Portraits in Leadership: Rabbi Akiva

Enroll Today!! For more info visit http://myjli.com. Lesson Four: THE PERSEVERANCE TO LEAD Are there dreams that you have given up on? What is it that you once would have loved to do, but think you are too old to do now? What new dreams are you afraid to consider because you think it is too late? Too often, we are content to live within the limits defined by distant decisions and former failures. Rabbi Akiva, however, who spent his youth disdaining the academy, was willing to rethink his life at the age of forty, and with the encouragement of his wife, Rachel, spent the next twenty-four years absorbed in study and scholarship. He was able to see the destruction of Jerusalem, and yet retained faith in the future of the next generation. And when, as a centenarian, he lost all but five of his students in a plague, he began investing anew in training a new cohort of protégés who would transmit his teachings to the next generation.