The following is an analysis of the psychological basis of contemporary political currents and nationalistic movements.  The concept of mentality is defined from an historical and psychological perspective.  The concept of "tabula rasa" is shown to be inadequate.  Awareness of mentality is posited as crucial to the resolution of interpersonal, inter-gender, inter-generational, inter-faith, and international conflict.

Death of the Patriarch

Patriarchal and Matriarchal Mentalities

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 category of the familiar from the category of the unfamiliar.  At approximately eight months, infants develop the ability to recognize a permanent feature, and to relate to it as to a familiar category: Smiling to familiar people, suspicious and mistrustful in the presence of new faces, projecting hostility and crying when strangers come, relaxing only when the strangers leave.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that at this early stage, hatred is born, or that the ability to hate begins with classification.

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

The need to justify these feelings, to seek out objective values, comes only at a later stage, during adolescence.  In infancy and during childhood a person does not feel the need to justify likes and dislikes.  Egocentric survival mechanisms determine that whoever causes me pleasure is good and whoever causes me pain is bad.  Values have no right to an independent existence, at this stage.  Most very young children measure good and bad according to subjective emotions.

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

School testing systems use this distinction as their power source: A good mark is a reward, and a bad mark is a punishment.  A human being becomes a number: This student is a one hundred student, that one is a seventy, the other is a fifty or below – meaning "better for him that he had not been created than that he had been created", being stripped of worth.  He was not quick enough to adjust to an inhuman method, though its inhumanness could be the secret of its longevity, for it is wonderfully simple and direct, some educators' refuge from the complex value judgments needed to assess individual students' qualities.

Eight-year-old Avi comes home from school and informs his mother that Yossi was a bad boy today.  Why?  Because the teacher punished him.  What did he get punished for?  Because David threw a tangerine peel on the floor.  Mother does not understand: If David threw the tangerine peel on the floor, why is Yossi a bad boy?  Because Yossi is the one who got punished.  Whoever gets punished is a bad boy, explains Avi philosophically. 

The test is in the result: Avi is demonstrating admirable biological survival skills.  He even merits the support of sociologists, historians, and people of the Protestant faith.  A person of the Protestant faith believes that everything is managed by the Creator, Who continues to manage His world.  A successful person, who has achieved his goals, is beloved by the Creator.  His very success is proof of that, and there is no need to investigate the moral basis of his achievements.  Money has no smell, it would seem to them.  According to this perception, an utterly corrupt person, who has achieved impressive material gains, can judge himself utterly righteous.  He can bask in the pleasure of his success, for indeed his very success is the best proof of his righteousness.  The obvious does not need to be proven...which is why success has so many friends. 

Yet how success sometimes eludes one who asks too many moral questions.  How often it slips through his grasp, and evades his piercing eyes.  He often wonders how the successful person made all his money.  "Well, if God granted him wealth, surely he deserves it.  Who am I to doubt the ways of the Creator, when all know they are supported upon justice...”  It is worth keeping eight-year-old Avi in mind: If we wish to correctly evaluate this philosophy - which we will call judging-by-the-results - we must remember its childish basis.

The Birth of Mentality

People form their sense of reality through an encounter that takes place between their own inborn traits and the conditions of their environment.  For example, in a society that values learning, an action-oriented person is constantly dealing with society's expectations of industriousness and academic excellence, as they conflict with his own need for activity and tangible achievement; he feels an inner need to organize and arrange and achieve practical action-based goals.  These energies do not find their 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 inborn character fail to contribute to the building of the self image, and difficulties arise in one's 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 and the need to be free - is missing.  The need to belong is not being fulfilled.  This is a form of deprivation, and it 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, have the effect of creating a personality that is not compatible with the original personality with which one was born.  Conflict then becomes intrinsic to one's inner experience. 

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, response patterns formed of 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.

For a liberal, all human beings are 'tabula rasa', a blank slate.  People are considered top-of-the-line industrial products – often impressive, but lacking intrinsic individual character.  They all have the same neutral mentality, and react identically to identical input.  If they do not, they must pretend to.  One who is capable of meeting these ruthlessly Draconian pre-conditions of liberal society, who can cast off inborn uniqueness, who can give up the mentality that makes him or her different, and puts him or her into the category of a stranger, and then he or she may win personal attention from 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 anchored in the law, and to be turned into an equilateral square that will abide by the dictatorial expectations of the liberal system.  The individual is caught into a double standard: Equality and individual rights abound on the surface of liberal society, yet underneath is a despot's indifference to the mentality that grew out of one's childhood home and one's indigenous culture.  Considering individual mentality is called a racist crime by the liberal.  It is deserving of the very worst 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, according to the laws of the "politically correct", what the stranger may or may not utter.

The need to separate into categories surfaces time and again.  Basic morality, rooted in all those who are created in God's image, determines the primary category: good versus evil.  But then egocentrism sets in, and the good become, of course, us.  The bad are, of course, them, the strangers.  This distinction consistently appears and reappears, even at the level of the primitive jungle's rules of survival.  The jungle's "us" and "them" corresponds to the powerful versus the weak.  This is Nietzsche’s distinction: There is the noble savage.  He is a good and powerful being.  Because he is powerful, he does not need to justify his position.  Then there are the weak and base ones.  They invent the idea of morality, of pitying the weak.  They do this in order to undermine and confuse the weak brains of their dangerous adversaries.

Following Nietzche's basic distinction, a division of categories has taken place in humanity's cultural field.  Patriarchal cultures correspond to the noble savage.  They are usually derived from indigenous, tribal cultures.  Matriarchal cultures correspond to Nietzsche’s weak and clever inventors of morals.  They are usually derived from cultures that have 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 more conducive to religion than the other.  The main goal, for both cultural types, remains what it has always been: Power. 

The tribal societies do not bother to hide the fact that their goal is to acquire power by force, because they are still in touch with their natural origins.  It is the sophisticated technological societies that invent various guises, that contrive to conceal the power hunger that lurks behind the smooth veneer of the blank slate. 

It behooves us to define the brute-force character of the patriarch, and of his work tactics, in order to acquire some notion of how vastly different it is from the matriarch's method of social enforcement.

 

The Need to Address Child Development

Studying variations in cultures and systems of government, one finds oneself forced to classify cultures according to developmental levels, just as one classifies groups of children of different ages according to 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 holds the secret of cultural behavior patterns. 

The description of children's developmental stages as formulated by intelligence researcher Jean Piaget, has proven its importance in broad applications and multi-disciplinary research contexts, among these, artificial intelligence and brain research.  There would seem to be no reason not to apply this same rather astonishing model to the disciplines of political science and cultural anthropology.

Mass Culture

The Piagetian model becomes especially important when we consider that we are dealing with a culture of the masses.  The phenomenon of mass psychology was investigated by Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Canetti's description of the character of the mass is strikingly accurate.

Canetti found that the central feature of mass culture is the use of lowest common denominator in the public forum: Cultural ideals are catchy and superficial, numerical quantity is emphasized at the expense of individual quality, and the public realm devours the uniquely individual private realm.  It 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 lack of unity and cohesion, a short memory, illogical and inconsistent thinking, and glaring contradictions that are an 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 was elected to do.

Some Childish Features of Mass Culture

A tendency toward narrow vision, perceptions that are not encompassing.  A child's view of things, limited to immediate instantaneous impressions.  Aperception is the dominant feature, i.e., observation through pre-intelligence impressions.  There is no analysis of the causes, or roots or other component factors of a situation; there is 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.

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 of maturity, of an adult response.  This can provide a yardstick for measuring maturity, both in individuals and in societies.  Immature people tend to more readily reject their own basic principles and values, such as religion, tradition and ideals, to more readily yield up their own unique character, to be light-headed, weak of character, unstable, to ignore the values of morality and justice, and to feel little respect for the law to the extent of ignoring it and circumventing it whenever they can.  Such characteristics, which have a direct bearing on the wisdom of one’s personal actions, can lower the behavioral level of the two-legged to that of the four-legged.

A study conducted by Piaget - in which I participated - sought to determine stages of cognitive development in relation to the law: How a legal perspective is developed and consolidated.  Piaget investigated this question by examining children's attitudes toward the rules of the game of marbles.  Piaget's study found that a pre-law stage exists, which predominates until approximately the age of six.  At six, socialization begins, i.e. a new need - the need to belong - is born.  (I have found that the ability to fulfill the need to belong, and the ability to fulfill the need to be free, together form the basis for a healthy existence.  A deficiency in either of these can significantly limit the quality of experience.) 

At the earliest stage, the children were limited by their own egocentrism, which narrowed their scope and limited the extent of their perceptions.  Being entirely absorbed in their own struggle for survival and entirely ruled by their instincts, their perception of the meaning of rules of a game reflected a purely egocentric mode.  When Piaget asked a group of children younger than six years old which of them was the winner in the game of marbles - each child pointed to himself.  No one paid the slightest attention to any sort of convention of rules; they made up their own rules as they played. 

At age six, Piaget encountered an entirely different phenomenon: There was an absolute respect for the rules of the game.  Six-year-olds who were asked who had invented the rules of the game, replied, “G-d”.  Children who had had no religious education cited the government, or the king.  When Piaget suggested that perhaps the rules could be changed, the children were appalled.  This sacrilegious notion was rejected point-blank.

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

At age thirteen the authority to create rules is placed on their 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 in trembling awe, privileged to be present and watching as democracy is born!)  This age finds the beginning of abstract ability.  There is an awareness of rules, and an understanding of the role played by the law.  Most of all, that the law is relative.

This is the ladder – or the mine-field – that the law must travel: From an egocentric, pre-social stage, through a perception of the law as a reality in itself:  A supreme authority, owing nothing to man, containing no human values or needs that it is required to protect from unlawful violation.  It is a law in which human beings are not mutually obligated to one another.  A human being must bow to the law, to adapt themselves humbly to it, unilaterally.  There is no doubt that this stage of legal perception turns in time into an instrument of oppression, wielded by those who choose to “take the law into their own hands,” creating gangs, Mafiosi and miscellaneous dictators, both within and outside of democratic regimes.  The birth of the law and the stages of child development seem to parallel one another in complete correlation, to be as closely mingled as the flame within the coal, to an extent that is astonishing and puzzling.

 

Unfortunately, it is difficult to point to a developed society that has attained the third stage – that has developed an understanding of the relativity of the law, let alone an understanding of the more advanced stages.  For indeed, there exist more advanced stages in healthy cognitive development. 

Studies conducted by Lawrence Kohlberg in California examined children’s cognitive development as it continues into adolescence.  (Piaget’s research stopped at the beginning of adolescence.  I asked Piaget about the later continuation of cognitive development, about the qualitative intelligence that develops during later adolescence, and continues indefinitely.  He was clearly taken aback.  He had never considered the possibility of an intelligence that was not technically ordered, that did not obey a technical system of organization.).  Kohlberg investigated the process of cognitive development of legal perception and discovered that a yet 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 clearly 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 perceptions.  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 mostly acquired. 

Qualitative thinking includes intuition, creative imagination and most importantly, the ability to express human intelligence.  Human intelligence is the stage of encounter: Human sensitivity meets rational, reality-based thought. 

Only those who are fastidious about forming their opinions ever reach this stage.  It is not the lot of the masses.  What is absorbed at the mass level is the lowest common human denominator.  The best the mass culture can reach is the childish intermediate stage, which features all the characteristics described above, including a superficial, two-dimensional, and short-term point of view.  The mass conception rejects anything original, is hostile towards the unconventional, and measures things according to a general consensus that is determined by public opinion polls and ratings. 

The outcome of a mass culture is that an unbridgeable gap is created between the patriarchal mentality and the matriarchal mentality.  Both of these mentalities are controlled by a juvenile thought process, which creates an existential gap between one's "doing" and one's "being".  Let us examine these terms, and the way that they pertain to the process of human development.

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

The fervent desire of the weak 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 could possibly desire: protection, personal security and even the ability to exploit one’s own power as a protected weak person, against those who are truly weak and unprotected – whose status in a patriarchal society is that of abandoned slaves whom no master protects.

Anyone who views those holding protected slave status as poor unfortunates who have been robbed of their freedom, is very far from a correct understanding of the patriarchal mentality.  A person with a slave mentality has as his goal the replacement of a less strong master with a more strong and more generous master.  To assume that a person with a slave mentality secretly cherishes dreams of rebellion and feels the brooding frustration of a caged wild animal, is to overlook the bizarre phenomenon of the kidnapped girl who falls in love with her robber-kidnapper, to the point that she refuses to be freed. 

This lesson is taught in the Torah’s law of eved nirtsa, the slave who is punished by having his ear pierced.  What was his crime?  He refused to be set free, on the grounds that “I love my master.”  This is a choice that arises from an undeveloped and childish perception.  Its symptoms are choosing dependency and fearing liberation.  Pure belonging - no freedom.  The Torah accepts this choice, but very reluctantly; it teaches that to buy one's security at the cost of one's freedom is to pay too high a price.  Nevertheless, the Torah acknowledges the fact that there are some people who wish for 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 a ruling tyrant's arbitrary will.  The highest value is honor, which arises out of and mingles with cruelty, and absence of pity for the weak.  Revenge is highly valued, in that it expresses the restoration of offended honor.  The greater the revenge, the harsher the cruelty, the more one's offended honor is restored – and the brighter shines the cruel avenger’s reputation.  Feelings of pity are interpreted as weakness, in that they express a yielding of one's position, an admission that one's rival’s claim is just.  An objective perspective on 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 personal intentions, or feelings, or 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. 

We might say that a negative correlation exists between "doing" and "being":  "Doing" is ignoring "being".  In a patriarchal society, one does objective actions at the expense of subjective human beings.  Only objects have value, because an object is the concluding link in a chain of events, where each link is the objective result of the previous link.  Therefore the object is all that matters.  It is a mechanical, power-based system, in which the bigger gear activates the smaller gear.  Mechanical systems do not contain personal intentions, personal needs, personal goals or personal 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 or values.

For its own reasons, and not by coincidence, the matriarchal culture also adopted a mechanical system.  Indeed, the matriarchal cultures has become the leading exponent of technical/mechanical expression, which seems odd when we consider how the matriarchal culture expounds the values of "being", and prefers it by far to the values of "doing".  "Being" is supposedly the 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 stuck onto a mechanical/technical course?  How has it turned into a supremely technocratic culture, starring business, bureaucracy, and the dry letter of the law?  Clearly this bears investigating.

It seems to me that such indications - when we find objects being granted full citizenship in a culture that is supposedly suffused with subjective meanings and qualities - first appeared 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 the process?  How did it occur?  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 needs a third element that will reconcile their contradiction.

The above statement is based upon a Talmudic dictum: “Two scriptures contradict one another, until the third scripture comes and resolve them.”  This mysterious key - the third scripture - apparently cannot be found hidden behind the curtains of the Theater of the Absurd known as existential reality.  It is not found in the ancient East nor is it found in the progressive sophisticated West.  Both are beset by difficulties on the rocky road toward the coveted ideal of justice.  Left with no choice, both cultures heave themselves up on the life raft called brute force. 

The patriarch seized power that was clothed in the image of man.  He created an idol, a graven masked image of power.  Its form was human but it had been emptied of its humanness.  The matriarchal culture, religion of love and mercy, arising from the ruins of the defeated patriarchal culture, seems rather like a child fleeing an angry father who has cast him off.  Overwhelmed by existential distress, the child clings to his mother’s apron.  It is not insignificant that the Christian counter reaction appeared as the sun was setting and twilight falling on the Roman Empire, that had attained power's peak only to be crushed by primitive vandals.  The patriarch had disappointed.  It had showed powers other face - defeat: From the top, one can only come down.  The loss of faith in (patriarchal) power triggered the flight to the mother's warm and loving bosom. 

Thus, both sides are characterized by immaturity.  Eight-year-old Avi's acceptance of the notion that Yossi was a bad boy today solely because Yossi was punished - though Avi is aware of the fact that it was David who did wrong, is a phenomenon of the childish stage.  As the child advances into adolescence, this same phenomenon develops into a tendency to transfer guilt from the one who perpetrated the crime to the one who intended to perpetrate the crime.  The former emphasizes the object (objective results) while the latter emphasizes the subject (subjective intentions) completely detached from the object. 

Christianity won the field abandoned by Rome - Mankind, the child, became Mankind, the adolescent - until it too wandered down the dead-end road of cultural atrophy, and helplessness in the face of vandalism, this time perpetrated by man-beasts that rise up out of the Arabian Desert.  Primitive guerilla warfare takes pot shots at advanced western technology, turning victory into rout.  At this point the discussion ceases to be theoretical, having become a feverish search for the roots of the problem.  The question has become simply this: To be or not to be...

If childish behavior is a central feature of western culture, what went wrong?

Obstacles began to pile up on the matriarchal culture’s path.  Though it had been born and raised in the mysteries of subjective experience, and was supposedly well-versed in all of a human beings subjective needs, its path toward realizing the ideal subjective experience nevertheless grew muddled, and of course, never reached 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 eventually to divorce itself entirely from physical reality.  Reality was blamed for limiting spirituality's possibilities; why, it could cause one altogether to lose the dimension of height and godliness. 

The phenomena of Gnosticism soon seized control over the territory of the dimension of height - the dimension of spirituality - and did not allow it to connect to objective reality.  It was the fear of actualizing spirituality through tangible means, the fear that this would make spirituality limited and prosaic that consistently prevented the matriarchal culture from attaining the union of subject and object.  Subjective inner intentions were thus severely limited, being denied the opportunity of actualization - of being made tangibly present in objective real-world practical action.  Only through this union, where subjective experience is actualized in objective experience, can one attain access to the dimension of height and to the dimension of depth.

We find then that both approaches, matriarchal and patriarchal, remained in a two-dimensional reality, detached from the freedom afforded by height and from the rootedness afforded by depth.  They were left with religions that lacked the vertical structure.  They did not have Yaakov's "ladder standing solidly on the ground", based and rooted in earthly laws, while "its top reached to the heavens".

Reciprocity

A gap yawns between heaven and earth that can only be bridged by reciprocity - a principle that Judaism introduced into the world.  How did Judaism's monotheistic daughters come to lose what their mother-mentor had given them?  Mentality forms religion, and religion forms mentality, in a circular motion.  Islam was devoured by physical reality, to become a tool in the hands of brute force, and Christianity lost its hold upon reality, abandoning reality to the control of technocratic systems.  In these religions, no reciprocity developed between the physical and the spiritual.

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

Fear of the unknown created the territory of mystery and mysticism, for in this territory, the unknown is allegedly 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, that compensate the obedient, that are circumvented by the clever, that teach the believer how to adopt an attitude of ingratiating submissiveness toward the threatening powers-that-be. 

Monotheism? 

This accounts for much of the meaningful content of religion.  It explains the anthropomorphist tendencies of religions, even within those religions that are called monotheistic, but that actually split apart from the monotheistic ideal to become either one or the other 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, and ignored whatever tended in the opposite direction.  (The progress from the 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.)  It was a limping, one-legged monotheism that grew further and further away from the balance envisioned by the Jewish ideal of harmony. 

And now, a story: 

During the eighties of the previous century, 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 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 in 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 and 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 macrocosm of the universe is divided between patriarchal and matriarchal elements, and in the microcosm of the family 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 saw 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 clumsy bureaucracy for enforcing the strong arm of its laws over its slave nations.  It was not the power of revolt against oppression, but rather the simple phenomenon of disorder undoing order. 

This is entropy's perpetual and predictable victory.  It is a law of physics, which determines that all things must move from a state of integration to a state of disintegration.  The law of entropy applies to all physical cycles, be they organic or inorganic, vegetable, animal, or human.  This rule, fixed permanently into the Torah, “not on bread [physical advantage] alone can a human being live” has proven its truth time and again. 

In the Bible's first chapter, in Genesis, the name of God is called Elokim, which expresses judgment.  In the second chapter, the two names of the Creator appear joined: Ado-nai, Elokim.  Ado-nai is the name of the measure of compassion, and appears side by side with Elokim, the name of the measure of judgment.  As is its sacred custom, the Oral Torah interprets the meaning of 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 stood up and mixed the measure of compassion with the measure of judgment.”  It was not a case of one measure overcoming the other, but rather of one drawing near the other, of their joining side by side in a complementary relationship. 

So it is in the creation, and so it is in the family.  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 need.  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 a digestive system.  She enables the children to 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 emotions.  The children absorb their father's abstract principles through emotional identification with their mother.

While balance cannot exist if the measure of judgment refuses to respect the measure of compassion, it also cannot exist when the measure of compassion refuses to receive and to digest the measure of judgment.  Juvenile delinquency is not only the 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 because the law of the strong arm was their daily fare, and the latter because a life of overindulged egoism taught them to take it for granted that all their desires must automatically be granted.  The moment a wish is denied, they resort to force, for they have never been taught to consider another.  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.

It would appear that both sides are in need of one supreme authority, in order to arbitrate their conflict, according to the Talmudic principle: "There are two scriptures that contradict one another until the third scripture shall come and resolve them.”  The flowering of Christianity, the matriarchal religion, followed close upon the heels of the patriarchal culture's collapse.  It had been an exploiting culture, which reveled 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, which she exploits in order to gain power over her child, to capitalize on a moment of weakness.

On hearing these words, the Catholic priest rose courageously before the entire gathering, which included representatives from every part of the world, to admit that Christianity had lost the truth – that had just been heard – as a result of its disconnecting and distancing 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, and 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 was proven 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 canceled, and human beings were forced to give up 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, as opposed to the rude wild-beast vulgarity of Islam's power struggle.

Mentality Enters the Arena

The difference that creates the deep divide that separates Islam from Christianity lies in cultural mentality.  First and foremost, and commanding center stage, is the difference in the attitude towards women.  It is a difference that spans from one extreme to the other, from one culture to another.

Researchers' attempts to point to the growth of science as the decisive factor dividing the two cultures, fails to explain the scientific flourishing that took place in Islamic culture during the Middle Ages, at a time when Christian culture was experiencing a dark age of scientific ignorance.  It would appear to be specifically the attitude toward women that accounts for the difference, for we require an element more profound that simply the scientific difference, and one that would more broadly account for the flourishing of western culture.  Although only a partial flourishing, it contrasted starkly with Islamic culture’s decline.  We must broaden our scope to cover eastern culture as a whole, to find factors whose roots go deeper than religion. 

Let us join Bernard Lewis, as he distinguishes between Islamic culture and Arab mentality.  In The Crisis of Islam (Holy War and Unholy Terror) Lewis asks: How is it that there are great nations in Islam who live peacefully, while other Islamic nations are perpetually steeped in war, conflict, internal and external assassinations, and "live by the sword" whether they need to or not.  Consider too that Islam is a religion that is 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 be a religion common to many nations of Europe, without causing a blurring of national characteristics.  Belgium, France, parts of Germany, Poland and others maintain their national uniqueness, despite their being believing members of the same faith. 

The reason seems clear in relation to Islam: There is an Arabic Islam and a non-Arabic Islam.  Millions of Indians and Indonesians are members of the Islamic faith, yet are by no means members of the Arab nation.  The Moslems of the Far East are devoid of aggressiveness, in spite of constant attempts by outsiders to light their fanatic fire.

This distinction between mentality and religion seems to show that mentality goes deeper than religion, and is not influenced by it.  The Arab mentality, steeped in patriarchal essence, delights in embracing Islam’s lack of spiritual values, and enthusiastically adopts Islam’s fanatic patriarchal attitude, whereas these two components of Islam have failed to penetrate the quiet mentality of the Far East.

Relationship of East to West

East is close to nature.  Eastern wisdom focuses on efficient exploitation of the laws of nature.  An eastern person would never attempt to ignore or alienate the laws of nature.  A Bedouin would not try to flatten a hump in the ground, to smooth a change in level or dig a hole in order to change a topographical situation.  He would seek other means by which to live peaceably with rather than against the powers of nature.  "If they tell you there is wisdom [in the east], believe it.  If they tell you there is [technology in the east], do not believe it.”  Technological sophistication belongs specifically to the matriarchal west.

How very opposite was the picture during the Middle Ages, in which Islam was the great conqueror and the great scientific achiever.  Suddenly it 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 sticking to outdated sailing ships that were very limited in speed and mass.  Technology's victory was clear-cut and absolute.  Why did Islam fail in the sphere of technology? 

 Apparently as long as technology was linked to its human dimensions, the patriarch's power, arrogance and ambition assisted him in his progress in scientific spheres as well.  When technology diverged from human dimensions and rose into the abstract dimension, 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 from 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.  It was exactly this mentality that introduced extreme dualism and the total conflict between spirit and matter, that sent the west soaring into the wide open spaces of abstract thinking - even as the east sank further into stagnation, and into a mysticism that contained no objective definitions or tangible boundaries. 

The victory of rational mind over mysticism brought great benefit and progress to science, but brought 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 monstrous dimensions, and brought the phenomenon of hatred up to the levels we all recognize from the not so distant past.  Sophisticated moral and political theories promise sophisticated solutions to the problems of existence: Liberalism, and bodies of law 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 - are lies, if sophisticated ones.  They have shown themselves to be mere demagoguery, empty words whose aim is to deceive the naive.

All this was the result of a process of abstraction that grew further and further distant from the natural human condition, and grew increasingly involved with a virtual reality, with laws that were remote from human feelings and human senses.  The patriarchal mentality felt threatened and offended.  In its frustration and rage it created a natural weapon with which to attack 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 undue waste of time, using explosives that have grown to monstrous proportions.  An engineer with a pacifist spirit returned from reserve duty, and poured 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 being able to confront an adversary in such a way.  For this reason they have had to invent other methods that are compatible with their mentality.  Therefore they 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 tail of the clumsy enemy from behind, bringing him to his knees by the 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/weaknesses against itself.  The easterners exploit the great bureaucratic western mechanism for his own ends: He demands democracy and civil rights, he cites all the blindly dogmatic theories, all the lofty ideals that are so characteristic of western culture, that ignore and are utterly detached from prosaic realities.  The easterner plays them against the west for all they are worth.  True to character, the 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 was in ignoring and harboring contempt for the eastern mentality, has boomeranged.  Humiliating retreat has been the outcome in most confrontations between the west and guerilla warfare.  So it was in Algeria, so in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so the mighty Israeli Defense Force against the Hezbollah in Lebanon: Short-range victory and long-range defeat.  As they say, 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 his tricks.  The guerilla is not overly sophisticated.  The truth of the matter is that his strength lies in his simplicity. 

The guiding principle in guerilla warfare is: Exploit the given, 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 limitations such as ideology, morality, rules of play, past agreements, international treaties and all those other laws that only obligate the weak, to an eastern mind. 

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 you can.  (Rules of the game are perceived as weakness by a child of the patriarchal culture.  After all, the mighty one is not obligated to obey any rule that does not express his own direct will.  After all, he himself is the embodiment of the law.)  Victory does not go to the one who has the most effective weapon, but to the one who knows how to exploit it and how to steal it. 

Now we may understand how the legal system, the communications media, and the public's right to know have become the undoing of the west.  The guerilla fighter's weapon is mystery, deceit, and exploitation of the secrecy that the enemy does not 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.

The 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 faith for one 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 weak point in the guerilla mentality is the mindless mob.  Aware of nothing, they are a blind flock led by a bloodthirsty leader who is drunk on the sensation of his own unlimited power, and drugged on 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 rule upon your citizens, the more loyal they will be to you.  This cynical perspective, which will be rejected out of hand as illiberal and short-ranged and not even serious, by any child of western mentality, is the only one capable of rehabilitating a patriarchal society and bringing it to tranquility, whether it is African or Middle Eastern.  It would be wise to accept this as the realpolitik that will bring lasting calm to the region.  "Peace" can be postponed to the era of the Messiah.

The transition from one mentality to another is a prolonged process that spans four generations, according to Jewish sources - "the fourth generation shall return here" - and according to the conclusions of anthropological research.  Arbitrarily attempting to speed the process can complicate more than it can save.  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 had a dictator's mentality - to create a "melting pot" of immigration, and to house the immigrants in mixtures: Immigrants from the east together with immigrants from the west.  Within a short time these mixed settlements fell apart with a great crash and serious conflicts between 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 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 between the new immigrants and the native Israelis.  Tensions were aggravated considerably by the leaders of both sides, who had different mentalities.  Distancing the leaders of one of the sides restored peace.  This artificial attempt to speed integration too had missed its target.

Negative Integration

In a patriarchal culture, the individual is placed in a framework of tradition that is joined to rules of reward and punishment and to the opinion of the public and the ruler and these do not recognize the 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 a framework, he feels that he lacks "belonging".  He loses his self-confidence and his capacity for self-expression and creativity. 

When an individual from a tribal society loses the conditions necessary to relate to a framework, he finds it difficult to fill this vacuum.  He finds it hard 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 toward himself, as does the individual who belongs to a matriarchal society.  (See above for definition of the mother's role in enabling the child to digest and internalize values, to accept the rules of forbidden and permissible within the public space.  The mother custom-fits 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 - indeed it is even obligated - to create an atmosphere of personal liberty and free choice.  The relationship between "freedom" and "belonging" is a relationship of content and container.  Only in 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 as 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: The complete lack of consideration for the other driver, the use of driving as a weapon, as an expression of power rather than as a mere means of transportation.

During Israel's period of returning to nature, of youth movements and youth rebellions, the child of patriarchal immigrants found himself freed of the duty to honor his father and mother and to honor their values.  It seemed that the boundaries had burst open in every direction.  The fine line separating sanity from insanity had never had a place in his inner world.  The subtle border that defines the litmus test of sanity does 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 an individual's inner cultural world.  Indeed, the inner world of the child of a patriarchal culture is empty of self-rule or 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.  Without making this distinction, one never gets to 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, change and expressions of 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 approaches animalism.  Since self-rein is not a component of this type of personality, when external reins are slackened, it can 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, and 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 rebellious behavior and aggression.  The desired response at this point would be a tolerant, long-range educational approach whose goal is mutual rapprochement, understanding, and respect, a matter that may 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 to her means fascinating, tough 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 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.  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 from 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 denominator.  It was spirit versus matter.

It should be noted that this 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 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 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 in the family framework is 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 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: All that is negative and undesirable in one adversary will encounter all that is 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, failure in the inter-gender minefield haunts 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.  Behead the patriarchal snake, however, and you have can 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 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, 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. 

This attempt has crashed in the smoke of battle, with much reciprocity in spilled blood.  In the wake of the tragic crash, no constructive formula for reciprocity resulted.  Logic did not play the decisive role, as might be expected.  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 devoted to instilling the value of reciprocity, and mostly, trying to understand, rather than only to 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...", remarks the Talmud, coming to teach us that a human being must occupy two realities simultaneously, and deal with two confrontations at one and the same moment: The self versus its Creator, and the 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 does not push the moral imperative aside in Judaism.  "Love your friend as yourself", the "great rule" of the Torah, combines both the moral and the religious imperative. 

To support this claim - when the "great rule" seems moral and interpersonal, and not religious at all - 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 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 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 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.  I.e., 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 this 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 - through Arab folktales such as "A Thousand and One Nights", or through "The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales", which is the childhood source that shapes the German mentality, or through the lullabies of England and France – will testify to raw human materials soaked in cruelty and drenched with blood.  Their topics are of the battle for survival, of power struggles, and tales of intrigue.

On the other hand, one who delves into the tales of the Torah and the legends of the Talmud will find in-depth analysis of moral and spiritual values to be the mainstream standard fare.  Towering figures, moral giants of epic proportions that resemble 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 on these values that every Jewish "heder" child has been raised from time immemorial.  Morality is combined with halacha - the religious imperative.  Human sensitivity for the other expresses morality, 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 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.  Inexorably demanding halachot shed a Divine authority over all aspects of existence.  Prohibitions relating to eating, and commandments relating to festive eating as an obligatory mitsva, accompany one all one's life, as 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, 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 open 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.

Hence the Jewish preference for eating and 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.  It plays a starring role in every "feast of mitsva", symbolizing the sanctity of 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 very quickly fills up with the savage brute forces of existence, and 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 persuasions toward weakness remain in the category of unenforced rules.  In practice a vacuum is created, and into the 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, for after all, it is written: "One thing in the mouth and another in the heart".

Jewish Mentality

Loosening the connection to halacha and to Jewish morality breaks the existential vacuum wide open for a Jew who is weak in observance of the commandments.  This invites the mentality of the host environment to enter, which blurs the qualitative difference that is meant 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.  (This is not the place to expand on the deep difference in mentality between the Jew who connects to the Torah and to the commandments and the Jew who falls prey to mentality.  Elsewhere this topic is developed more extensively.  It is enough if) We present mentality as a phenomenon that develops in a vacuum, that enters the vacant space that is devoid of service of God.  Alternatively, we present service of God in the Jewish religion as a guarantee that the Jew will rise above the temptation of mentality and remain in control. 

Of course mental discourse also exists in the Jewish sector.  This is a mentality of spiritual and moral quality, which stands the difficult test of the animal struggle for existence, and prevents 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.  This mentality will require a few generations before Jewish qualities can settle fully into the basic infrastructure of personality.

The characteristics of a Jewish personality molded by a Jewish mentality are a tendency to feel shame, a tendency to feel compassion and a tendency to do actions of kindness.  People who obviously have these three traits should consider seeking and probably finding their Jewish extraction, for the simple reason that these traits cannot create a unified and 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 uncertain for long-term stability, since the successful reconciliation of such mutually contradictory features would be difficult to achieve naturally. 

Only rising above the pressures of nature and the war for survival instincts by reining in one’s natural animal instincts can create a personality that can include all personality traits, even those that seem to contradict.  Only this higher perspective can provide effective guidelines for preserving the balance between creature and Creator.  This is a full state of balance, within which all personality tendencies may coexist to their mutual benefit.  It is a balance where no vacuum can exist, no empty space that would invite mentality to settle in and take possession.  A religion that prevents mentality, versus religions that create mentality, religions that aggravate one’s creature tendencies toward aggression and brutality.

Conclusion

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

Mentality results when belonging betrays its duty and does not preserve freedom.  When belonging splits from freedom, mentality develops.  It is an inevitable and uncontrollable, and requires no conscious awareness.  On the contrary, it is a concealed process that grows out of an incessantly accumulating sedimentary layer of impressions, unconsciously gathered from one’s environment and mythology.  An unconscious undiscriminating mentality poses a danger to itself in that it blurs the boundaries separating 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 them of racism.  Yet it seems that ignoring mentality is equivalent to forcefully imposing upon individuals a standard that does not recognize their uniqueness, that uproots one's right to belong to the landscape of one's birth land, to preserve the values and roots of one's culture.  It is equivalent to 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.  A cornerstone and central condition 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 and to exercise control over the developmental processes of mentality.  Observing the commandments and learning the Torah enable one to cautiously sift and to stringently eliminate and to effectively prevent the intrusion of elements that lack quality, that lack compatibility, that do not suit the unique needs of the individual. 

Finally, Patriarch and Matriarch drag mentality in their wake when they are disconnected from one another.  When they are joined they are the factors that create wholeness, as the midrash states: "The Holy Blessed One saw that the world could not stand up to the measure of judgment.  He rose and mingled the measure of compassion with the measure of judgment".