Today I heard an interesting lecture, which stirred me up. The story of Rabbi Akiva and his students, who died in an epidemic, offers a couple of challenges.
Just to sum up the story, Rabbi Akiva, a prominent Jewish scholar who witnessed the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple, gained popularity among the young Jewish scholars and acquired after many years 24,000 students (to be sure, the numbers are not to be taken exactly, but rather point at the enormous impact of the teacher). According to the Jewish tradition, they all died because of the same reason - lack of respect to each other. And there came a good question from one of the lecture listeners: It is indeed very important to pay respect to others, but are there not more severe transgressions against the Torah, and against the humanity, that go unnoticed? Why did the students had to be punished so severely for the "mere" lack of respect?
Let us think about this. It is a legitimate wonder. Even if we admit that God evaluates the transgressions of righteous people (who Rabbi Akiva's students surely were) more stringently than those of simple and not so righteous people like me, we still can find an epidemics too harsh a punishment.
It might help to bring into picture two factors:
1. Historical setting of the story,
2. Who gave the reason for the epidemics.
The first factor will help us understand, that the story of Rabbi's Akiva was part of bigger history, namely the history of the Jewish people. Rabbi Akiva is marked by the Jewish tradition as a man of faith. Of such faith, that enabled him to laugh at a painful and terrible view of destroyed Jerusalem. He laughed, because he realized that the destruction of the Temple was already foretold by the Jewish prophets. And if the sorrowful words of the prophets are becoming reality, so their words of joy, namely the construction of the Third Temple, will one day become a reality.
People did not understand him. He was alone in his faith and deep insight. Yet, he raised a new generation of students, Jewish scholars and leaders, into a new scene - destruction and diaspora. The promising continuation was however sharply discontinued. All the students died. They did not respect each other as personalities. They were having lots of scholarly disputes, and they forgot that they were also people.
According to the Jewish tradition, there are two types of dispute: the one that is for the sake of the Heaven, and the one that is not for the sake of the Heaven. If the dispute if for the sake of the Heaven, the participants strictly divide between the partner in dispute and the partner in life. In dispute, there is raising voice, there is fierceness, passion, boycott. But in privacy, both parties show high respect to each other. The scholarly disagreement doesn't spoil the true nature of the relationship between two human beings. The opposite is true about the dispute that is not for the sake of the Heaven. Academic disputes are taken into privacy, both parties are hostile to each other.
It is not stated about the students of Rabbi Akiva that they hated each other. But they did not pay respect to their colleagues and that was something unheard of until then. This was the end of one era - the era of the Temple, of the Jewish political autonomy, of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel, the era of disputes for the sake of the Heaven, and the beginning of the another epoch - lack of Jewish statehood, lack of contact with Eretz Israel, diaspora, disputes that are not for the sake of Heaven. Rabbi Akiva's students were punished harshly for what other people would have probably survived. Not that we are claiming that later scholars were not righteous, or that all the Jews before the destruction of the Temple were righteous. Rabbi Akiva's students can be seen as symbolically marking the borderline between then and now.
The second factor is a question: Who gave the reason for the students' death? It was later Jewish spiritual leadership that reasoned the otherwise inexplicably targeted epidemics. Nowadays we read it as it is without a wink, as we read also about reasons given to the destruction of the First and the Second Temple. But imagine that someone would like to give similar reason to some contemporary tragedy. Just remember the vast criticism that falls on heads of those who give "spiritual" reasons to the Holocaust. So my question is simple - are we entitled to explain history or are we not? If we say yes, then the yes would be strongly selective. Not everyone has the spiritual legitimacy to suggest why bad things happen. It is only a very limited number of spiritual leaders who could possibly do that. And they themselves probably feel unfit to such a role, not daring to compare themselves to the Jewish scholarship from 2000 years ago. If the answer is no, than how can we learn from history? How can we amend what our forefathers (and us) corrupted? I think the answer is somewhere between. We are not in a place, from where we can point at tragedies and say "That's because X and Y." But it would be foolish to ignore that maybe someone wants us to stop for a moment and think what perhaps has to be done otherwise.
And this is indeed something we can live on during these difficult days of epidemics, that we are trying to stop. Not giving explanations or reasons. But acting as if we gave such a reason. Namely, improve our social and private behaviour. It is quite tricky at times when you barely meet anyone, when you have no real social contact, when virtual connectivity prevails. On the other hand, we have an opportunity to, while siting in our homes, slowly starting to miss the social part of our busy lives, define better our priorities, understand more the people around (our situation is all of a sudden so desperately same, or very similar, worldwide) and come up with a new social deal.
