11
About the holiday times I had more leisure for looking round at home. Just before Tabernacles, we had a great wash.
One night I dreamt that I was in the next world. I saw how the angels stretched out their hands from heaven and caught hold of the souls who were returning thither. The angels sifted them; those that were clean and white as snow, flew up like doves out of their hands as though into Paradise. The dirty ones were thrown into a heap, and the heap was thrown into the sea of ice, beside which stood black angels with their sleeves rolled up, who washed them. After that they were boiled in a black pot over hell-fire.
And when the dirt was squeezed out of them and they were ironed, the weeping of the souls was heard from one end of the world to the other.
There, in the soiled heap, I recognized the soul of my teacher; it had his long nose, his hollow cheeks, his pointed beard, and it wore his large, blue spectacles. They washed it, and it only looked the blacker.
And an angel called out: "That is the soul of the heretical teacher!" Then the same angel said angrily to me:
"If you walk in his ways, your soul will be as black as his, and it will be washed like this every evening, till it is thrown into Gehenna."
"I will not walk in his ways!" I cried out in my sleep.
My mother woke me and took my hand down from my breast.
"What is it, my treasure?" she asked in alarm. "You are bathed in perspiration;" and she blew upon me—fu, fu, fu!
"Mother, I have been in the other world!"
Early next morning my mother asked me in all seriousness if I had seen my father there. I said, "No."
"What a pity! What a pity!" she lamented. "He would certainly have given you a message for me."