The Dead of Ashkenaz Came Back to Collect Their Due

The carpenter looked at the offcut on his bench and saw a violin. The coffin was built, nailed, lowered. This last length of board was good wood, well-grained, and it would be a waste to burn it. His neighbors told him to leave it. "Do not take that piece," they said. He took it anyway, planed it thin, bent the sides over heat, strung it, and drew a bow across it until it sang.

That night the dead man came to him.

The Corpse Who Demanded His Board Back

In the dream the buried man stood close, the way the living do not stand. He had been measured for that wood. He knew every plank that had gone into the dark with him, and he knew the one that had not. "You were warned," the dead man said. "Break the instrument, or you will come to harm." The carpenter woke, remembered the cold of the dream, and reached for his bow. The sound was too sweet to give up. He played on.

Then the fever took him. It climbed through the winter and would not break, and the carpenter lay shrinking in his bed while the violin hung silent on the wall. His son understood what his father would not. He took the instrument down, carried it past the edge of town to the cemetery, and found the grave of the man whose coffin had been short one board. He raised the violin over the headstone and brought it down. The wood cracked apart. He left the splinters scattered on the grave, and by the time he reached home his father's fever had begun to fall.

Whoever mocks the poor, the old verse says, insults his Maker. The dead man had been poor in the one thing the dead still own, the wood that wraps them, and a stranger had stolen a strip of it for a toy.

The Army That Hauled Its Own Wagons

A different night, a different road. A man rode alone through open country, the moon full enough to throw shadows. He was crossing waste ground, scrub and stone, when he saw what looked like a marching army ahead, wagons and great wagons, a whole baggage train laboring across the moonlit ground.

Something was wrong with the shape of it. The wagons were not pulled by oxen or horses. Men were in the traces. Men strained against the ropes and dragged the loads forward, and on top of the wagons other men rode at their ease, doing nothing, going where the haulers took them.

He rode closer to understand it, and as he came up beside the column he began to recognize faces. He knew these men. He had stood at some of their funerals. "What is this?" he asked them. "Why do you pull the wagons all night while the others sit and ride?"

They answered without stopping, because they could not stop. "Because of our sins," they said. "When we were alive in that world we chased women and girls and took what we wanted and called it nothing. Now we pull until we cannot pull, until our legs give and our breath is gone. Then the ones on the wagon climb down, and we climb up, and we ride and rest while they drag us. When they fail, we trade again. It does not end." The whip in that place was held by the upright, who drove the haulers the way a man drives a beast that has stopped earning its feed. Whoever had lived like an animal now labored like an animal, harnessed and lashed, hauling through the dark the weight of everything he had once made others carry.

The Body the Soul Cannot Take Off

These were not phantoms with nothing inside them. Among the dead the soul carries the body still. A spirit is fine and thin, but it stays wrapped in the scent of the flesh it wore, and the flesh stays wrapped in the scent of its clothes, and even fire does not strip that scent away. Burn the man, burn his house, burn the furniture, and the smell of it still rises to testify, because the dead grasp everything they touched in life and bring it with them.

So the dead choose their clothes. When they wish to be seen, and permission is granted, they appear to their children in whatever garment they please, sometimes the shroud they were buried in, sometimes a coat from years before the grave. Only the robbed are naked. Strip the shroud off a corpse, steal the cloth it was buried in, and that spirit stands exposed before itself, with no garment its soul can wear.

One man wore his Shabbat clothes into death and never the shroud. Rabbenu HaKadosh came back to his household dressed as he had dressed at the Shabbat table, in his finest, so they would know he was not like the ordinary dead. He had not been released from the commandments. He was strong enough still to lift the cup and say the Kiddush for the whole house, and so he came in living clothes and blessed the wine, and the righteous, who are called living even in their graves, kept their seat at the table.

The Spirits Loosed Before the Gates Shut

But not every spirit sits at a table. The truly wicked do not go down to Gehinnom at all. When they die their spirits turn into something that hunts, harmful things, the way the dead of Cain's line turned harmful, their souls remade into mazzikim that wander loose and strike. And there is one seam in the week where they run free.

On the eve of Shabbat, as the day comes in and the fires of Gehinnom bank low for the rest, the gates that hold the punished stand open for a breath, and the spirits that are not penned inside come out. Permission is given them to harm. They go for the ones who scorn the day, who labor through it, who sit sour while everyone else lights the lamps, who take no delight in it at all. So a sickness comes at the turn of the week, an illness no physician's hand can reach, because no human medicine touches a wound a spirit makes. Against that injury there is one defense. The household sings the song against harmful encounters beside the song for the Shabbat day, asks aloud for deliverance to rise and for health of the body, and waits for the One who wounds and heals His own blow to close the gates again.