“We the Jewish people are a stubborn people who do not even take the obvious for granted,” emphasized Israel’s former government secretary Zvi Hauser in an interview with the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom a few weeks ago. The president of the worldwide association of Moroccan Jews, Sami Ben Shitrit, also pointed out this biblical nature of our people to the Ma’ariv daily: “Neither quarantine nor lockdown will save us from the coronavirus, because our people are a stubborn people. Most of them simply don’t follow instructions.”

In recent months, quite a few politicians and rabbis in the Israeli media have been moaning about the disobedient behavior of the Israeli population during the Corona crisis. Each community, each sector of society demonstrates in its own way the human nature of the Jewish people, who are stubborn and stiff-necked.

Modern politicians are not the first to use this term in complaining about the behavior of Israel. On several occasions in the Bible, God calls the children of Israel stiff-necked. A people who, despite receiving...