Rabbi Akiva strode briskly into his candle-lit, austere study, his tallis draped around him, the fringes caressing the floor. His staccato gait belied the fact that he was in his 80s. A desk, a few chairs scattered haphazardly, two blackened quills, and a collection of rolled papyrus in a wicker basket were the ornaments of the day. The tips of the rabbi’s right thumb and forefinger were still blackish, although he had tried meticulously to scrape off the staining black ink that left its mark on him and his desk. The vaulted ceiling made the room seem bigger than it was, high windows on all four sides kept a soft breeze circling the chamber. Rabbi Akiva opened a secret compartment in his podium that stood at attention in the center of the room and took out his tefillin. Even as he began his prayers, his mind darted to the Mishnah he was organizing and jumped from there to the Midrash he had begun extrapolating the night before.
The rabbi raised the sleeve of his left hand, opened a blue cloth bag, and took out two black tefillin boxes wrapped in black straps. He opened one box, took out the arm tefillin, and recited a blessing before binding the tefillin onto the bulging bicep of his left arm. A black strap spiraled down from the hand tefillin, draping the slender podium. He pulled on the strap, tightening the knot that bound the black box to his arm. Slowly, methodically, he circled the strap around his arm seven times, turning the remaining strap around his palm.
He took the second black box, which housed the tefillin of the head, and put it on like a crown, reciting yet another prayer. Looking into a small mirror on his desk, he centered the head tefillin between his eyes. He parted two black straps that hung from the back of the “crown” and let them dangle over his chest. He recited a seven-word prayer praising God’s gift of sustenance to the world as he touched each one of the seven black circles wound around his arm. The number seven spoke to Akiva, its personification of things worldly – the seven days of the week, the seven Noahide laws, the death of Hannah’s seven children – reminding him of the rabbinic imperative to squeeze out every ounce of joy, every day, from God’s wonders. How he would have liked to squeeze out one more day this day, if only to savor the love that flowed from his angelic wife, Rachel. Then he unwound the strap around his palm and swiftly intertwined it about his fingers, palm, and the top of his hand, forming the Hebrew letters Shin, Dalet, Yud, which spelled the mystical word Shaddai, the antediluvian attribute that God had given Himself to create the boundaries of the universe and set limits to the workings of the world.
Akiva grasped the podium and began swaying. He recalled his days as a boorish, unlettered young man, sitting idly by a stream, watching drops of water collect at the edge of a tree branch and fall slowly, one after the other, like lemmings, onto a large shiny gray rock below. “Foolish drops,” he said out loud, “you can no more penetrate that hard rock than the words of the sages could penetrate my thick skull.” But after a time, he saw what looked like a wrinkle, a slight indentation just where the water was bombarding the rock, and he instantly understood. The bloated drops had splattered against the rock, thrashing its exterior, eroding it with their suicidal intensity until finally they had made their mark. At that moment, Akiva resolved to penetrate the impenetrable mountain of Torah, drop by drop, word by word, until he left his mark as well.
Rabbi Akiva’s upper body moved like a pendulum, back and forth, his feet keeping time to the silent song he sang to God, his arms grasping the podium, rocking it to and fro in a preternatural dance. The gates of the seven heavens gave way to his passionate prayers, as he prepared himself to make the final leap into God’s unfettered world.
But he knew the time had not yet come. It was too early in the day. Too dark.
A praetorian blow rattled the door of his study. “Let us in!” demanded the Roman legionnaire. “Now!” Akiva dissolved his prayers and removed the tefillin of his arm and head, placing them into the secret compartment. The door screamed a warning as a fresh blow sent dust and small splinters hurtling through the air.
Rachel rushed in to stand in front of her husband, to protect him from what must happen. The rabbi moved her gently aside. “It’s only Shaddai who has come to take me home,” he said to his beloved. He stepped forward and swung open the door. The soldiers stormed in. Rachel grabbed his hand in a vice-like grip, crying, “No! No! Leave him be!” even as the soldiers pried their hands apart and placed their own soiled arms on her beloved.
Mandius, the young leader of these Roman soldiers, had not anticipated such animosity from his soldiers and quickly commanded, “Leave him be!” The soldiers grudgingly moved away from both husband and wife.
Mandius had known Akiva since childhood. He had learned much about the Jews through this rabbi and had grown to love and respect the sage. More than once he had clandestinely visited Akiva and warned him that his forbidden practice of Judaism was being observed. Akiva only smiled and said, “But my practice of Judaism is who I am.”
When Mandius had entered the Roman Army, his superiors soon observed his natural leadership qualities and he rose quickly through the ranks. Naturally, he had to submerge his feelings for the Jews, aligning himself instead with those who had no use for these strange, obstinate people who rejected their gods and worshiped one God. A God, it seemed to cohorts, only the blind could see.
Hearing that Rabbi Akiva was to be taken to the proconsul, Mandius requested to lead the detachment that would arrest him. He knew he could not save the rabbi, but he might be able to help him face the inevitable.
Mandius stepped forward and gently pulled Rachel away, whispering, “Look at him. He is ready.” Holding back his own tears, he and Rachel watched as the legionnaires took Akiva away.
In the Great Hall, Lucius Sempronius, the proconsul, stared unabashedly at the tall, broad-shouldered rabbi who stood before him, dressed in a simple white flax robe, inadvertently the center of attention. Akiva’s long silver hair and beard framed thick, black, bushy eyebrows that underlined a deeply wrinkled brow. His loose-fitting robe could not hide the taut muscles resting below. The diminutive Roman proconsul secretly wished he had some of Akiva’s strong physical attributes. A recurrent intestinal ailment had left the Roman proconsul gaunt and stooped over, as though he was looking for something he had lost. His long face, with its hollow cheeks, served to frame his one remarkable characteristic: A decidedly Roman nose that seemed to point the way. Looking up, he barely reached the chest of his adversary.
Lucius Sempronius beckoned the guards to bring Akiva closer. “This comes of rebellion,” he stabbed his finger into Akiva’s chest, but only after he made sure the rabbi was securely shackled. “Did you think there would be no consequences to your joining that rebel Bar-Kochba? Messiah indeed! Mess-maker would be a better title for him. Look at the mess he made for you, for Rome. Do you think the Roman Senate has nothing better to do than quell rebellions? The loss of life! Was it worth it, Akiva? Did it bring back your Temple? Have you seen what’s left of your holy Jerusalem?”
Rabbi Akiva smiled and swayed. He was no longer with them. He was at the ruins of the Temple, where he and his companions had gone to view for themselves the damage done to God’s Earthly House. As a fox sauntered out of what was once the Holy of Holies, the other rabbis wailed and rent their clothes. Rabbi Akiva smiled the very same smile he now revealed to his captors.
“Why do you smile like that?” asked Rabban Gamliel, deeply offended.
“Why do you cry like that?” responded Rabbi Akiva.
“In a place where the Torah says, ‘A non-Jew who enters forfeits his life,’ a fox now makes its home; should we not cry?”
“But that’s why I’m smiling,” answered Akiva. “When I see that the prophecy of Uriah, who warned that the Temple would be ‘home to wild animals,’ has come to pass, then I know Zechariah’s later prophecy that ‘children will yet laugh in the streets of Jerusalem’ will come true as well.”
“Stand still!” Lucius Sempronius commanded, raising himself up on his toes in a vain attempt to look Akiva in the eye, “and wipe that smile off your face. We have prepared something special to put you in the mood for your death, Akiva, something that will stop your senseless daydreaming.”
“I am already in the mood for my death, Proconsul,” Akiva said, looking up at the rectangular window behind his tormentor. The sun’s rays were warming the ledge of the window, preparing to vault into the Great Hall. Lowering his gaze, Akiva whispered, “You are holding me up.”
Lucius Sempronius stepped back, uneasy. This Jew should be negotiating his freedom, or at the very least begging for a quick death, he thought. But instead, his face glowed and his eyes burned with a strange passion. Something was amiss.
“We’ll see,” was all Lucius Sempronius could think to say. “Guards, take him away!”
Before the soldiers could grab him, Mandius stepped forward, grasped Akiva’s shoulder, and whispered, “Come, Akiva, there is nothing you can teach those here.”
Rabbi Akiva looked at Mandius and gently touched his hand. The boy had always shown promise.
As Mandius and Akiva walked away, the contingent of warriors followed, but felt uneasy, seeing the way their commander was treating a Jew.
The assemblage wound its way to the palace dungeon. Lucius Sempronius had not built the torture chambers below ground. He wanted his prisoners to see the light coming from the chamber’s window, to see a new day arriving, to realize that the future would pass them by as they suffered their painful death.
This suited Rabbi Akiva.
“So, this is the great rabbi Lucius Sempronius spoke about,” said the beefy torturer, his bald head shining as he heated the tools of his trade. The room was small, too small to hold everyone comfortably. There were the traditional racks that tore a person’s limbs off, metal head-caps that could be turned until they crushed the skull, knives encrusted with blood, and a table where a single metal claw with four pointed fingers stood at the ready.
“I’ve been warned not to kill you,” the torturer said, turning to Rabbi Akiva. “You are special. Look at what I have in store for you,” he said, lifting the claw. “I’ve spent much of this morning sharpening this, just for you,” he grinned. “It takes a little getting used to, it does. I call it the Snake’s New Skin. Why? You ask. Well, you see a snake sheds its skin every year or so and slithers away with a wet, new, smooth skin. Boas and pythons are at their most vulnerable when they shed because they lose much liquid in the process, but soon they just slither away, good as new. I can peel your skin so thin that you will barely feel it, that is, the top layers. It’s the bottom layers that take expertise. It’s hard to keep a person alive then, but let me assure you, you’ll not slither away.”
Without warning, in one paw-like motion, the torturer ripped off the rabbi’s robe. “Of course, the chances of you growing new skin before you die are, well, zero,” he laughed.
Rabbi Akiva ignored him. He kept his gaze above the torturer’s head, fixed on the tiny stream of light peeking through the high window. He was calculating the exact time the sun would rise. If the fellow would just stop talking and start doing whatever he was meant to do, he could actually meet his death at exactly the time the high priest of the Temple would have welcomed the sun’s rays announcing a new day, a new day of God-given life: “Barkai!” He had always wanted to die at that special morning moment reserved for announcing a Jew’s renewed love for God.
“Looking for a way out, are you?” the torturer said, standing between the light and the rabbi, completely blotting out the rabbi’s view of the window. Akiva blinked, then gagged as the torturer’s vile body odor suffocated the air around him. This only made the torturer more talkative.
“That’s better,” his tormentor said, laughing, mistaking the rabbi’s discomfort for fear.
The torturer looked over his shoulder at the soldiers, curious to see if they were laughing too. He was dismayed to see them standing at attention, staring.
What had caught their attention was the rabbi’s circumcision.
One of the soldiers whispered, “Do you think it’s true, that circumcision actually makes women go wild?”
“Please begin,” Rabbi Akiva said, not as a request, but as a command. “Now,” he added, looking upward again, watching the light drain the darkness in the chamber.
“My pleasure!” spat the jailer. He trussed Rabbi Akiva in a blood-speckled metal harness that immobilized his limbs. He stood in front of Akiva, blocking his view of the window. Then the torturer took the rake with its four flat, sharp fingers and waved it in front of the rabbi. “Snakes always shed from the neck down,” he said, as he slowly ripped off the top layers of skin from the middle of Akiva’s sternum down to the beginning of his stomach. The soldiers screamed, masking Rabbi Akiva’s scream. Their swords clattered as they took baby steps backwards. “Go back to your barracks!” Mandius ordered his squeamish soldiers. He alone remained.
The torturer paid no attention. He had seen the faint of heart flee before. “Don’t worry. You won’t die from this wound,” he said, humming a tune. Blood oozed out of Akiva’s chest, flowed down the ridges of his stomach muscles, and onto his thighs. “Most people who get the kind of flaying I’m giving you last for hours, even days,” he lectured. “In a while, you’ll start feeling cold and your teeth will chatter, but we have time. I’ve only begun to peel the snake.” Then he flayed more skin, working his way down to Akiva’s thighs.
It was at this point that Lucius Sempronius walked in with his gaily dressed entourage.
“Kill me!” Rabbi Akiva shouted. Something in the rabbi’s voice made the torturer stop what he was doing. A moment of fear overcame him. He gently placed his rake back on the table.
“Don’t you dare listen to him,” Lucius Sempronius commanded. He turned to Rabbi Akiva. “Not so haughty now, are we, Rabbi?” he said. “Anxious to die, are you? Well, you’ll die when I say so.”
“Kill me,” Rabbi Akiva ordered again, his blood filtering, like a sieve, to the surface of his body. The morning light sought out Akiva’s writhing, skinless form, as though trying to heal him.
The torturer grabbed his rake and stripped the skin from the right side of the rabbi’s face. “Scream all you want, Jew,” he said, conscious of the presence of his master. “I’m in charge here.”
But Mandius had heard the rabbi’s command and accepted it. He unsheathed his sword and ran towards Rabbi Akiva. The torturer tried to stop him, but Mandius easily parried his thrust, slitting the jailer’s throat. Lucius Sempronius and his entourage saw the carnage and ran out, oblivious to the demands of rank.
Mandius didn’t think to save the rabbi – it was much too late for that. His only thought was to fulfill Akiva’s wish.
As he raised his sword over a tearful, smiling Rabbi Akiva, he heard the rabbi’s last words echo throughout the chamber and burrow deep within his own nascent, uncircumcised Jewish soul.
“Shema Yisrael A-donai E-lohaynu A-donai Echadddd.”
The end
The writer is the owner of the Sherlocks Hats shop and the author of AZAZEL and Other Jewish Stories. ■