Stubborn People | Imamother

yehudis

Sat, Jan 15 2005, 11:06 pm

I am reading a book called Dancing through Time by Rabbi Y. Y. Rubinstein. It's a collection of essays on different topics. One essay is called "A Very Stubborn People." I thought it was relevant to some of things we've talked about here.

It begins with a question that someone asked Rabbi Rubinstein.

Quote:

[H]e was deeply disturbed by the treatment meted out to some of the greatest of our gedolim, sometimes by other gedolim. In particular, he could not understand how the Rambam could have been so criticized and attacked, especially after writing Moreh Nevuchim.

Rabbi Rubinstein brings some more examples of such cases, and then he says that this is what he answered:

Quote:

[D]espite the distress and knowledge that his critics were mistaken... Rambam would have ultimately been quite content and even happy that he was suffering such an attack...

HaKadosh Baruch Hu describes the nature and character of the Jewish people in the Torah. After the making of the golden calf, He says, "Hinei am keshei oref hu -- Behold, it is a stubborn nation." Obviously Hashem knew that this was our special trait long before anyone thought of a golden calf. We are, after all, the descendants of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, who stood alone against the entire world.

Then he talks about how it was because of his stubborness that Avraham was chosen to be the father of the Jewish people, because only someone who is willing to be thrown into the fire because of his beliefs would be able to pass his knowledge of Hashem to the next generation.

Quote:

If Hashem wanted to find a people who would be able to carry the Torah through the millenia unswervingly, despite the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, and even the Holocaust, He would have to find a people who was stubborn. Such a nation would be deeply suspicious of anything or anyone who seemed to deviate from its oral tradition. The criticism and suspicion the Rambam and so many other gedolim faced attested to the great care the nation takes in guarding its Torah. It attests to the tenaciousness of the Jewish people.

When I told my husband about this essay, he said that the Maharal also writes about stubbornness in Gevuros Hashem. He says that spiritual things are by their nature unchangeable, and physical things are constantly changing. Since the Jewish people have such a strong connection to the spiritual, it is very hard for us to change, which results in stubbornness. That's why it says that non-Jews do teshuva quickly, while Jews are not so quick to change.