On a lonely road, Rabbi Akiva met an ugly, exhausted man bent double under a massive bundle of firewood.
"I adjure you," Akiva said. "Tell me — are you a man, or are you a demon?"
"Rabbi," the stranger answered, "I was a man once. I left the world some time ago. Each day I am made to carry a load like this. Each day I bow under its weight. And three times a day I am burned."
Akiva pressed further. "What did you do in your lifetime to earn this?"
"I committed an immorality," the man said, "on Yom Kippur." The holiest day. The day when the smallest sin is magnified.
Akiva asked whether anything could release him. The man knew exactly what could. "I have a son," he said. "If he is ever called up to the public reading of the Torah, and says the blessing — Blessed be the blessed Lord — I will be pulled out of Gehinnom and brought into paradise."
Akiva wrote down the son's name and the man's town. He traveled there and asked after the son. The townspeople spat at the mention of the father. "The name of the wicked shall rot" (Proverbs 10:7), they answered.
Akiva insisted. He took the boy aside, taught him Hebrew, taught him the blessing. On the next Shabbat, the boy was called to the Torah and recited the words his father had never taught him.
That night the dead man appeared at Akiva's door. "Rabbi," he said, "may your mind be as much at rest as mine now is."
The Midrash Aseret ha-Dibrot preserves this story. No soul is so far gone that a son's blessing cannot reach it.