How Rabbi Akiva Saved the Shema for the Jews
In 1898 the secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Walter Nash purchased four fragments of a sheet of papyrus from a dealer in Egypt. Written on them were the Ten Commandments and the Shema. Dated probably to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, the Nash Papyrus confirms the statement in the Mishnah (Tamid 5:1) that the Ten Commandments and the Shema were recited together. The Mishnah is referring to practices in the Temple; the Nash Papyrus (which may have come from a set of tefillin) shows that these two passages were also regarded as a single unit outside the Sanctuary.
However, we no longer read the two passages together. Indeed, the Ten Commandments are never recited as part of our regular liturgy; those prayer books which do include it, do so as a sort of appendix to the morning service. Both the Babylonian and Yerushalmi Talmuds tell us that the reading of the Ten Commandments was dropped because of the ‘claims’ (טענות in Y. Berachot 3c) or ‘rebellion’ (תרעומת in B. Berachot 12a) of the minim.
According to the Yerushalmi, the minim, who are never identified in the Talmud but are generally assumed to be an early Christian sect, were saying that the Ten Commandments were singled out to be read because this was the only part of the Torah given to Moses at Sinai.
The rabbis disagreed. Although there is no Talmudic consensus on which parts of the Torah were given on Sinai and which during the forty years in the wilderness, the idea that the Ten Commandments were somehow superior to the rest of the Torah was unpalatable. Even those who held that the Torah was given in stages as the Israelites travelled through the wilderness (e.g. Gittin 60a) did not elevate the Sinai-given commandments above the rest of the Torah.
To prove the point, to refute the assertion that the Ten Commandments were in some way superior to the rest of the Torah, the rabbis detached them from the Shema, and stopped their daily recital. There is no indication when this happened but it is Amoraim of the 3rd century CE who lead the discussion in the Talmud.
That Christianity regarded the Ten Commandments as fundamental to their faith is evident from Matthew (16-19).
Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.” “Which ones?” he inquired. Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honour your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’”
Jesus cited the Ten Commandments to indicate that they were fundamental. The Shema was also fundamental to early Christianity. In Mark, a Pharisee asks Jesus which is the most important commandment. Jesus replies by quoting the Shema (Mark 12, 28-30). And a little over a century later, the church father Justin, in his polemical Dialogue With Trypho, appropriates Jesus’s reply to claim the supremacy of Christianity over Judaism:
And hence I think that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ spoke well when he summed up all righteousness and piety in two commandments. They are these: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy strength’, and ‘thy neighbour as thyself.' For the man who loves God with all the heart, and with all the strength, being filled with a God-fearing mind, will reverence no other god; … whoever, says the Scripture, loves the Lord God with all the heart, and all the strength, and his neighbour as himself, would be truly a righteous man. But you [i.e. the Jews] were never shown to be possessed of friendship or love either towards God, or towards the prophets, or towards yourselves, but, as is evident, you are ever found to be idolaters and murderers of righteous men, so that you laid hands even on Christ himself; and to this very day you abide in your wickedness, execrating those who prove that this man who was crucified by you is the Christ.
The rabbis removed the Ten Commandments from the Shema to demonstrate that they were not superior to the rest of the Torah. They may have thought about abolishing the Shema too in order to refute the Christian suggestion that it was also more important than the rest of the Torah. But they could not cancel the daily recitation of the Shema. The very text itself mandates its daily recital, “when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up”. So, since they could not abolish the Shema, they had to do something else with it. They had to elevate it to ensure that it was seen as an exclusively Jewish text, to demonstrate that what it affirmed lay at the heart of Judaism alone, not at the heart of any other religion. They had to show that the Shema was Judaism, that the essence of Judaism lay in the Shema.
This is where Rabbi Akiva comes in. Justin lived in the first half of the second century. His dates overlap with those of Rabbi Akiva. Akiva may not have seen the passage from the Dialogue with Trypho but he would certainly have been familiar with the argument that Justin used. In Akiva’s day, in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, when the Jewish faith was in crisis and early Christianity was emerging, people like Justin were turning the Shema into a Christian text and using it to castigate the Jews.
We can see Akiva’s response to people like Justin in the Mishnah. The Mishnah is a product of Rabbi Akiva’s school, in fact Akiva may even have compiled its earliest version because our version of it contains a reference to ‘the Mishnah of Rabbi Akiva’ (Sanhedrin 3,4). The Mishnah makes no bones about the pre-eminence of the Shema. Its opening book is the treatise Zeraim, which deals with agriculture. But the very first book in Zeraim is not about agriculture at all; it is called Berakhot and deals with prayers and liturgy. The opening sentence in Berakhot asks “from when do we read the Shema in the evening.” One might expect the first sentence in the great compilation of Jewish law is to be about Shabbat, or Kashrut, or the Temple. It is not. In the Mishnah, edited by Yehuda HaNasi, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva’s students, the very first sentence is about the Shema.
Akiva stresses the importance of the Shema in his exposition:
And you shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart and all your soul and with all that you have.” (Deut. 6:5) “With all your heart” – with your two inclinations, with the inclination of good and the inclination of evil. “And with all your soul” – even if he takes your life. “And with all that you have” – with all your money. Alternatively, “With all that you have” – with every measure that is measured for you. (Berakhot 61b)
Akiva confronted the new Christianity in other ways too. We can think about his famous statement about Bar Kochba: “this is the King Messiah (Y. Taanit 4,5)”. Perhaps his emphasis was not on the word ‘Messiah’, but on the word “this”. “This (and no other) is the Messiah.” In other words, Akiva’s statement may have been less about proclaiming Bar Kochba as Messiah, than about denying that anyone else was.
Akiva also seems to challenge the Christian theology of suffering. He pioneers a phrase “beloved is suffering” (חביבין יסורין- Sanhedrin 101a). It sounds odd. When he said it to his teacher Rabbi Eliezer, he was astonished. It sounds Christian: Jesus’s suffering, according to Christianity, redeems the world. But the idea of suffering as a redemptive process originally comes from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, who writes about God’s “suffering servant”. Perhaps by stressing the idea that suffering is beloved, Akiva was reclaiming a theology that he saw as exclusively Jewish, that he feared was being appropriated by early Christianity..
Of course the most powerful evidence for Akiva’s advocacy of the Shema as the essence of Judaism comes from the story that is told of his death at the hands of the Romans.
When they took Rabbi Akiva out to be executed, it was time for the recitation of Shema. As they were raking his flesh with iron combs he was reciting the Shema, accepting upon himself the yoke of Heaven. His students said to him: Our teacher, even now, as you suffer, you are reciting the Shema? He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by the verse: ‘With all your soul’, meaning we are obliged to love God even if he takes our soul. I said to myself. “When will the opportunity be afforded me to fulfil this verse? Now that the opportunity has been afforded me, shall I not fulfil it?
He prolonged his uttering of the word ‘One’, until his soul left his body. As he uttered his final word ‘One’, a voice descended from heaven and said: Happy are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your soul left your body as you uttered: ‘One’. (Berakhot 61b)