Moses beseeches God to forgive the Israelites for worshipping the Golden Calf. He asks for God to rest His presence among the people because they are an obstinate people.
This is remarkable. Aside the irrationality of God resting His presence on a stubborn nation, God earlier told Moses that He plans to destroy the Israelites because they are obstinate (32:9-10). And yet when Moses appeals to God for forgiveness, he uses the very same adjective that God has used to express His displeasure of the people: forgive them for they are obstinate.
If stubbornness is so distasteful in God’s view, why does Moses use it as a plea for forgiveness?
Rambam writes that every human character trait can be a virtue as well as a vice (De’ot 1:1). Obstinacy is no different. It can be expressed as the vice of stubbornness or the virtue of tenacity.
When God tells Moses that the people are stiff-necked, He is referring to their stubbornness. When Moses tells God that the people were are stiff-necked, he is referring to their determination. Moses overturns the criticism of stiff-neckedness into a praise because obstinacy depends on what you do with it and how you wield it.
And surprisingly, God accepts this argument. He tells Moses that He will indeed rest His presence once more on the people. Why so? Because the trait of being stiff-necked, of being determined and tenacious, is what has preserved us as a nation for thousands of years. Our unflinching, unswerving and unyielding commitment to God and Torah is why we have thrived, and still thrive, nationally and religiously.
As a people, we are commonly referred to as Jews. But nowhere in Torah are we referred to as Yehudim, Jews. Our original name is Ibri, Hebrew. Abraham was the first Jew, and he is referred to as an Ibri (Bereshit 14:13) because he was the iconoclast: “the whole world was on one side and Abraham was on the other side” (Bereshit Rabbah 42:8).
Bialik once said: ‘All beginnings are hard, but harder yet is perseverance”. Perseverance is hard, but it is a trait we have within our psyche; one we should use as a virtue, not vice.
