Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives

3. Wiesel and Rabbi Akiva

3 Wiesel and Rabbi Akiva Joseph Polak Early in his essay on Rabbi Akiva, Elie Wiesel asks: Is it because of the striking similarity between his times and ours that Rabbi Akiva seems more present—­ more relevant—­ than most other Talmudic personalities? As a survivor of the destruction of Jerusalem, he had to find a way of conferring meaning upon it; he had to learn—­ and teach—­ how to deal with its aftermath, how to explain and articulate what cannot—­ should not—­ be explained, what to tell . . . people who wondered why they should go on praying, or dreaming, or living as Jews in a world that seemed to have been drained of Jewishness.1 The essay on Akiva is magnificent; not a stone about him is left unturned, not a legend neglected. Every primary and sec­ ondary source on his life has been plumbed and sifted. And yet for all his admiration and admitted love for this hero, still, as befalls him so of­ten, a question haunts Wiesel: why did Rabbi Akiva go so stoically to his martyr’s death at the hands of the Romans; why was he so accepting of his sentence, why did he die apparently exalted by the fact that it offered him the privilege of martyr­ dom; why did he die teaching this? Didn’t he know, he asks, how dangerous it is to exalt martyrdom, didn’t Rabbi Akiva know that this would be modeling po­ liti­ cal passivity ; wouldn’t it—­ if I may put words in Wiesel’s mouth that he himself would never use—­ teach Jews to go to their deaths like sheep to slaughter? In his own words: I am mystified by Rabbi Akiva’s passivity during his [final] agony. He seems to have welcomed suffering and death. Rather than rebel and turn his pain into an existential insurrection, his punishment into an act of supreme protest, he decided to submit and pray. Rather than formulate the question of all questions—­ that of the role of divine justice in human anguish—­ he answered it. And for some time I did not like his answer. As much as I admired and revered Rabbi Akiva, a hero of many dreamers, I could not help but see him as a martyr who was attracted by martyrdom. . . . The fact that countless generations of victims and martyrs have claimed kinship with Rabbi Akiva has made the problem even more acute, more challenging. 30 Wiesel and Rabbi Akiva | 31 Who knows? Had he spoken up, had he revealed his anger, had he protested what was happening to him, his fate—­ and ours—­ might have taken a different course. . . . I remember the nocturnal processions of Jewish families walking toward death—­ it seems that they, too, like Rabbi Akiva, were offering themselves to the altar. It seems that they, too, had given up on life—­ as he had, many of them with Shema Israel on their lips. Why didn’t Rabbi Akiva opt for defiance? Why didn’t he proclaim his love of life up to the very moment it was taken away from him? Why didn’t he weep instead of rejoice? Didn’t he consider that to die willingly for one’s faith could—­eventually—­be interpreted as an element of weakness in that faith? What kind of law is the law that brings suffering and cruelty upon those who serve it with all their might and with all their soul?2 Let us examine some of Wiesel’s assumptions here and see how well they fare. The first of these is the question of martyrdom as theater—­ dying, so to speak, in a fashion that represents a conscious lesson to its witnesses and to history. How likely is it, in other words, that Rabbi Akiva sought to have people draw deep lessons from his behavior during his execution? The answer, from Jewish law, is simple. The conduct exhibited by a sage most of the time is to be taken as normative; the sage’s pub­ lic behavior can even be cited as prece­ dence in Jewish jurisprudence. We have a Tosefta that weighs in on Rabbi Akiva’s own opinion on this matter: In both the biblical and rabbinic traditions, residents of the land of Israel were obligated to assess their produce with multiple tithes; the study of the details of these tithes fill a whole Order (large literary section) of the Talmud (Zerai#m—­“Seeds”). Fruits and vegetables, in other words, were not...