Akavya Named Three Hard Things Before Sin

Akavya ben Mahalalel did not raise his voice for it. He waited until the room went quiet, and then he set three things down on the table between his students and the door.

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"Consider three matters and you will not come to sin. Know from where you came, from a putrid drop. Know where you are going, to dust, maggots and worms. Know before Whom you are destined to give a reckoning, before the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He."

A young man near the window had somewhere to be that evening and had been thinking about it since the morning. He looked down at his own hands as though somebody had just told him where they came from, which somebody had. Outside, a fruit seller kept calling a price that nobody was paying.

One Verse Held All Three

Rabbi Akiva had found the whole of it inside a single line, "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth" (Ecclesiastes 12:1). The word he leaned on was bore'ekha, the Creator. Turned one way it becomes be'erekha, a well, which is the drop a man came out of. Turned the other it becomes borekha, a pit, which is where the worms are. Left alone it is the King who will ask for the accounting.

The verse says the days of youth on purpose, because it is meant to arrive while a man still has his strength and can still be talked out of something. It lands on nobody in the evil days that come after.

The Bone That Would Not Break

The second matter sounds at first like an exit, since a man who is going to be worms has nothing much left to be threatened with. The emperor Hadrian thought so, and he put it to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya as a challenge: from what will the Holy One make a man blossom again in the future?

"From the nut-sized bone at the top of the spine," Rabbi Yehoshua said.

"Prove it to me."

He sent for one and put it in water, and it did not dissolve. He ground it in a mill, and it came out whole. He put it in fire, and it would not burn. Then he laid it on an anvil and struck it with a hammer, and the anvil split and the hammer split, and the bone lay there in the wreckage of the iron without a mark on it.

So the grave is not a door out of the third matter. It is the waiting room.

Rabbi Shimon Ben Halafta Stopped Climbing

Every month for years Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta went up to greet Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. Then the visits stopped, and when he finally came again he came slowly, and Rabbi Yehuda asked him what had been keeping him.

"The far have become near," he said, "and the near have become far. Two have become three. And the thing that kept peace in my house is finished."

The knees that guard the house had started to shake. The grinders had ceased because the teeth had dwindled, and it had gone dark at the windows where the eyes look out. When a bird chirped near his roof before dawn he sat straight up in the bed, certain that robbers had come for him.

None of that had been news to Akavya. He had said it while his students were still young enough to argue with it.

May a Man Question the King

The third matter is the one people try hardest to get out from under, and the way out that Israel tried was to put the Judge on trial. "Master of the universe, did You not write in Your Torah, do not take vengeance and do not bear a grudge? But You take vengeance and You bear a grudge."

It is the complaint of a disciple whose teacher forbade him to lend at interest and who then watched the same teacher lend at interest. "Rabbi, for you it is permitted and for me it is forbidden?" The teacher answered that the disciple had only heard half the rule, since the ban was on lending to an Israelite and not on lending to a gentile, so the disciple had spent his outrage on something he had not understood.

God answered Israel the same way, that He does not bear a grudge against Israel, though He keeps one for the nations who came against them, and that the ban laid on them was a ban on taking vengeance against the members of their own people. Then the verse closes the argument the way a gate closes: "Since the king's word has power, and who will say to him, what are you doing?" (Ecclesiastes 8:4).

The Loaf Handed Back

There was a priest who was scrupulous about ritual purity, and he handed a loaf of teruma bread to a priest who was not. "Look," he said. "I am pure, my house is pure, and the loaf I am giving you is pure. Give it back to me the way I gave it to you and all is well. If not, I will throw it down in front of you."

That is the reckoning Akavya meant. The soul was pure when it was handed over, the house it came from was pure, and it is coming back across the same counter.

The young man by the window sat through all of it and then got up when the others got up. He did not turn righteous on the stairs. He went out past the fruit seller and turned left, which was the longer way home, and he did not explain it to anybody.