There are altogether four scenes from Gehinnom: (1) Kaf Haqela (the Sling), (2) Tsalmavet (Shadow of Death), (3) Gag ‘al Gag (Roof upon Roof), and (4) the Tatar horsemen. (The fourth scene differs from the rest; it has the characteristics of a nightmarish vision particular to the shamash’s febrile imagination. When he speaks of his tour of Gehinnom, he does not include it, speaking only of three compartments.) The first contrasts with the second and the third in that it precedes the encounter with Aaron’s shade and is in fact a series of tortures that take place outside Gehinnom. It is additionally distinct from those two in the confidence with which the shamash explains the scene; he does not need the rabbi to parse the meaning of strange and inscrutable practices. Based on a passage in the Talmud (Shabbat 152b), the scene describes sinners being flung by gigantic slingshots from the gates of Gehinnom back to the original sites of their sins, which, because of their sins, are no longer identifiable. Having failed to enter Gehinnom, they are flung back and forth until they are wholly worn down. Worse than the fate of confirmed sinners is that of those who wanted to sin and had sinful thoughts but lacked the opportunity to sin. Because of lack of commission, they cannot avail themselves of the process of regret and contrition that purges sin; it remains with them forever. Worse still are “those contemptible people who feel false pangs of conscience and fancy that they have repented, yet all the while they are consumed by sinful thoughts and their illusory pleasures” (20). Of these latter, says the shamash not without a note of grim humor, “No one can accuse me of loving sinners, but when I see them flung around like that, I am quite ready to hire myself out as the doorkeeper of Gehinnom so I can personally let them in” (20).
The Kaf Haqel‘a scene established disorientation as the sign under which all the subsequent matters relating to Gehinnom will be presented. What happens in the Netherworld, the shamash tells his listeners, does not conform to your notions, and it is much worse than you think. The norms and hierarchies we live by do not apply there. Reason and received rabbinic teaching would dictate that sins actually committed warrant a more severe punishment than those merely contemplated, but not so in that world, in which the order is reversed. You would think that the quest of the sinner to return to the site of his sin and expiate it would be rewarded, but the infernal ordeal into which he has been thrust makes that impossible. You would think that Gehinnom is terrible, but in fact there are those for whom admission to Gehinnom would be a kindness. This first iteration remains abstract; the sins of the sinners are not named. The stunning, upending news to come is that there are sufferers in Hell who, remarkably, resemble — and in most cases are superior in learning and scholarship to — the shamash’s listeners themselves.
This cognitive disorientation is explicitly named in the descriptions of the second and third compartments. The first is called Tsalmavet [Shadow of Death] and the second Gag ‘al Gag [Roof upon Roof]. Both compartments are filled with innumerable scholars, heads of yeshivot and chief rabbis, from the time of the Mishnah through the period of the Spanish Inquisition to the present. In the first, the scholars are floating in space and separated from each other by great distances, and in the second they are piled one atop the other. Central to both is a grotesque scene of desire repeatedly frustrated. The myriad scholars are all puffed up with self-importance, and each believes that the fate of Torah wisdom depends solely on him. And he wants nothing more than to broadcast his novel insights and arguments and induce his fellow to acknowledge his superior acumen. But not only is the wished-for acknowledgment denied, the very possibility of communication is nullified in the most gruesome way. In the first compartment, the ears of the listener grow bigger and bigger until they cover his entire body and muffle the scream that dies in the throat of the scholar who sought to impress him, whose own lips have enlarged to engulf his body. In the second compartment, the lips of the speaker fly away from him, and his tongue becomes impaled on his teeth and swells to the size of a church bell. His listener attempts to yell from horror, but no sound comes out of his mouth. “I am an old man and have seen much trouble and travail,” says the shamash, “but misery like that I have never seen.”
This cognitive disorientation is explicitly named in the second scene, the compartment of Gehinnom called Tsalmavet. “Nothing in the world is as paradoxical [davar vehipukho] as that compartment. It is circular in shape but appears square, square in shape but appears circular. The eyes perceive it one way, the mind another. These differences in perspective induce a certain melancholy” (28). The compartment is notable for being neither hot nor cold and totally airless, and for being presided over by a nameless angel who does nothing but stand with his mouth agape “like a person utterly bored and about to yawn.” The population of this compartment is huge, “twice the number of people who went out of Egypt,” and, as is evident from their accoutrements (silver-collared talitot and large tefillin), they are all heads of yeshivot and chief rabbis of whole regions, and they are all prodigious Torah scholars with total mastery of the Talmud with its earlier and later commentators. What is most unnerving about this scene is how these mighty throngs are situated. Each is separated from the other by a distance of two thousand cubits (a Sabbath boundary), and because their eyes have grown dim from study they cannot see the hundreds of thousands of similar scholars who float in the space surrounding them. Each, literally, is full of himself and, puffing himself up, proclaims, “I’m all alone in the world; all wisdom dies with me” (29). When he finally manages to prop himself up and realizes that the tiny distant creatures are also Jews, his overwhelming desire is to bestow on them some of his pilpul. (Pilpul is the intellectual gymnastics employed by advanced scholars to resolve difficult legal problems.) But as soon as he conceives of this plan, he falls into a desultory sleep.
What happens next in the shamash’s description of this compartment can only be described as a scene of talmudic jousting that is a parodic enactment of pilpul itself. The sleeper awakes to see someone striding toward him, and the two begin to trade taunts. One claims that he possesses a pilpul greater than anyone else has ever conceived; the other retorts that the first has stolen his words and that he possesses a pilpul that the other would long to hear with every fiber in his body. The two now enter into a parody of scholarly etiquette in which each, supposedly deferring to the other, in fact claims the right to speak first. But the contest turns out to be pointless because communication proves impossible. As soon as one begins to speak, his ears expand until they cover his entire body. The two stand facing one another, utterly mortified and wanting to cry out. But the “first one’s scream dies in his throat, and the other’s is muffled by his ears.” The total effect of their panic on the torpor of the presiding angel is to make him rock back and forth; he would have destroyed them if he had not been striving to produce a yawn.