Women

This Yeshiva tries to instill in every student that the secular misconception of Orthodox Jews being sexist is just that, a misconception. Just recently this point was illustrated very clearly and I thought some of you would be interested in hearing about it.
Me and another student here were learning about the laws of Shabbat and we came across something we did not understand. There is a law that if on Shabbat there is a fire you should tell a woman to deal with it. Since you are not allowed to put out a fire on Shabbat unless it will save a life, we did not understand why a woman should potentially break Shabbat as opposed to a man. We asked one of the Rabbis here what exactly was the reasoning for this law. He explained that a man has to learn Torah because he does not inherently understand it. If there is a fire in front of a man on Shabbat he will start thinking about how he could make sure that nobody would be harmed by the fire without putting it out and the end result could be that the fire harm someone. A woman on the other hand inherently understands what she is supposed to do. She will be more likely to make a quick decision, and it be the correct one, than a man.
Just this shabbat at lunch we were discussing this idea with the family that was hosting us. The father of the family made a comment that I thought was very interesting. He said that we see a hint to this idea that a woman is inherently smarter than a man in the account of Creation. The Torah describes how the plants came into existence before the water creatures, which came before birds, which came before land creatures. Each life-form is more intelligent than the last. We see that each new form that Hashem brings into the world is more intelligent. This pattern continues from mammals to the creation of Adam, and then the creation of Eve. Not only does the Torah say that Eve was created after Adam, but when describing the forming of Eve, the Torah uses the verb "to build" which, in hebrew, shares the same root as the word for "understanding."