Rabbi Akiva: From Shepherd to Leader of the Generation

Akiva ben Yosef herded the flocks of the wealthy Kalba Savua and knew not a letter until he was forty. His employer's daughter Rachel saw in him what no one else saw and married him in secret; her father cut her off, and they slept on straw while he picked the stalks out of her hair.

The turn came at a spring. Akiva saw a stone hollowed by dripping water and said: if the soft has worn away the hard, then words of Torah will surely cut into my heart. He went to study alongside his own son, beginning with alef and bet. Rachel let him go for twelve years, then twelve more. When he returned with twenty-four thousand students she came out in rags; the students moved to push her aside, and he said: leave her — what is mine and what is yours is hers.

Rabbi Akiva changed the way the Torah is read, deriving law from every particle and every crown above a letter, and sorting the accumulated material by subject — the foundation from which the Mishnah would grow.

The bitterest page of his life is the death of his students: twenty-four thousand died between Passover and Shavuot, the Talmud says, because they did not treat one another with respect. The world was desolate until Akiva began again with five students — among them Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.