An Outstanding Generation

Rabbi Melanie Aron

April 27, 2002

The Teachings of the Great Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud span twelve generations, six generations of Tannaim early scholars of the Mishnah and six generations of Amoraim, later generations of Talmud. Yet what is particularly striking is how many of the greatest of our teachers were either contemporaries or students of Rabbi Akivah. This is all the more remarkable if you know something of the history of the period.

Rabbi Akivah lived after the destruction of the Temple in the time of the Hadrianic persecutions. He and many of his colleagues were martyred by the Romans. It was a time in which the study of Torah was forbidden and yet it produced the greatest literature of Torah scholars.

This week's chapter of Pirke Avot, the book which we read between Passover and Shavuot, includes teachings by rabbis as early as the Yavneh period, just post 70, and as late as Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (200), but most of the statements quoted in this chapter are from scholars who lived around the time of Rabbi Akivah around the year 135 of the Common Era.

Was it the force of Rabbi Akivah's personality that created that renaissance? Certainly he was an exceptional individual. An ignorant peasant, he fell in love with a rich landowner's daughter. He was so unimpressive at that time that his father-in-law forbade the marriage and cut off his own daughter from all his wealth. Poorer than church mice, the couple lived in a barn. Akivah remained ignorant until he was 40, when according to tradition, he noticed that small drops of water eventually carve their way through even the hardest stone. Convinced by this, that learning could penetrate his skull, he went with his son to school and gradually over time was recognized as the outstanding scholar of his generation. Perhaps the period of his lifetime was so fruitful for the development of Jewish tradition, because of the stimulus of his outstanding personality.

There is also another possible explanation. Do you recall the Weavers song:

"Wasn't that a time - a time to try the souls of men - wasn't that a terrible time."

Perhaps it was the challenge of those difficult times that produced its greatness. Having chosen to risk so much for the sake of Jewish study, perhaps this generation approached it with a passion, a ferocity even, which explains their outstanding contributions. There are other periods of Jewish history which support this hypothesis.

The period of the Babylonian exile, so difficult for the people of Israel was also a time of spiritual and literary creativity as many earlier traditions were written down and synthesized.

Many centuries later the challenge of the Kaarites, which threaten to split the Jewish community produced some of the most important philosophical defenses of Judaism.

There was a time, when I was younger, when I worried that I was living in such boring times, that I was missing out on some important aspect of human existence. Now I think that our generation too faces difficult times. I pray that these times do not defeat us, but that we are able to rise to them, as did the generation of Rabbi Akivah and other generations of our people. Perhaps the challenges will also be the impetus for our generation's contribution to Jewish life and to the communities in which we live.