The Dead Came in Dreams to Reopen Their Verdicts

The Scales Tipped Against Him

A Jew traveled far from home, lay down in a strange bed, and dreamed himself into the upper court, where the dead come to reopen the verdicts already passed against them. There the bright beings were weighing a man. They set the man on one pan of the great scales. On the other pan they began to pile his sins.

The sins came one by one, and then in heaps. The pan that held them sank lower and lower. The pan that held the man rose until his feet hung above the floor of heaven.

The bright beings looked at the balance and read it aloud. "His sins outweigh him," they said. "He has no share in the World to Come."

The Fox Skins Flung Onto the Pan

The dreamer thought the weighed man was someone alive, someone who would wake in the morning and never know how close the gate had come to shutting. He was wrong. The man on the scales had already died. This was his sentence being read.

Then others came. They pushed in among the first beings and stopped the reading. "You did not weigh him properly," they said.

In their arms they carried skins. Fox skins, and other hides, rough and heavy. They threw them onto the pan that held the man. The hides struck the metal and the balance shuddered. The man sank. His sins, all of them, lifted into the air. The pan with the body settled to the floor of heaven and held there.

"Behold," they said. "He is a son of the World to Come."

The dreamer did not understand the hides. The beings answered before he could ask. Those were skins the man had given when the community laid a tax upon every household and bound each one under a ban to pay a fixed share. He had paid his share in full and in faith. A grudging payment is only a payment. A faithful one is counted as if it were charity poured out by hand. So the prophet had promised that oppressors themselves would be turned to righteousness, and here the heavy skins of a hard tax came down on the side of mercy.

They weighed his body and not only his soul, because it is written that a king was once weighed in the balances and found wanting. And because this man had worn his body out in acts of kindness, the body deserved to feel the verdict turn.

The Sage and the Figure Taller Than a House

In another bed, in another night, a sage was visited by a different messenger. A person stood over his sleep, taller than the roof of a house, with a human face looking down from that impossible height.

"Come," the figure said. "I will show you your father's grave."

The great one led him through the dream to the burial place of his ancestors. There he bent and lifted the grave open as a man lifts a lid. "Speak with your father," he said.

The son looked down. His father lay in the opened grave and would not look back at him. The dead man's face was set hard with anger. He did not speak. He did not move. He lay rigid and shut, a father refusing his own child.

The Two Stones and the Unpaid Debt

The son stood over the silence and did not know what he had done. The towering figure explained the anger the corpse would not voice.

"He will not answer you," the figure said, "because his grave was ringed with stones, and gentiles came and took two of the stones and set nothing in their place." The son looked again, and now two gaps showed plainly in the ring, two missing stones, a fence broken open over the dead.

"And your father is angry for another reason," the figure went on. "He owed a certain man two zekukim. A single zekuk was not enough to settle the debt. Why did you never pay it for him?"

The dream ended there. The son woke with the question still in his ears and went straight to his mother. "Did my father ever repay that debt?" he asked. "Yes," she said. The debt, at least, was clear. The broken fence was not.

The Earth Carried Back to the Grave

He swore to himself that he would fill the grave back up and set new stones where the two were missing. The others heard him say it and caught his arm. "Do not do it," they warned. "It is a danger to your life." The graveyard was a place where gentiles would kill a Jew found tending it, and so the broken fence stayed broken and the promise stayed unkept.

Many days passed. Then he saw gentiles hauling earth out of their own houses and dumping it. He remembered the start of the dream, the giant lifting the lid, the father's locked face. "Since you are clearing earth from your houses," he called to them, "bring it to the graves, and I will pay you for it."

They carried the earth. He filled his father's grave until it was whole again and set two new stones in the broken places of the ring. Then he went down the rows and filled the other sunken graves that had caved in over the years, grave after grave, until the gentiles refused to carry one more load.

He had wanted to finish all of them. He had to stop short. After this a son died to him, and then a daughter, and some in the community said it among themselves. He had set his hand to a commandment and lifted it before the work was done. It had happened before, they said, to Judah, whose sons Er and Onan were taken. A grave left half filled was a verdict left half answered, and the dead do not forget which half.