Quotes from Barry W. Holtz

Probably no statement attributed to Akiva is more well-known and more associated with him than this one: of the verse "love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18)

According to Josephus, Gessius Florus never omitted "any sort of violence, nor any unjust sort of punishment; . . . it was this Florus who necessitated us [the Jews] to take up arms against the Romans, while we thought it better to be destroyed at once, than by little and little" (Antiquities 20:254–57).

And he said, "It is not that Eleazar knows more Torah than I do but that he is descended from greater men than I am. Happy is the person whose ancestors have gained merit for him. Happy is the person who has a 'peg' on which to hang.

The clause "whose inside is not like his outside" is used elsewhere in the Talmud (b. Yoma "The Day" 72b) to indicate a person who puts on a nice show for others that does not conform to his inner, true self—a morally deceptive person in other words.

I will tell you a parable. To what can this situation be compared: A fox was once walking alongside of a river and saw swarms of fish going from place to place. He said to them: 'From what are you fleeing?' "The fish replied: 'From the nets that people throw to catch us.

You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor but bear no sin because of him. You

Third, Akiva adds a different perspective. The real problem, he suggests, is that no one understands the best way to rebuke another person. If the person doing the rebuking understood how to rebuke, rebuke would be more easily accepted by the other.

What, in the end, can we say about Rabbi Akiva? Throughout this book I have tried to keep in mind the words of the novelist Margaret Atwood in the epigraph: "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.