic dualism, hypocrisy is cultivated, to form the infrastructure and the main characteristic of this mentality.  It is symbolized by the necktie, which separates the spoken word from the heart's intention as in the rabbinic definition of hypocrisy: "In the mouth, one thing, and in the heart, another."


Jewish Mentality

For a Jew, weakness in the observance of the commandments or any loosening of one's connection to halacha and to Jewish morality breaks the existential vacuum wide open.  This invites the mentality of the host culture to enter, which blurs the qualitative difference that is designed to separate Jew from non-Jew.  Being different is a religious commandment: A Jew is forbidden to walk in the ways of the non-Jews.  A Jew is commanded to walk in the ways of the Creator.  (Elsewhere [See “Torah Scholar”] we expand on the profound difference in mentality between a Jew who connects to the Torah and to the commandments and a Jew who falls prey to mentality.) We present mentality as a phenomenon that develops in a vacuum, that enters the vacant space that is bare of the service of God.  Alternatively, we present the service of God in the Jewish religion as a guarantee that a Jew will rise above the temptation of mentality and remain in control.  



Certainly mental discourse exists in the Jewish sector as well.  It is the mentality of spiritual and moral quality, which stands the difficult test of the animal struggle for existence, preventing human beings from falling into the dark trap of their creature urges.  Beside this ideal Jewish mentality, so easily applicable, there creeps another mentality, one that has developed in a vacuum, in the empty space where service of God was absent.  Such a mentality requires a few generations before Jewish qualities can fully settle into the basic infrastructure of the personality.



The characteristics of a Jewish personality molded by the Jewish mentality are a tendency to feel shame, a tendency to feel compassion, and a tendency to do acts of kindness.  People who blatantly posses these three traits should consider seeking out and probably discovering their Jewish extraction, for the simple reason that these traits, left to themselves, cannot create a unified, organized mentality.  Each trait contradicts the other: One who tends to feel shame is one who relates to the sanctity of the private space, to which modesty is fitting.  One who tends to feel compassion excels in relating to the other, through identifying with the other.  Such a person tends to blur the boundaries guarding the sanctity of the private space.  One who does actions of kindness is a doer, sacrificing himself for the other at the expense of his own unique qualities, which he neglects as a result of his ultra-practical orientation.  These three traits create internal contradictions within the personality, making the prospects for long-term stability uncertain, as the successful reconciliation of such mutually contradictory features is difficult to achieve naturally. 

The only way to create a personality that can successfully incorporate all of its traits, including the apparently contradictory ones, is to rise above nature's pressures, to reach higher than the war for survival by reining in the natural animal instincts.  This higher perspective alone can provide effective guidelines for preserving the balance between creature and Creator.  It is a full and perfect state of balance, within which all personality tendencies coexist to one another's mutual benefit.  It is a balance where no vacuum exists, no empty space that would invite mentality to settle in and take possession.  Here is a religion that blocks mentality – that prevents it from taking form and taking over, as opposed to religions that create mentality, that actually aggravate one's creature tendencies toward aggression and brutality.

Conclusion



Freedom and belonging are a pair of opposites that together constitute fundamental components of the human personality.  They complement and complete one another in a whole, perfect person, and they are responsible for a destructive split in personality tendencies when they are not held under consistent control.  Ideally, belonging provides the framework that preserves an individual's freedom, and the tool that expresses the individual's uniqueness.



Mentality results when belonging betrays its duty and does not preserve individual freedom.  When belonging splits from freedom, mentality develops.  It is an inevitable, uncontrollable process, requiring no conscious awareness.  On the contrary, it is a process concealed from awareness, in that it grows out of incessantly accumulating sedimentary layers of impressions, unconsciously gathered from one’s environment and one's mythology.  An unconscious, undiscriminating mentality poses a danger to itself, in that it blurs the boundaries that separate the private space from the public space, allowing the rapacious public space to devour the private space.  



Religion is a phenomenon in which mythological meanings accumulate and are then channeled through a mystical power that is so strong as to preclude competition.  Religion thus becomes a chief contributor to mentality.



An individual's right to belong derives from an undeniable natural need.  Nevertheless, the conventional response to those who recognize differences in mentality has been to accuse such people of racism.  Nevertheless it would appear that to ignore mentality is the equivalent of forcefully imposing standards upon individuals, standards that do not recognize their uniqueness, that uproot one from their inalienable right to belong to the landscape of their birth land, to preserve the values and roots of their culture.  It is the equivalent of casting them into the great melting pots of the Bolshevik and Fascist dictatorships.  Ignoring individual mentality means denying an individual’s unique personality.  It precludes an understanding of that person's behavioral process.  If this is not an apt definition of racism, what is?

The Jewish religion is the only one that cannot be blamed for the influence of mythology.  The cornerstone of Judaism is free choice.  Retaining an awareness of free choice and making incessant use of it is a Jew's privilege and obligation.  It guarantees the ability to be discriminating, as well as to exercise control over the developmental processes of mentality.  Observing the commandments and learning the Torah enable the Jew to cautiously sift and to stringently eliminate and to effectively prevent the intrusion of elements that lack quality or compatibility, or that simply do not suit the unique needs of the individual. 

In summary, Patriarch and Matriarch drag mentality in their wake when they are disconnected from one another.  When they are joined together, they are the elements that create wholeness, as in the midrash quoted above: "The Holy, Blessed One saw that the world could not stand up to the measure of judgment.  He therefore rose and mingled a measure of compassion into the measure of judgment.”

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