Gaster's exemplum No. 258 preserves a story that has startled every generation of Talmud students, because it involves Rabbi Akiva following his teacher Rabbi Yehoshua into the beit ha-kissei, the privy, and watching him.
The Talmud (tractate Berakhot 62a) tells the fuller story. Akiva, curious about how a sage handles even the most private bodily functions, hid himself and observed Yehoshua. When the teacher realized what had happened, he was furious — not at the intrusion itself, but at what it represented. "Akiva, have you lost all sense of modesty?"
Akiva answered, unblinking, "It is Torah — and I must learn."
The line has passed into rabbinic legend. The student did not go there to mock his teacher; he went because he believed that the Jewish sage's derekh eretz — his ordinary manners, his habits of decency, even in the most mundane moments — was itself a form of Torah worth studying. How does a pious man keep his dignity in the privy? How does he orient his body? How does he pray, if he prays at all? How does he leave?
These are not silly questions to the rabbis. Judaism is a religion of small gestures. The way a Jew handles the least private moment reveals more than his public speeches. Akiva, who had come to learning late in life, did not skip the lesson just because it was uncomfortable. Torah meant everything — and everything included how one's master carried himself at every hour.
The story is, in its own way, an argument for total musar: ethics is embodied, not declaimed.