One day Saint Besht fell into a thoughtful state. For three days he walked immersed in deep thought, and on the fourth he suddenly found himself in the sultry desert. He was very surprised and thought that it was not without reason that he had been brought here. Suddenly Besht saw a fat, ugly toad nearby. The toad, without taking its gaze off Besht, approached him in slow, short jumps.
- Who are you? - Besht asked the toad.
“I am a man,” said the toad’s voice. “Exactly a hundred years ago, by command from above, I was turned into a toad and banished to the desert, where there are no people and where no one can forgive me my sins.
- Tell me, what are you sinful about? - Besht asked.
“My sins began with the fact that I did not wash my hands before eating,” said the toad. When Satan began to accuse me, it was explained to him at the Heavenly Court that one sin cannot be punished, and that if he manages to lead me into another sin, then the first sin will also be counted against me and I will be severely punished. Satan managed to lead me into the second sin, then I could not resist and succumbed to him once again:
I committed a third sin, then a fourth.
It is said, “sin entails sin.”
So little by little I committed all sorts of sins, and the Heavenly Court decided to deprive me of the possibility of repentance. That's why Satan made me a drunkard. I drank a lot, but a drunk doesn’t think about sins and what awaits him. So I died without having time to repent of my sins. And since the first time I sinned by neglecting to wash my hands, after death my soul was infused into a toad, a creature that causes disgust in everyone, and sent to the desert, where there is no one to pray for my soul and thereby bring me forgiveness.
Then Saint Besht understood why he found himself in the desert and began to fervently pray for the soul of the sinner.
After a while, he saw that the toad had fallen, sprawled at his feet. She was dead, and the soul of the sinner ascended upward.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru