Moses sees Rabbi Akiva (Menachot 29b)
Moses sees Rabbi Akiva teaching the Oral Torah, and later meeting his fate at the hands of the Romans, in a sugya (passage) in the Babylonian Talmud.
Readers are expected to know that Rabbi Akiva, a leading sage of the early rabbinic period, was known for his interpretive creativity, and that he was one of the ten martyrs who were tortured and killed by Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt.
[3] In this Talmudic sugya, Rav Yehudah narrates the story, which can be summarized as follows: When Moses ascended into heaven (or Mount Sinai), he saw God preoccupied with making ornamental "crowns" (tagim) for the letters of the scriptural Torah.
God explained that a man named Akiva ben Yosef would be born, in a future generation, and that he would derive "heaps" of halakha (Jewish laws) from "each and every thorn" (kotz) on Torah letters.
The story of Moses seeing Akiba deals with the broadening of Jewish teachings beyond revealed scripture, the Hebrew Bible, with a self-conscious attention to how far rabbinic exegesis has gone, as discussed by Rubenstein.
[3] Moreover, he suggests that the sugya, when Moses sees Rabbi Akiva, reflects a shift after tannaitic (early rabbinic) literature to revalue interpretation in the Talmudic period.
The rabbinic counter-narrative quietly alludes to its Christological parallel and it sets up Akiva as "a messianic figure, but not the Messiah; and he is martyred and his body consumed, but he is not yet resurrected.
For example, politically conservative, Orthodox rabbi Meir Soloveitchik wrote about the sugya in a 2008 sermon with the idea that the Torah, with its detailed calligraphy, is an in-depth "love letter" from God to the Jewish people.
[16] A British rabbi, Sylvia Rothschild, quoted the sugya when giving a sermon at the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, saying that just as Moses was puzzled by Akiva's approach, so her ancestor Pinchas Halevy Horowitz (16th C.) would not understand much of contemporary Judaism, though some aspects would be familiar.
