And so it was. For centuries proud Jews who knew their worth and held tight to their religion fought against the oppressor at the sacrifice of their own lives, Kiddush ha-Shem: they sanctified the divine name by killing their stoic selves, remaining clean, becoming martyrs, floating like angels in a weightless state of bliss. This strategy was followed beginning with the Maccabean Revolt, and using this technique—we apologize for the macabre choice of words—one could escape almost anything: Christian crusaders, the Inquisition.
And then back to hell. Gehinnom. The rabbis believed that hell was a structure divided into seven parts, each section of which, whether you chose to move horizontally or vertically, required three hundred years to traverse from end to end. And every segment of hell was sliced into seven subsegments, through each of which ran seven rivers of fire and seven of snow, their paths guided by the Angels of Destruction. In each compartment of hell were seven thousand caves, each of which had seven thousand cracks, each of which had seven thousand scorpions. And each scorpion had three hundred rings, in each of which were seven thousand poison sacs, from which flowed seven deadly poisonous rivers. (Wait a moment, so there are now a total of three types of rivers, right?) With flaming whips the Angels of Destruction lashed sinners, meaning those who had broken the commandments of the Torah, insofar as the angels could spare their time from guiding the rivers. For Moses, at least, is said to have taken a guided tour with the angels through hell, like the Christian Durante degli Alighieri, alias Dante, did.
On his journey, Moses saw sinners hung up by their eyelids, their ears, their hands, and their tongues, and women by their breasts and hair, each according to his or her crime, according to what body part had been active in committing the sin. In a place named Aluka, sinners were hung upside down by their feet. Long black worms squirmed on their skin. They had sworn false oaths, they had desecrated Shabbat, they had mocked the wise, and they had defamed their neighbors and done evil to both orphans and widows. Elsewhere, sinners were tormented by two thousand scorpions, each with seventy thousand heads, each with seventy thousand mouths, each with seventy thousand poison barbs, each with seventy thousand poison sacs. The scorpions struck with their tails, stung with their stingers, and in every conceivable way tortured those who had robbed their own kinsmen and abandoned them to heretics, those who had publicly dishonored their neighbors and denied the Torah. To top it all off, those who ended up getting the scorpion treatment had claimed during their lives that God wasn’t the creator of the earth!
In Tit ha-Yawen, Moses saw sinners up to their navels in mud. The Angels of Destruction whipped them with fiery chains—they had time for that too—and hung glowing stones from their teeth. These wretches had eaten forbidden food, given money to usurers to loan, and stolen pennies from their fellows. They had used false weights, they had written the name of God on infidel amulets, and they had eaten on Yom Kippur, and, logically, they had also drunk blood.
Finally Moses arrived at the level of hell named Avadon. There sinners were burned: one half of their bodies were submerged in fire and the other half in snow, and at the same time worms generated from their own flesh crawled all over them. The Angels of Destruction abused them without cease. These sinners were the worst of the worst. They had committed incest, they had murdered and called themselves gods, they had cursed their parents and teachers, and—well, that’s pretty much it.
Then the bewildered Moses was delivered back to the surface of the earth, where in a daze he continued guiding his people away from the hands of their enemies. And the wretches didn’t understand to be thankful, instead grumbling constantly, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?”
Of course there are also detailed accounts of the Jewish heaven, but as all who have read their Divina Commedia know (regardless of whether the book was read in the original language or only in translation), no one is interested in heaven. The rays of Beatrice’s smile are just as boring as lukewarm bath water whose rose extracts have stopped giving off their fragrance. Hell is what stirs people up! Hell makes your skin tingle and your heart race. And that’s why we will pass over the blooming trees of life and luxurious rooms paneled in olive wood (and also because the architecture of the Jewish heaven wasn’t on the list of things to be explained in the first place, of course) and conclude that the hell Shlomith referenced in answer to Polina’s question meant something other than the blood and thunder Gehinnom of the rabbis, where fiery chains flail and scorpions work their tortures.
Perhaps when she said hell Shlomith meant other people, as a certain French intellectual wrote in his famous play set in the afterlife. The play was performed for the first time in May, 1944—note: the German collaborator Marshal Pétain was still in power then; Paris was not liberated until August—at a place named the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, and ever since the interpretation of the phrase “L’enfer, c’est les autres” has, well, gone all to hell. Not all people, always and everywhere, are synonymous with hell. Some of us at least sometimes are sublimely lovable. Just so long as it remains possible to get
