"How
can I help sighing over this house, where sixty bakers used to be
employed during the day, and sixty during the night, to make bread for
the poor and needy; and Rav Chena had his hand always at his purse, for
he thought the slightest hesitation might cause a poor but respectable
man to blush; and besides he kept four doors open, one to each quarter
of the heavens, so that all might enter and be satisfied? Over and above
this, in time of famine he scattered wheat and barley abroad, so that
they who were ashamed to gather by day might do so by night; but now
this house has fallen into ruin, and ought I not to sigh?"

Ibid., fol. 58, col. 2.

Egypt is a sixtieth of Ethiopia, Ethiopia a sixtieth of the world, the
world is a sixtieth part of the garden of Eden, the garden itself is but
a sixtieth of Eden, and Eden a sixtieth of Gehenna. Hence the world in
proportion to Gehenna is but as the lid to a caldron.

_P'sachim_, fol. 94, col. 1.

They led forth Metatron and struck him sixty bastinadoes with a cudgel
of fire.

_Chaggigah_, fol. 15, col. 1.

In the context of the foregoing quotation occurs an anecdote of
Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah which is too racy to let pass, and too
characteristic to need note or comment. One day Elisha ben
Abuyah was privileged to pry into Paradise, where he saw the
recording angel Metatron on a seat registering the merits of the
holy of Israel. Struck with astonishment at the sight, he
exclaimed, "Is it not laid down that there is no sitting in
heaven, no shortsightedness or fatigue?" Then Metatron, thus
discovered, was ordered out and flogged with sixty lashes from a
fiery scourge. Smarting with pain, the angel asked and obtained
leave to cancel the merits of the prying Rabbi. One day--it
chanced to be on Yom Kippur and Sabbath--as Elisha was riding
along by the wall where the Holy of Holies once stood, he heard
a Bath Kol proclaiming, "Return, ye backsliding children, but
Acher abide thou in thy sin" (Acher was the Rabbi's nickname). A
faithful disciple of his hearing this, and bent on reclaiming
and reforming him, invited him to go and hear the lads of a
school close by repeat their lessons. The Rabbi went, and from
that to another and another, until he had gone the round of a
dozen seminaries, in the last of which he called up a lad to
repeat a verse who had an impediment in his speech. The verse