NOT TO WORRY

To the Editors: Stephen Greenblatt [“Damn It All,” NYR, December 20, 2018] contrasts to ill effect Catholic punishment in the afterlife with that of what he alleges is the rabbinic version. According to him, “For the ancient rabbis” the opposite of heaven “was not a place of torture; it was more like a state of depression.” How benign. The truth is something else, however. The Babylonian Talmud has the destroyer of the Jerusalem Temple, Roman general Titus, burned to ashes, reconstituted, and burned again, forever. The ancient rabbis place Jesus in a cauldron boiling with hot excrement for eternity (BT Gittin 57a). Not a place of torture?

Michael Hoffman Coeur d’Alene, Idaho