Akiva and the Dead Tax Collector Who Carried His Own Fire

The road ran through a graveyard, and out of the gravestones a man came running. He carried a stack of firewood taller than himself, naked, his skin burned the color of a cold coal, and he moved at the pace of someone fleeing a whip nobody else could see. Rabbi Akiva stepped into his path.

"Stop," Akiva said. "Are you a man or a demon?"

The figure did not stop so much as stagger to a halt, swaying under the load. "I am a dead man," he said. "Once I breathed the same air you breathe. Now every day I cut this wood and carry it to the place where I am burned, and the wood that burns me is the wood I gather with my own hands."

Akiva looked at him. The man's shoulders were raw where the bark had ground them open, and the wounds did not bleed, because there was no blood left in him to spill.

The Wood He Cut for Himself

"What did you do," Akiva asked, "that this is your portion?"

"I was a tax collector," the dead man said. "I had power over a town, and I used it the way the strong always use it. I bowed to the rich man and waved his debt away with a smile. I broke the poor man over a coin. A widow came to me and I took what she had and called it the law. I did this for years and I died comfortable, and then I woke up here, in Gehinnom, gathering my own fire."

He shifted the load and a few sticks slid loose and he scrambled after them, frantic, as if losing one would cost him more than carrying it. He gathered them back against his chest.

"Every morning the pile is whole again," he said. "Every day I carry it. Every night I am the fuel. And in the morning it is whole again."

The One Door Left Open

Akiva had stood beside the dying and the condemned, and he had never learned to look away. "Is there nothing," he said. "No road out of this at all."

The dead man hesitated, and the hesitation was worse than the running, because it was the first time something like hope crossed his ruined face.

"There is one thing," he said. "I heard it spoken among the burning. If a son of mine were to stand before a congregation and lead them in prayer, if he were to call out, Barchu et Adonai ha-mevorach, bless the Lord who is to be blessed, and the people answered him, then I would be lifted out of the judgment. A father whose son sanctifies the Name in public does not burn alone."

"Then you have a son," Akiva said.

The man's face fell back into the dark. "I left a wife with child. I do not know if she carried it to birth. I do not know if it was a boy, or if it lived, or if a single soul ever taught him one letter of Torah. I left him nothing. I taught him nothing. Why would anyone teach the son of a man like me?"

He looked at the wood in his arms. "There is no one," he said, and he began to run again.

Akiva Goes Looking for a Boy

Akiva went down into the world of the living to find a child who might not exist.

He asked in the dead man's town. He asked the name and watched faces curdle at the sound of it, the name of the collector who had crushed them. The widow he had robbed remembered. The poor he had broken remembered. And yes, there had been a wife, and yes, she had borne a son, and no, no one had touched the boy. He had grown up uncircumcised, unwashed of the father's reputation, unable to read, a neglected thing on the edge of the town that the town was glad to forget.

Akiva found him. The boy knew nothing. He did not know the alphabet. He did not know the blessings. He had never been brought into the covenant of his people, and the people who might have brought him in had decided his father had forfeited that on his behalf.

Akiva did not decide that.

From the First Letter

He circumcised the boy and brought him into the covenant that his father's name had locked him out of. Then he sat him down and began where everything begins, with the first letter, aleph, and then the second, and the shapes of the words, and the sound a word makes when it stops being marks and becomes a voice.

It was slow. The boy had years of nothing to climb out of. Akiva fed him and clothed him and taught him to read, and then taught him the prayers, and then taught him Torah, sitting with the child of the man the whole town despised until the marks on the page turned into meaning in the boy's mouth.

And one day the boy was not a boy. He stood at the front of a congregation, at the place where the prayer leader stands, and he opened his mouth and called out across the room, "Barchu et Adonai ha-mevorach. Bless the Lord who is to be blessed."

And the people answered him. "Blessed is the Lord who is to be blessed forever and ever."

The Father Comes Back Clothed in Light

That night Akiva slept, and the dead man came to him.

He was not blackened now. He was not running. The wood was gone from his arms and the burns were gone from his shoulders, and he stood in front of Akiva clothed in light, the way a man stands when nothing is chasing him anymore.

"You have released me," he said. "My son stood before the congregation and blessed the Name, and the fire let me go. You found a son no one would teach, and you taught him, and he reached down into Gehinnom with one sentence and pulled me out."

Then he was gone, and Akiva woke in the dark, and somewhere a boy who had been left with nothing was now a man who could lead a roomful of people in blessing the Lord.