“It happened once that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon were reclining in Bnei Brak and telling the story of the Exodus that whole night, until their students came and said, ‘Rabbis, it’s time to say the morning Shema!’”

This strange little story doesn’t appear anywhere in the Mishnah or the Talmud, only in the traditional Haggadah. At first glance, these rabbis appear to be at a seder, but modern commentaries call that assumption into question. Because of the mitzvah to tell the Exodus story to the next generation, it’s unlikely the sages would have a seder together without their families or students present.

Instead, many suggest that they were gathering to plan a revolt against the Romans who were colonizing Palestine and that their students (who were serving as lookouts) interrupted to warn them of danger. Rabbi Akiva was the spiritual leader of the Bar Kochba revolt, a valiant but doomed revolutionary effort to throw off the yoke of Roman oppression. He was so enthralled with Shimon Bar Kochba, the rebellion’s leader, that he declared him the Moshiach. Akiva paid dearly for his revolutionary activities and messianic fervor, being brutally martyred by the Roman state. But the Romans never killed the Jewish people’s revolutionary spirit. 

Perhaps there is another revolutionary lesson here. How could five of the wisest rabbis of all time not have the common sense to look out the window and see the sunrise? Even if we believe that the students’ line about the morning Shema is referring to approaching danger, why were they up so late? This is a story about losing track of time. In order to harness the revolutionary potential of the moment, we must live in it fully. Ironically, through doing so, we live simultaneously in every other revolutionary moment, past, present, and future. 
 


haggadah Section: -- Four Questions
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan