Elazar ben Dordaya was, by his own admission, a man who had lived as low a life as a Jewish soul could live. He had chased every pleasure, broken every fence of decency, and finally arrived at the door of a notorious woman in a distant city — having spent the full purse of gold she had demanded just to travel the distance.
In the middle of their arrangement, she did something that reached past his sin and struck his soul. The Talmud in Avodah Zarah 17a preserves the detail: she said, "Elazar ben Dordaya will never be received in repentance."
The door he had thought was still open had, in her mouth, closed.
The Mountains, the Sun, and the Stars
He left. He went and sat between two mountains and cried out to them: "Mountains, plead mercy for me." The mountains answered: "Before we plead for you, we must plead for ourselves" — citing Isaiah 54:10, "The mountains shall depart."
He turned to heaven and earth. They refused.
He turned to the sun and the moon. They refused.
He turned to the stars and constellations. They refused.
At last he understood. He put his head between his knees, wept until his soul shook, and cried out: "The matter depends on nothing but me."
The Voice from Heaven
His weeping continued until his soul left his body. A Bat Kol — a heavenly voice — proclaimed: "Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is invited to the life of the world to come."
When Rabbi Judah HaNasi heard what had happened, he wept himself, saying: "One man acquires his world in a single hour, and another acquires his world across many years."
This exempla, one of the Talmud's most-quoted stories on repentance, makes a claim that reshaped Jewish thought: no sinner is beyond return, and the entire cosmos may refuse to help you — but if you weep the right kind of tears in the last hour, the gates open anyway.