Four Rabbis Walked Into Paradise and Only One Walked Out

The marble looked like standing water. Akiva stopped the other three at the last gate, because he knew they would want to shout.

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They had climbed as far as the orchard they called Pardes (פרדס), the grove that is not a grove. Four sages, and the floor beyond the threshold shone so hard it seemed to move.

"Do not say water," Akiva said. "If you cry out that you are drowning, you have lied in a hall that will not let a liar dwell."

Ben Azzai nodded too fast, but Ben Zoma was already looking past him, and Elisha ben Abuyah did not nod at all. Then they went in.

Names at Every Gate

The climb was not a garden walk. Palaces stacked on palaces, and each gate had guards who threw themselves at a man who arrived with the wrong name in his mouth. Fire ran along the walls. Wheels turned in the air, and the rims of the wheels were crowded with eyes that did not blink.

Somewhere above them a throne waited the color of sapphire, the same throne the prophet Ezekiel had seen from a riverbank: fire inside fire, four faces on the creatures that carried it. Akiva had the names ready. He had learned them the way a man learns a password he will need in the dark. The others had learning enough to pass the first gates, but learning is not the same as a closed mouth. The orchard did not smell of fruit. It smelled of heat.

Ben Azzai Did Not Come Down

Ben Azzai went first because he always went first. Torah had eaten him so completely he had never stopped long enough to marry. He reached the height and looked the way a starved man looks at a table, and his chest stopped.

There was no fight to tell. He saw what a living body is not built to hold, and the body did the only thing left to it. They said over him that the death of the faithful is precious in God's sight, but a kind verse does not change the fact that the orchard kept him and sent no one back with a report. Akiva did not shout for him. Shouting was how you lost the next man.

Honey Until It Came Back Up

Ben Zoma looked and lived, which was worse. He came down the stairs talking, and the sentences were brilliant though they did not join. Students who had once brought him any question in the house of study now walked him back to his own door like a man struck on the road.

He had found honey and eaten past enough, so the overflow came out as madness. Part of him stayed at the marble, still arguing with the shine of it. The rest of him walked the lower world with that argument unfinished in his mouth. He could still quote, but he could not hold a thought long enough to sit down with it.

The Angel Who Sat

Elisha went higher. He did not die and he did not crack, but he understood, and the understanding was the wound.

In the inner court the angel Metatron sat at a desk, writing. In that court everyone stands. Only God sits. Elisha looked at the seated scribe, at the crown, at the pen moving, and a second throne assembled itself in his mind, fully formed. Two powers, not one.

He let it harden on the way down. He tore his own learning to pieces, and the sages stopped saying his name. They called him Aher (אחר), the Other. His student Rabbi Meir kept walking beside his horse on the Sabbath, though he stopped at the limit of the Sabbath boundary, taking Torah from a mouth he would not follow over the edge. The horse went on. Meir stood in the dust with the teaching in his ears and the teacher already gone past the line.

Akiva Swallowed the Word

Akiva came to the marble alone. The floor shone like a pool after rain, and his throat filled with the shout, but he held it down. He did not name water. He did not name a second god. He took the fire in through his eyes and left it there.

The gates opened behind him. Ordinary dirt found his feet, and he still had his name. Ben Azzai's body had stayed, and Ben Zoma's mind, and Elisha's name, but Akiva walked home with his mouth shut, which was the whole art, and the hardest one.