18:
The content of the statements attributed to Yehoshu'a ben-Peraĥyah are fairly simple to understand. In common with most of the personalities reviewed in this chapter his contribution consists of three pithy statements.
19:
Create a rabbi for yourself: Judaism is not only what the western world calls a religion; it is also a study discipline. One might almost say that for Judaism the supreme sin is ignorance, because if you are ignorant of what the Torah demands you cannot accommodate its requirements. The study discipline of Judaism basically consists of three elements.
20:
Firstly, there is the reception of the tradition. It is but natural that in every walk of life each of us wants to carve out his own intellectual path, to leave his personal imprint on what he thinks and does. But in the traditional Jewish manner of learning there are two very important prior steps, and the first is to know what has come before. Generation upon generation of scholars – very great, great, and less than great – have done the same thing: our forebears have contributed their own imprint on the development of Jewish the tradition. Before we can formulate our contemporary attitude to eternal truths and requirements we must learn and absorb what has already been said – particularly what has been bequeathed us from those whom the passing of centuries has consistently recognized as great and meaningful contributors to Jewish religious behaviour and thought. Since the amount of material is vast and since there is always more than one way to understand what has come before, it is imperative that we choose for ourselves one living authority to whom we can turn for guidance in the task of understanding and interpreting the Jewish tradition. That one living authority will also help us to understand the thoughts and opinions of other contemporaries, by presenting us with a consistent dialectic.
In his commentary on our present mishnah Rambam – possibly the greatest of all our intellectual predecessors – says:
To be continued.
Still on the subject of matrism,
Naomi Graetz writes:
I would like to add a more feminist perspective approach to round out your patrist/matrist explanation. Linda Kuzmack in her article Aggadic Approaches to Biblical Women, in Elizabeth Koltun (ed.) The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (New York: Schocken Books, 1976) allowed for the fact that different approaches to Women in rabbinical texts may have reflected their different life experiences as well as their differing theologies. Thus her first alternative was that rabbis chose to depict women as subjugated to men and as having relatively little freedom out of an automatic choice conditioned by an ongoing tradition, thus: "the Rabbis really could not conceive of any other alternatives for women." Kuzmack’s Second Alternative was that "the Rabbis deliberately chose to make an already existent role the only role for Jewish women, because they felt that the physical and spiritual survival of the Jewish people was being threatened to the point of extinction". Her "third alternative is that the reason for emphasizing the domestic role is somewhere between assimilation of traditional concepts and deliberate selection of material." Judith Baskin has recently pointed out in her new book, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature makes clear that rabbinic misogyny was a deliberate part of rabbinic worldview. She does not allow for Kuzmack’s alternative view and makes it quite clear that it was a deliberate choice and not an "automatic" choice conditioned by a thousand years of tradition.
On the same subject, David Baird writes:
Concerning the matrism/patrism societies and Rattray Taylor's book, I wonder if you've read the criticism of the book. I Googled for matrism and found many articles strongly critical of Taylor's views, or claiming that we are at the end of a matrism cycle. Most of the criticism seems to try to explain the random violence we see at the start of the 21st century. Here is one web based book, with what I found the most concise criticism: A Study of Our Decline, specifically: Why The Surge Of Random Violence? -Matrism/Patrism Explained
I respond:
This criticism is included in the source that I gave in Avot029 for the complete text of Rattray Taylor's book. If you do a Google search on "Sex in History" you will find dozens of much more positive evaluations.
