From Mount Scopus, Rabbi Akiva, with three other sages, gazes down at the destroyed Second Temple. A fox, fulfilling Jeremiah’s dismal prophecy, pokes its head from the ruins. Jewish history has reached its end. 

Akiva laughs. According to the Babylonian Talmud, the other sages stare at him, incredulous: History has testified to the obsolescence of the Jewish people. Their story is sealed; the book is closed. 

But Akiva sees a different ending to the story: Just as the prophecy of a destroyed temple came true, the prophecy of a restored Jerusalem would also be fulfilled to the letter. Akiva laughed amidst the ruins because he knew the story wasn’t over. 

Two thousand years later, and days before the Tisha B’Av fast that marks the destruction of the Second Temple and other historical calamities facing the Jewish people, we understand Akiva’s laughter — not a light-hearted “ha-ha,” but anguish and defiance in a single breath.

I feel this acutely as a purveyor of Jewish stories that continue the saga the destruction of the temple failed to end. Like so many others, I was distressed when, last week, the president of PEN America, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned — not over a censored book or a jailed writer, but in protest of his organization’s report on the exclusion of Jewish........

© The Jewish Week