[Avodah] Dying al Kiddush Hashem

[Zev Sero]

Our first model of kidush Hashem, I think, is that of R Akiva and his
colleagues.  R Akiva said that he had waited his whole life to fulfil
"and you shall love Hashem with all your life -- even if He takes your
life", and was happy that he finally had this opportunity.

But what really happened to R Akiva?  What was he really killed for?
I think if we were to do a poll in any MO community, or even on Areivim,
we would find the majority view was that he was executed as a traitor,
for his leading role in the Bar Kochva rebellion.  If this is so, then
the only kiddush Hashem in his death was in his attitude, that he didn't
despair and reject Hashem, or curse Him for what was happening to him;
that even while he was being horribly tortured he proclaimed how much he
still loved Hashem.  Very inspiring, and if true it's a model that could
apply very much to the Holocaust, at least to those who went to their
deaths singing Ani Maamin, etc.

But this isn't at all the traditional Jewish view of R Akiva's story.
The story as recorded in the gemara and as our zeides told it to us has
no mention of Bar Kochva or of rebellion.  Instead it's about Hadrian's
decrees, particularly the one against teaching Torah, and R Akiva's
deliberate public defiance of it.  According to this view, it was that
defiance, knowing very well what would happen to him as a result (it's
not as if he acted in secret, hoping to get away with it), that
constituted his kiddush Hashem.  Once he'd been arrested and sentenced,
could he have escaped death by renouncing his "crime", by promising to
embrace the Roman gods and become a loyal subject of the Emperor?
Perhaps; but if not, then he'd already made his decision and chosen his
fate, and in effect he had already become a kadosh the moment the
legionnaires came to arrest him -- all that remained to him was not to
mess it up, and he didn't.

-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas