These words, while they greatly increased the respect which the rabbi felt for Mosheh, also added immensely to his perplexity. They seemed utterly to shut the door in the face of any attempt to obtain the required sum. Rabbi Akiba himself was not the possessor of any considerable amount of money. His income was not large and he never had any difficulty in disposing of it, there being plenty of claimants on his bounty outside of his own family. If, therefore, he could not go to the wealthy householders in the Kehillah and openly ask them for donations, he knew of no source whence he could derive the assistance needed. It would not do to request of them the gift of such a large amount without stating the purpose for which it was to be used. They might give it to him, such was their respect for his character and their trust in the purity of his motives, but they would be apt to speculate on the use to which he intended to devote it, and very likely they would find it out, too, and that would be directly contrary to the explicit desire and request of Mosheh, Hence the perplexity and the mental struggles by which the poor rabbi had been tortured all day until at supper he had found, as he thought, the solution of the vexatious problem. The simpler solution which would have suggested itself to many a modern cleric, to shrug the shoulders deprecatingly and politely to inform the suppliant that he regretted extremely that under the circumstances it was impossible to do anything for him, did not occur to Rabbi Akiba. He was narrow in many ways, limited both in views and experience to that which could be acquired in the secluded recesses of the Beth Hammidrash, simpler, indeed, than many a modern child in worldly ways; but on that very account his moral fibre possessed the old, unspoiled Jewish sturdiness. He knew that Mosheh was deserving of sympathy and help, and he determined to help him if there were any possibility of doing so; and believed he had now found a way to attain that wished-for end.