Kalba Shebua's Daughter Sent Akiva to Study at Forty

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The Crown With the Stones In It

Late in his life, when there was money, Rabbi Akiva had a crown made for his wife. A heavy one, set all over with precious stones, the kind of object a man commissions when he has stopped counting.

His children asked him why she got things like that.

"Because I cannot pay her back," he said. "There is no amount."

She Married the Shepherd

Her father was Kalba Shebua, one of the richest men in Jerusalem. Akiva worked for him, out in the fields, watching the flocks. That was the whole of him at that point. A hired man with sheep.

She turned down men with land and picked him, and she attached one condition to it before she would betroth herself. Go and learn.

Her father put her out of the house and swore an oath that she would get nothing more from him, not a coin, not a loaf.

She moved in with Akiva's mother. The neighbors knew exactly whose daughter was living in that house now, so they brought her work quietly, at the door, the way you hand something to a woman who used to be above you and cannot be seen taking it. She did the work and sent part of what she earned out to her husband, who was somewhere else, learning.

A man with a bad leg laughed at her about it in the street. Her hair, he said, would go grey before that shepherd of hers turned into a scholar.

The Hole in the Stone at Lud

Akiva was forty years old and had never studied anything. He did not believe it could be done to him. Whatever the other men in the study hall had, he had not been born with it, and starting now was a joke that would run for the rest of his life.

He was sitting by a fountain in Lud when he noticed the stone.

A big one, at the well head, with a hole worn straight through the middle of it.

"Who bored that out?" he asked.

The rope, they told him. The bucket rope runs over it. It has been running over it for years.

He sat there and looked at the hole in the rock.

"If a soft thing can cut a stone," he said, "then the words of the Torah are as hard as iron, and my heart is only flesh."

He got up and went to learn.

The Smoke

What frightened him was not the work. It was being watched doing it, a grown man in a beginner's row.

His wife handled that too, and not with encouragement. She showed him, by demonstration, the plain mechanics of it. People laugh at a thing once. They laugh at it a second time. By the third time they have seen it before and their eyes go somewhere else. That is all it is.

He lived on straw. Every day he cut hay, sold half of it to eat, and burned the other half at night to see by and to keep from freezing.

His neighbors came around to complain. Akiva, they said, you are killing us with that smoke. Sell us the other half of your straw and buy oil with the money and read by a lamp like a person.

"I cannot," he said. "That straw is my light and my heat and my living, all three."

I Am the Man

Twelve years later he came back to Jerusalem with two thousand students behind him and the whole city went out into the road to meet him.

Kalba Shebua came out too, and got in line, and asked the great teacher for a legal ruling on a private matter. He had driven a daughter out of his house years ago and sworn an oath never to support her. She was starving now. Could the oath be released?

Akiva asked what she had done.

"She betrothed herself to an ignorant shepherd," the old man said. "A man who could not say the blessing over bread."

"And if that shepherd has become a scholar since?"

"If he knew even the blessing," Kalba Shebua said, "I would give him half of everything I own."

"I am the man."

Her father stood up in the road, took hold of him, kissed him, and thanked God out loud in front of the crowd for a thing he had spent twelve years trying to prevent.

Leave Her Alone

She came through the crowd to reach him.

Twelve years of other people's mending had not left much of the rich man's daughter. She got to the front, went down in the dirt of the road, and took hold of his feet to kiss them.

The students moved in to pull her off him. They had no idea who she was. Some woman.

"Leave her alone," Akiva said. "Everything you know and everything I know belongs to her. It is the wisdom of women that builds the house."

The students let go of her arms.