רבי עקיבא

Rabbi Akiva is living proof that it is never too late. Until the age of forty he was an ignorant shepherd, who even hated Torah scholars. The transformation was wrought by a woman: Rachel, daughter of the wealthy Kalba Savua, perceived the greatness hidden in him, married him in secret on condition that he go to learn, and her father cut them off to poverty (Ketubot 62b).

One day Akiva saw a stone hollowed out by drops of water, and said: if the soft carved the hard, then words of Torah, which are hard as iron, will all the more carve my heart. And he went and learned the alphabet with children, without shame.

For twenty-four years he learned far from home, and returned with twenty-four thousand students. When his wife Rachel came to greet him in the garments of poverty, and his students sought to push her away, he told them: leave her, 'what is mine and what is yours, is hers' (Ketubot 63a). All his Torah, and all theirs, was the merit of one woman.

Akiva taught the great principle: 'you shall love your fellow as yourself, this is a great principle in the Torah.' He expounded the crowns on the letters of the Torah, and it is told that Moshe our teacher was brought in a vision into his study hall and did not understand his lesson, until a student said 'it is a law given to Moshe at Sinai,' and his mind was set at ease (Menachot 29b).

At the end of his days, when Rome decreed against the study of Torah, Akiva continued to teach in public with self-sacrifice. They seized him and raked his flesh with iron combs, and he recited the Shema. His students said to him: our teacher, even to this point? He said: all my life I was troubled, when will I fulfill 'with all your soul,' even if He takes your soul, and now that it has come to me shall I not fulfill it? His soul departed on the word 'Echad' (Berakhot 61b).

Most of the anonymous Mishnayot follow his approach, and he is one of the pillars of the Oral Torah. His teaching: 'all is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given, and the world is judged with goodness' (Pirkei Avot 3:14).

Rabbi Akiva teaches that there is no despair, that love raises up the great, and that the true love of God is measured in the hardest moment of all.