[Avodah] Dying al Kiddush Hashem

[Yitzhak Grossman]

On Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:01:54 -0500
Zev Sero <zev at sero.name> wrote:

...

> 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

...

> 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

I cannot answer for what MO or Areivimites may think, but AFAIK, there's
absolutely no basis for the idea that R. Akiva was executed for his
role in Bar Kochva's rebellion.  Indeed, there's apparently no
evidence, outside of the Talmudic and Medrashic traditions, that he
even played any role whatsoever in the revolt, or even that he
supported him at all!

See, e.g., Ben-Zion Rosenfeld's article "The Sages in the Generation of
Bar Kochva and their Relations to the Revolt Based on Tannaitic
Literature" in "Ohev Shalom: Mehkarim Le'Kevodo Shel Yisrael Friedman
Ben-Shalom", who begins by pointing out that the majority of sources
consulted by scholars for information on the relationship of R. Akiva
and his contemporaries to Bar Kochva and his revolt are from the
Talmudic and later Medrashic literature, which are dated generations
after the events, and he then struggles mightily to mine the earlier
Tannaitic literature for more contemporary information. Ultimately, he
has very little success in finding any concrete reference to the
rebellion in those earlier sources (at least according to my fairly
brief perusal of the article); the best he can do is to argue that
given the apparently religious natures of Bar Kochva and his
comrades, and the importance of R. Akiva and his colleagues as
religious authorities, we must assume that those Sages at least
tolerated, if not actually supported him, since otherwise the revolt's
apparent organizational and logistical success would not have been
possible.

So, as far as I know, any assumption that R. Akiva was executed for
treason in connection with the revolt is pure unfounded speculation.
Ha'Peh She'Asar Hu Ha'Peh She'Hetir; Hazal are our only actual source
that R. Akiva was a major supporter of Bar Kochva, and they know
nothing of this theory of his death.

 > Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this
Court's

Yitzhak
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