Before Rabbi Akiva became the greatest sage of his generation, he was an illiterate shepherd in the employ of Calba Savua, one of the wealthiest men in all Jerusalem. He was forty years old and could not read a single letter of Torah.
Calba Savua's only daughter, Rachel, fell in love with him anyway. They carried on a secret courtship for months before her father found out. When he did, he raged. Akiva was the son of a proselyte, rumored to descend from Sisera and Jael, ignorant, unlettered, old enough to be her father. Calba Savua threatened to disinherit her, throw her out of the house, cut her off entirely. Rachel stood her ground. She married Akiva, traded her father's mansion for her husband's shack, and lost everything.
After a short married life, she did something stranger still. She sent him away. "Go study," she told him. "Go to the great academy far from here. I will wait."
As Akiva walked, he began to lose his nerve. A forty-year-old illiterate among schoolchildren? More than once he thought of turning back. One day, resting by a spring, he noticed how the water dripping from a ledge had worn a hollow into solid rock. He watched for a long time. Then he said to himself, "If soft water can carve stone, can words of Torah not carve my heart?" He stood up and kept walking.
Under Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, the shepherd became a scholar. Twelve years later he returned leading twenty-four thousand students. When they crowded around him to celebrate, Akiva silenced them and pointed to a ragged woman pushing through the throng. "All that I know, and all that you know," he said, "is hers." The story, preserved in the Talmud (Ketubot 62b–63a) and retold in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, is one of the great love stories of Jewish tradition.
A tradition worth remembering: what wears down stone is not force. It is patience, repeated long enough to become a shape.
Hereto hangs a tale stranger than fiction, yet founded on fact. Rabbi Akiva was once a poor shepherd in the employ of Calba Shevua, one of the richest men in all Jerusalem. While engaged in that lowly occupation his master's only daughter fell in love with him, and the two carried on a clandestine courtship for some time together. Her father, hearing of it, threatened to disinherit her, to turn her out of doors and disown her altogether, if she did not break off her engagement. How could she connect herself with one who was the baseborn son of a proselyte, a reputed descendant of Sisera and Jael, an ignorant fellow that could neither read nor write, and a man old enough to be her father ? Rachel — for that was her name — determined to be true to her lover, and to brave the consequences by marrying ' him and exchanging the mansion of her father for the hovel of her husband. After a short spell of married life she prevailed upon her husband to leave her for a while in order to join a certain college in a distant land, where she felt sure that his talents would be recognized and his genius fostered into development worthy of it. As he sauntered along by himself he began to harbor misgivings in his mind as to the wisdom of the step, and more than once thought of returning. But when musing one day at a resting-place a waterfall arrested his attention, and he remarked how the water, by its continual dropping, was wearing away the solid rock. All at once, with the tact for which he was afterward so noted, he applied the lesson it yielded to himself. " So may the law,** he reasoned, "work its way into my hard and stony heart; and he felt encouraged and pursued his journey. Under the tuition of Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Hyrcanus, and Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Chanauiah, his native ability soon began to appear, his name became known to fame, and he rose step by step until he ranked as a professor in the very college which he had entered as a poor student. After some twelve years of hard study and diligent
