Ki Tisa,” means “When you raise up” – the beginning of the portion deals how to do a census of the people. Then comes the part that makes Ki Tisa famous: dancing around the Golden Calf, saying “this is the god that took you out of Egypt”. In the scale of bad Jewish behavior, this takes the cake. Just saying. The portion continues with Moshe’s interceding for the people, calming God down, getting God to forgive, punishing the people and God giving Moshe the second tablets.
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There is a phrase in this week’s parashah that appears four times, and the repetition is not accidental. Am kshe oref — a stiff-necked people. God says it first, three times in rapid succession, and each time it sounds like a verdict. A diagnosis. A reason for distance.
“I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.” (Shemot 32:9)
“For I will not go up in your midst, because you are a stiff-necked people, lest I consume you on the way.” (33:3)
“You are a stiff-necked people.” (33:5)
God’s conclusion about this people seems final: there is something fundamentally rigid about Bnei Israel. Something that refuses to bend toward the divine will. Something, perhaps, unredeemable.
And then — in one of the most breathtaking reversals in all of Torah — Moshe picks up the very same words. He uses them not as an indictment but as a plea:
“If I have found favor in Your eyes, my Lord, let my Lord go now in our midst — for it is a stiff-necked people — and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your inheritance.” (34:9)
Ki am kshe oref hu. Because they are stiff-necked. The same phrase. The same people. But now it is not a reason for distance. It is an argument for presence and forgiveness.
How does Moshe make this move? What does he understand about this people that God, speaking from outside and above, cannot fully see in this moment?
There is something telling about where Moshe stands when he speaks these words. He has been inside — inside the camp, inside the grief, inside the chaos. He has heard the people’s anguish when they were told that the Shechinah, the divine presence had withdrawn. Moshe that the same stubbornness that built the calf is the stubbornness that makes this people unable to let go of God. The neck that refused to wait quietly at Sinai is the same neck that will, through every exile and every catastrophe, refuse to turn entirely away.
Moshe is using this very flaw is our deepest spiritual signature. Precisely because we cannot bend we need God’s presence. And we will keep needing it. And we will never stop seeking it.
This is the reading the Mei HaShiloach, Rav Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbicza, opens up for us. What the world sees as defect, the Izbiczer sees as the hidden face of a divine gift.
The stiff neck is not, at its root, about arrogance or disobedience. It is about the impossibility of full assimilation, the constitutional inability to become entirely something else. The oref — the back of the neck — is the place you cannot easily turn. And Israel’s oref is hardened, the Izbiczer suggests, because there is something at the core of Jewish identity that has been made by God to resist dissolution. God, he says, is the one that put this characteristic inside this people. The people will sin. They will wander. They will, in moments of despair and confusion, even build golden calves. But they will not, in the end, disappear. The neck will not bow all the way down.
What looks from the outside like stubbornness is, from the inside, resilience. What looks like the refusal to listen is, actually, the refusal to disappear completely. Am kshe oref is not a character flaw — it is a theological fact about a people who carry something so deep it cannot be negotiated away.
Now, there is a letter in the Bintel Brief — the beloved advice column of the Forverts, where Jewish immigrants poured out the anguish of their new American lives — that reads like a parable written precisely for this teaching.
A recording secretary of an Orthodox shul in a Western city writes in with a remarkable story. A man had recently come to their rabbi, a man everyone in the city knew well — known for his large pork business, known for his role in local politics, known by his Irish-sounding name. He was in his late sixties, six feet tall, respected and connected everywhere he went. Nobody, in thirty years, had suspected this man of being Jewish.
He had come from a small Jewish town in Eastern Europe — in fact, from the same town as the rabbi himself. He had arrived in America as a young man, shortened his name until it sounded Gentile, married a Christian woman. When she complained that he never went to church, he told her quietly: he was a Jew. She kept the secret. He kept the secret. They built a life, had daughters, became prosperous.
And then Hitler came to power.
The letter describes what happened next with almost unbearable simplicity: “his Jewishness was awakened.” He began to donate money — anonymously, so that no one could trace it — to Jewish institutions, to relief efforts for the Jews of Europe. He wanted to come forward openly, but his wife begged him not to, for the sake of their daughters’ standing in the community. He agreed. He waited.
After his wife died, he walked into the rabbi’s study and began speaking Yiddish. He wanted to come home. He wanted to join the shul — the Orthodox shul. He wanted to come back to a community that prayed in the language he had grown up hearing. And he wanted to endow it generously.
The rabbi said he could join — but first, he would have to give up the pork market.
The recording secretary is troubled by this, and a reader from Manchester, New Hampshire writes in to say so even more sharply. His argument is worth sitting with: “When a lost Jew wants to find his way back to his people, it is our duty to help him and accept him with open arms.”
And then, the observation: if the shul demanded kashrut from every member before accepting them, there would not be a minyan. The rabbi knows that Shabbat desecration is a greater sin than dealing in pork — does he check for that at the door? The recording secretary helpfully suggested to the man to join the Reform temple down the street, but the man refuses.
What I find most extraordinary in this letter is not the halakhic debate. It is this man’s oref.
He had done everything right, from the perspective of disappearance. He had changed his name. He had married out. He had built his livelihood on the very animal that stands as the symbol of everything outside the covenant. For thirty years. And still — still — when the Jews of Europe began to burn, something in him broke open that he could not close again. The donations flowed out of him anonymously, secretly, helplessly. He could not explain it. He could not stop it. He had never stopped being a Jew. The neck would not turn all the way.
And notice: he does not go to the Reform temple. He goes to the Orthodox shul, the one where the old rabbi speaks in Yiddish, the one that smells like the town he came from sixty years ago. The oref does not bring him back to a convenient Judaism. It brings him back to the one that feels true to his kishkes, to his gut.
The Manchester reader closes his letter with a phrase that has echoed through Jewish law for centuries: Yisrael, af al pi shechita, Yisrael hu. “A Jew, even when he has sinned, is still a Jew.”
It is a legal principle — but in this context, in this story, it becomes something more than law. It becomes a description of the oref itself. The stiff neck is not just stubbornness toward God. It is the stubborn persistence of Jewish being, the ontological refusal of full erasure. You can change your name. You can sell pork. You can live for decades in a life that has no visible Jewish content. And something — unnamed, unnameable — remains. When the moment of testing comes, it surfaces.
This is precisely what Moshe understands at Sinai. He does not come before God with a defense of the people’s behavior. He comes with a description of their nature. Ki am kshe oref hu — because they are stiff-necked. Because there is something in them that will always return. Because they cannot, in the end, be separated from You. Therefore, u’salachta la’avoneinu u’l’chatatenu u’nchaltanu — forgive our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your inheritance.
The answer that Moshe gets echoes throughout our history – the 13 attributes of mercy, that we sing on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The stiff neck is not a barrier to the covenant. It is the covenant’s most durable vessel. The very quality that makes the people difficult to lead, impossible to control, maddening to govern — is the quality that ensures they will still be standing at the end of every catastrophe, walking back toward the shul they grew up in, ready to come home.