Twelve Months of Ash and the Faces Black as a Pot

The mouth opens before the body can flinch. Gehinnom stretches its jaw wide at the gate, and the angels of destruction throw the sentenced soul forward onto its face, and a second rank of them catches the soul and shoves it over the lip of the fire. There is no falling and no bottom. The fire receives what is given to it and asks for more.

At that threshold two walls of angels stand, and they do not whisper. They cry, "Give! Give!" The cry has no end in it.

The Year Inside the Pyres

What burns there is not one fire but five, and they do not behave like the fire of the living world. One fire eats and drinks. One drinks and does not eat. One eats and does not drink. One neither eats nor drinks. And one fire eats fire. Among them lie coals the size of mountains, coals the size of hills, coals heaped like the Salt Sea, coals like great stones, and through it all run rivers of pitch and sulfur, seething, boiling, fed by the wood of the broom shrub.

Into this the soul of an ordinary sinner is set down for twelve months. Not a moment less, and, for that soul, not a moment more. A year is the first mercy, though it does not feel like one from inside the coals. The angel who keeps the ledger of one transgression comes, exacts it, and walks away. Then the next angel comes for the next sin, and the next, the way creditors line up before a king who tells them only to divide the debtor among themselves. So the soul is split and split again, paid out sin by sin, until the account is empty.

What the Fire and the Snow Did to the Body

A man is dragged from the fire to the snow and from the snow back to the fire, over and over, the way a shepherd drives one flock from this mountain to that mountain and back. His worm does not die. The flame above him does not go out. Beside him hang others, fixed in the air by the part of them that sinned, by the tongue, by the hands, by the eyes, by the legs.

Some are fed their own flesh. Some are fed live coals of broom-wood. And some, who once swallowed what they had stolen and found it sweet, are now made to eat fine sand against their will until their teeth break in their mouths. Over them a voice carries through the smoke. "When you ate what was stolen, it was sweet to you," it says. "Now you have no strength left even to eat."

The Houses of Bitterness for the Crooked Judge

Past the pyres of Israel's coarse and common sinners lie the seven pyres reserved for the nations who served foreign worship, and in each of those a soul burns a full twelve months before passing to the next. From beneath the Throne of Glory a River of Fire pours down on them and runs from one end of the world to the other.

And there is a chamber built for one kind of guilt alone. In each of the seven pyres stand six thousand houses. In each house, six thousand windows. In each window, six thousand jugs of bitterness. Every jug is prepared, and every jug is waiting, and none of it is for the thief or the glutton or the idolater. It waits for the scribes and the judges who held the law in their hands and did not rule honestly. Of that hour Solomon had already written the warning, that in the end a man groans when his flesh and his body are consumed. Not one of them slips past the jugs. Only Torah in his hand and good deeds beside it can tip the scale and pull a soul to the side of mercy.

The Souls That Rise Blackened

After twelve months the ordinary wicked are not released. They are finished. Their bodies dissolve, their souls are consumed, and a wind lifts the ash and scatters it under the soles of the righteous, exactly as the prophet wrote, that the wicked shall be ash beneath their feet.

Then the souls come back. They are returned into what is left of them and they climb up out of Gehinnom, and their faces are black like the underside of a pot held too long over a flame. They do not curse the fire that burned them. They open their blackened mouths and they say the only thing left to say. "You have sentenced us properly," they tell the One who judged them. "You have judged us properly. Righteousness is Yours. The shame is ours, as of this day."

The leech at the gate is still crying "Give." But the soul that has stopped lying about itself has already taken the first step out. After all of it, after the year and the ash and the climb, the Holy One has mercy on what He made, for He had said long before that He would not contend forever, that the same hand which makes the breath fail also makes the breath of life.