Why Rabbi Akiva Could Smile at His Teachers Suffering

Two passages preserved in Hebraic Literature, the 1901 English anthology of Jewish texts, work together to teach the rabbinic doctrine of yissurin shel ahavah, the sufferings of love that the righteous endure precisely because they are righteous.

The first is the famous moment when R. Akiva smiled while his teacher R. Eleazar was dying. The second is the conversation between R. Meir and his apostate teacher Acher about the two portions every person holds, one in paradise and one in Gehinnom.

Akiva's Smile at His Teacher's Bedside

The Akiva passage describes the deathbed of R. Eleazar. Friends and students surround the bed weeping. Akiva, alone in the room, appears happy. The mourners ask why.

Akiva answers with a series of agricultural images. If his wine did not grow sour, if his flag was not stricken down, then Akiva would have to assume that Eleazar received the entirety of his reward on earth, leaving nothing for the world to come. Eleazar's present suffering, in Akiva's reading, is the visible sign that Eleazar's reward has not been exhausted in this life.

The teaching is the rabbinic doctrine in compressed form. The most righteous people, the tradition holds, occasionally commit small sins. Those sins are punished in this world through visible suffering, leaving the soul perfectly clean to receive the full reward in the world to come. A righteous person who suffers visibly, in this reading, is being processed by a benevolent system that wants to deliver the eventual reward without deductions.

Akiva's smile is not callous. It is the smile of a student who recognizes that his teacher's current pain is the receipt for the unblemished entry into the next world. The mourners weep because they see the pain. Akiva smiles because he sees the receipt.

Acher's Question and R. Meir's Answer

The second passage records a deeper conversation. Acher, the famous apostate sage Elisha ben Avuyah, asks his student R. Meir about Ecclesiastes 7:14. God has set the one over against the other. What does the verse mean?

R. Meir answers in standard rabbinic terms. There is nothing the Holy One created without also creating its opposite. Mountains and hills against seas and rivers. The pairing is universal.

Acher rejects the answer. Your master, Rabbi Akiva, did not say so, Acher tells him. Akiva said something stranger. He created the righteous and the wicked. He created paradise and Gehinnom. Every person has two portions, one in paradise and one in Gehinnom. The righteous person, by personal merit, ends up carrying both his own portion of good and the wicked's portion of good. The wicked person, by personal fault, ends up carrying both his own portion of suffering and the righteous person's portion of suffering.

The teaching, in Akiva's framework that Acher preserves, is structural. The portions are predetermined. The person's choices determine which portions they will eventually occupy. A righteous person can purchase the wicked's reserved-paradise-share by living righteously. A wicked person inadvertently donates their own potential paradise-share to the righteous through their wickedness.

How the Two Passages Cooperate

Read the two passages together and the rabbinic theology of suffering and reward comes into focus. Akiva's smile at Eleazar's bedside is meaningful because of the two-portion framework Acher preserves on Akiva's authority.

Eleazar's earthly suffering, on Akiva's structural view, is removing small deductions so that Eleazar can enter the world to come carrying both his own paradise-portion and potentially the paradise-portions of others he has helped become wicked. The smile is the recognition of the longer accounting. The mourners are watching the medium-term loss. Akiva is watching the long-term gain.

Why the Tradition Preserved Both

The Hebraic Literature anthology preserves both the personal scene at Eleazar's deathbed and the structural exchange between Acher and Meir because the personal scene is incomprehensible without the structural exchange. Jewish folklore preserved the pair so that future generations encountering personal suffering could carry forward both the comfort Akiva's smile offers and the framework Akiva's theology requires.