Today's daf has several stories relating the frailty of the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The following story attempt to show that the dead know, and can communicate, who will join them next:
"Come and hear; for Ze'iri deposited some money with his landlady, and while he was away visiting Rav she died. So he went after her to the cemetery and said to her, Where is my money? She replied to him: Go and take it from under the ground, in the hole of the doorpost, in such and such a place, and tell my mother to send me my comb and my tube of eye-paint by the hand of So-and-so who is coming here tomorrow. Does not this show that they know? — Perhaps Dumah announces to them beforehand."
The conversation continues on tomorrow's daf, but I doubt the rabbis, like ourselves, ever truly resolve it. We, like them, seem to have pretty good evidence for some level of interaction between the living and the dead, but we still lack any proof that such a thing is possible.
Adam - these stories of the dead speaking to the living, especially when we see a bit of insider trading secrets coming from the dead, always strike me amazing. More than anything, that there is a Jewish belief in feelings after death is fascinating. Worms are to the dead like a needle in the flesh of the living? It scares me to think that death may not, in fact, be the end to our suffering (again, here's Kierkegaard). Taking solace in the fact that a sick loved one is "out of their misery" or "no longer in pain" is being challenged here in a very significant way. Beyond that, the notion that these spirits can speak to us once they've passed makes me wonder - how much of my daily experience is a cry out from a deceased presence? A bit far-fetched, perhaps, and certainly too much for my practical of-this-world mentality, but worth a thought or two.
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