Rabbi Akiva, free will and God's foresight

Avot 3:19 is one of the most enigmatic of Rabbi Akiva's teachings. In short, he says: "Everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted. The world is judged with goodness, and everything is according with the majority of the deed". 

The flexibility of Rabbi Akiva’s dictum offers great opportunities to vest his words with meaning. The table below shows how this mishnah in its entirety can be contrasted with an earlier mishnah (Avot 1:18) taught by his younger near-contemporary, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: ""he world is kept going by three things: truth, justice and peace".

Avot 3:19 (Rabbi Akiva)	Avot 1:18 (Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel)	Significance of contrasting content
Subject: the world, as viewed by man, which is full of doubt and uncertainty	Subject: the world, as viewed by God, which stands on three fixed pillars	God sees and knows all, while man’s knowledge is limited in time, space and depth of intellectual capacity
Everything is foreseen but free will is given	Truth	God, who knows all truths, makes man responsible for his actions by giving him free will
The world is judged for good	Justice	God, knowing all, is entirely just. Lacking such knowledge, man must give others the benefit of the doubt
Everything depends on the rov hama’aseh (literally "the majority of the deed")	Peace	God makes perfect peace in Heaven and on Earth; man-made peace is a compromise, depending on what the majority are prepared to accept

 On this reading, we see that Rabbi Akiva teaches how complex and baffling is the real world in which we live: we daily face unresolvable problems. We have to accept that, while nothing happens in the world unless God wills it, we have free will—or at least the illusion that it exists. We are required to be just, but our judgements are clouded by ignorance and uncertainty. We crave peace but know too well that one man’s peace (and indeed one nation’s peace) may be incompatible with another’s—and that even what appears to be genuine peace may be quite meaningless. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel however shows us how these same issues can be viewed, when considered from God’s perspective. To Him, truth, justice and peace are absolutes. They can be achieved if only we can approach them from God’s standpoint and not from ours. 

The point that we cannot understand God’s ways is poignantly recalled when we reflect on Rabbi Akiva’s own fate, as a faithful and brilliant Torah scholar who met a martyr’s death at the hands of Israel’s Roman conquerors. From Rav Yehudah’s aggadic account (below) of his martyrdom in the Talmud we see how this explanation of Rabbi Akiva’s own words applies: his death is foreseen though he still had the option not to teach Torah; God’s judgement is for the good even though we cannot understand how or why this is so, and the Romans followed the usual path of executing troublesome enemies in order to maintain peace in Israel in the form of the pax Romana, this being man’s path to peace but not that of God.

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Rav Yehudah's account of the death of Rabbi Akiva (Menachot 29b)

Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: ‘When Moses ascended on High, he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, engaged in fixing crowns on to the letters [of the Torah]. Moses said, ‘Lord of the Universe, What’s holding things up?’ He answered: ‘A man will arise, after many generations—Akiva ben Yosef—who will expound, upon each little crown, heaps and heaps of laws.’ ‘Lord of the Universe,’ said Moses, ‘let me see him.’ [Moses then has a vision in which he finds himself sitting at the back of a Torah class which he could not understand at all]. They came to a certain subject and the disciples said to their teacher, ‘Where do you know this from?’ When the latter answered, ‘It is a law given to Moses at Sinai’ he was comforted. [Moses then exclaims], ‘Lord of the Universe, even though you have such a man, You give the Torah through me!’ God replies: ‘Be silent, for such is My decree.’ Then Moses said, ‘Lord of the Universe, You have shown me his Torah, so show me his reward.’ ‘[Moses then has another vision, in which Rabbi Akiva’s flesh is being weighed out on market stalls]. Moses cried out: ‘Lord of the Universe, this is Torah, and this is the reward?’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree.’