The Nine Hundred and Three Gates and the Kiss of Death

The sages bent over a single word in the Psalms and started counting. The verse said that to God the Lord belong the issues of death, and the word for issues, totzaot, carried a number hidden in its letters. They added the letters one by one. Four hundred. Six hundred. Nine hundred. Three. When the total stood, they looked at one another in the lamplight and understood that they were no longer counting letters. They were counting doors.

Nine hundred and three gates lead out of a human body, and a soul leaves through exactly one of them.

The Hardest Road Out of the Body

The worst of the gates the sages named askara, a sickness that seizes the throat and will not let go. They reached for the cruelest comparisons they had. It is like pulling prickly thorns out of a fleece of wool, where every barb catches and tears on its way free. It is like dragging a thick ship's rope backward through a vent no wider than a finger, where nothing moves without violence. The body fights for every inch. It does not want to give up what is in it, and the soul does not slide loose. It is torn loose, knot by bloody knot, while the throat closes and the lungs labor and the watchers at the bedside can do nothing but hold the hand and wait.

That is one gate. There are nine hundred and two more, and most of them are nearer to this one than to mercy.

The Angel Who Is Made of Eyes

At every deathbed, whichever gate has been assigned, three figures arrive together. A scribe. An escort. And the one the dying person has never seen until this instant. The dying man protests from the pillow, "My end has not yet come." The scribe answers nothing. He opens a ledger and begins to count out the days and the years, and as he counts, the sick man's eyes are opened, and he looks for the first time at the Angel of Death.

The thing stretches from one end of the world to the other. From the soles of its feet to the crown of its head it is covered over in eyes, eyes upon eyes, none of them blinking. Its clothing is fire and its covering is fire and it stands inside fire and it is fire. In its hand it holds a blade, and from the edge of that blade hangs one drop, bitter and trembling. The first taste of that drop is death. The next is the slack jaw and the loosened limb. The last is the pallor that spreads green-grey across the face of the corpse. The man on the bed knows, looking at it, that no one passes any of the nine hundred and three gates without first standing in this fire, because no one dies until they have seen what cannot be seen and lived. To die is to be shown the face that the living are forbidden, and then to be allowed, at last, to look.

So the mouth of the dying opens of its own accord and confesses everything it ever did, and the scribe writes every word down.

The Drop Withheld

But the blade is not lowered the same way over every bed.

When the one who is dying lived straight, the eyed angel does not tear. The soul is handed back gently to the One who lent it, and three companies of bright messengers come up to meet it on the threshold. The first call out, "A righteous one has perished from the earth." The second say, "Let them come in peace." The third say, "They walked the straight road, let them rest upon their couches." The bitter drop never touches the lip. The thorned rope stays coiled in the dark, unused.

And over the very best of them, the angel of eyes is not sent at all.

The Gate Reserved for Moses

On the mountain across from Beth-peor, Moses finished writing the last words of the Torah and laid down the reed. He had spent the day refusing to die, standing inside a circle he drew on the ground, begging to live on as a bird, as a beast in the field, as an eye behind a door. He had beaten back Samael with the staff of God when that angel came girded with a sword, stripped the horn of glory from his head, and sent him away blind. No angel could take this soul. So God did not send one.

The Holy One came down to the mountain and bent over Moses Himself. There was no fire and no blade and no bitter drop. There was only the mouth of the Lord, leaning close, and a kiss. The soul of Moses rose into it the way a single hair is lifted out of a cup of milk, clean, silent, leaving no mark in what it leaves and clinging to nothing. The Torah marks the manner of it in three small words, that he died by the mouth of the Lord, and the sages read those words exactly as written. He was kissed out of the world.

This is the gentlest of the nine hundred and three, the gate called mitat neshikah, the death by kissing. Aaron went out through it on Mount Hor, and Miriam went out through it, and the tradition set the matriarchs there too, drawn out as softly as breath off the surface of water.

Why the Easiest Death Cannot Be Stolen

The sages were certain the kiss could not be counterfeited or seized. A man does not arrive at the milk-and-hair gate by luck, the way a traveler stumbles onto an easy road. He arrives there because of how he stood for eighty years and more. To be drawn out by the mouth of God, the face has to have been turned toward God the whole time, until the last breath, so that when the Holy One leans in there is nothing left in the soul that resists, no knot for the rope to catch, no barb to tear. The thorned throat and the dragged rope are gates a life walks toward without meaning to. The kiss is the only one of the nine hundred and three that has to be earned, hour by hour, all the way down to the end.

Nine hundred and two gates take what the body will not surrender. One gate is opened from the inside.