by Tova Reich
How did this happen? If such a story were told, it would not have been believed. How had this brother and sister, separately and apart, made this terrible journey from there to here, from Bava Kama to Kama Sutra, as if blindly burrowing like worms through the bowels of the globe, and come out blinking together now at this end, in this most alien of places?
Simultaneously and wordlessly we had asked this question of ourselves and each other over the tea and sugar, my brother and I. It had appeared like a cartoon bubble over each of our heads for the other to read, discernible only to our eyes. It was in essence the question I was already embarked upon answering in my first-person experiment at night in the cell I shared with my ruined girls, by the light of a yahrzeit candle, working on my laptop even during blackouts, tethered at those times to the cell phone system at megawatt cost, thanks to Charlotte’s beneficence.
There was internet at the ashram; this was something Rebbie-ji insisted upon and would never tolerate foregoing. But in every other respect, he was rigorous about maintaining the monastic austerities as practiced in the days when Mother Teresa had ruled this space with such righteous severity. There was still no private electrical generator to kick in during the perpetual outages. There were no large institutional appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers, and so on. We laundered our clothing by hand in tubs, slapped them against the stone walls, and hung them to dry on lines, just as the nuns in their white habits with the blue stripe (like the flag of the State of Israel, it had always struck me) had done in the days of the hospice. There was not even an elevator, though there was a shaft in which one could have been installed, and donors who had clamored to finance it. The saint had refused. Two slight nuns could carry an emaciated body up and down the steps, she had decreed, it was good for their spiritual development. But when Rebbie-ji needed to be moved from floor to floor, five muscled men known as the Bulvans were summoned, four to haul his person, since even on a vegan diet of beans and nuts and dates and tofu (which Rebbie-ji pronounced the original manna—white in color, and taking on all flavors and tastes) a human being can acquire superfluous padding amounting to many kilos, and the fifth ox to follow behind carrying the wheelchair in one hand. As a matter of principle Rebbie-ji had always refused a wheelchair upgrade to a top-of-the-line electric model, a wonder that could even bounce up and down the stairs. This self-denial was a personal form of austerity and soul affliction that he had taken upon himself, with a strictness akin to Mother Teresa’s who forbade painkillers for her sufferers before baptizing them and dispatching them to their reward. My brother’s lower body as a result continued to shrivel and waste away, its grossness appropriately nullified, while his upper body, arms and shoulders spinning the wheels that took him along his chosen path, grew more and more powerful like a god’s. His head remained untouched, its celestial brilliance shining through, illuminated even more blindingly now by the glowing whiteness of hair, beard, sidelocks that framed his face so that many of his followers dared not lift their eyes to gaze upon him if they wanted to live.
But as for the internet, Rebbie-ji regarded it as indispensable to his mission of spiritual outreach. Like Ammachi, he was never without his smartphone, except of course on the Sabbath and holidays when it is not permitted. The smartphone had evolved into essential guru gear it seemed. In his notoriety, my twin brother often was lumped in the mind of the public with the whole gang of indistinguishable ultra-Orthodox fanatics, including those who railed against the internet on posters and fliers, their polemical texts delivered to the printers as attachments to emails, declaiming that the internet is the cause of drought, cancer, diseases of the base organs, and the next Holocaust—Shoah: The Sequel—and so on and so forth. But Rebbie-ji declared the internet to be a mighty-blessed force of creation, like the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, omnipresent, omniscient, a glimpse of the divine consciousness, containing within it for those who truly knew how to seek for it, the answer to every question.
Yet though I was toiling by night in the first person to extract the larger picture of the trajectory of the first two stages of my life’s strange journey, with regard to the immediate question—how I got from that morgue in Mumbai to this hospice in Kolkata, as if risen from the dead—I simply had no recollection. It was a blank. I had blocked it out in classic trauma mode. Nor did I choose to inquire—a personal preference that those who surrounded me were considerate enough to respect. Manika was the first person I saw when I emerged from the blackest of pits to this false earthly reality. She was crouching like a tumor attached to the wall in a corner of a cell I was sharing at that initial phase in my brother’s private suite. My roommate laid out on the other bed, I eventually learned, was an exceptionally venerated woman whose worshippers could not agree whether she was alive or dead, she seemed still to be mutating through the stages of life; her fate was to lie there unburied, skin flaking down to the bone. Where was I? In Kolkata, Manika told me, in the Christian Kali’s hospice. Good, I thought, hospice means I’m certified dying. But then my brother rolled in and reminded me that he had taken over the site from that severe little Christian saint, asserting his squatter rights, as it was abandoned and vacant except for my roommate, who had been delivered just before his anticipated arrival and whom he allowed to remain because she reminded him of where he had come from and where he was going, and he had transformed it from a place of certain imminent death to a house of holy healing.
This was extremely disappointing news. I could only hope Shmelke would be kicked out of this squat as he had been from all of the others, and it would revert to a hospice so that I could continue with the dying process undisturbed. Charlotte arrived next with her entire girls band, Lakshmi and the Survivors, including her great reed player, Monica Lewinsky, blowing away. She was bursting with the fantastic news that her legal team was now closing a deal with the city thugs in Dalhousie Square and the Kali temple goondas up the road to buy this abandoned shelter for Rebbie-ji. It was looking very good, knock on wood, Charlotte said, tapping the air in the direction of the head of my narrow bed, over which a wooden cross was hanging covered by a bath-sized towel. We’re almost home free, keep your fingers crossed, she declared. After scuttling like a bug from one miserable country to another without rest to escape extradition back to Israel on such false and absurd charges that would be beneath us to even enumerate, Rebbie-ji will soon have permanent headquarters right here in tolerant live-and-let-live India, a nation that instinctively comprehends the duality of the spirit, the holy and the profane, the dark and the light. In this place he would at last have full protection and sanctuary from primitive Abrahamic vengeance and punishment.
From all of this I concluded that how I had gotten from Bombay to Calcutta had something to do with the interventions of Manika, Shmelke, and above all Charlotte, who now, having successfully redirected my past, was charging straight ahead to arrange my future. She invited me to join her in her private kabbalah tutorial with Rebbie-ji. They were working with clay to fashion a golem to defend all the persecuted and pursued of the world. “Do you know how therapeutic it is to stick your hands into clay and just squeeze?” she asked. “Excuse my French, Rebbie-ji, but it’s a privilege, like playing with your personal caca—pure regressive pleasure.” Such talk is permissible if you’re paying, I reflected, even to such a holy figure as my brother. She also insisted that I attend a performance of her band that night in the great room—for women only, she added, since Rebbie-ji has taught that the voice of a woman is nakedness and therefore cannot be listened to by men who are always so prone to sexual arousal. Rebbie-ji of course will be there, however, Charlotte assured me, the only man allowed to watch the show since he is completely hopeless below the waist, totally harmless and nonthreatening no matter what his enemies say, all you need to do is take one look at him in his wheelchair for God’s sake.
I am in mourning, I responded. For me, music is forbidden.
The wheelchair became Shmelke’s de
fining accessory early in his career, by our late twenties. By that time he was also already recognized as a scholar and mystic of extraordinary charismatic gifts, appearing only once in a generation to recapture the lost light of creation and usher in the golden age. The event that put him in the chair took place in Israel, where he had gone for higher studies at the age of eighteen, immediately after his marriage to the daughter of rabbinical aristocracy. The wedding was attended by more than ten thousand invited guests, the ceremony held under the stars in the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, closed off to traffic and encircled by ranks of New York’s finest in their blue police uniforms stretched across formidable guts. It was rumored of my brother, and also confirmed by him in a lecture of tremendous esoteric profundity that could be interpreted only by those with exceptional powers of penetration, that he was the reincarnation of the great Hasidic master, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who died in the year 1810 in the city of Uman in Ukraine with no male descendant to carry on the dynasty, leaving his disciples, thereafter known as the Dead Hasidim, leaderless, adrift, in perpetual mourning until his promised return. So great was the joy of my brother’s followers when the good news was privately circulated that the master had come back at last after nearly two centuries of concealment that they renamed by brother Breslov, and he became known worldwide as Reb Breslov Tabor. Only Ma and I, and also his wife, Zlatte, who by the time of his confinement in the chair had already given birth to all nine of their children, all girls (almost a statistical impossibility, but nevertheless my brother’s burden, like Rabbi Nahman’s, to be left without an heir) continued to call him Shmelke.
Central to my brother’s teaching was a mystical reinterpretation of the concept of tikkun, focusing on the personal obligation of each individual to repair the world, hugely corrupted and damaged when Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But as Shmelke conceived of it in esoteric kabbalistic terms, such tikkun often entailed sin and transgression at the behest of a holy man such as himself, a mandatory plunge into seemingly immoral behavior for the purpose of rescuing the divine light lost in the lowest depths during the fall of Adam from paradise, thereby restoring the world to its original state of illumination and bringing on the messianic age. This teaching, along with the ways in which so radical a form of tikkun was implemented, inspired intense controversy and also severe condemnation, including from the more mainstream Breslover Hasidim, who ultimately disavowed and excommunicated him. At the same time it also attracted a multitude of supporters, among them vastly wealthy donors, primarily American fundamentalist and evangelical Christians bent on hastening the rapture and the end of time, which pivoted on the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land; it was they who endowed his activities and financed his compound in the Muslim Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. By his late twenties, my brother had also amassed thousands of followers and devotees, many of them ex-hippie returnees to the faith, but also countless souls discarded by society whom he had rescued, literally pulled them up from the depths, from the streets, the slums, the drug scene and the underworld, from prisons and lunatic asylums, exactly as he would descend to the lowest realms to pull up through acts of radical tikkun the hidden divine sparks trapped during the fall in the filth below, and restore the world to the purity of its original light as at the time of creation.
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which he prophesied was a herald of far worse future shock and disaster, a forshpeis of hurban, as he put it, his tikkun activities intensified, spilling out into the streets. It was imperative to descend to the depths to dredge up the divine sparks in order to forestall the coming annihilation, he believed, and to do so at once, without delay, with the greatest possible alacrity. Toward that end he instituted the tikkun of pursuit of the holy man, calling upon his followers to pursue him every night after midnight as he set out at top speed on his motorcycle from Jerusalem to the Galilee to pray and beseech for mercy at the graves of the righteous. Behind him rode his inner circle, heaven’s angels, and in their train, scores of followers in all kinds of vehicles in a wild and raging caravan, including taxis and buses, and also some on horseback, donkeys and camels. They rode without helmets or seat belts or saddles, heedless of danger, which was beneath them spiritually to contemplate. They rode at top speed, two hundred kilometers an hour and more, defying all civic laws and regulations, never stopping for lights, flouting all road signs, cutting through traffic, jumping onto sidewalks and highway shoulders, leaping over dividers, zigzagging lanes, plowing through to the opposite side of the road wherever they spotted an opening, leaving the laggards far in the rear, leaving behind the fallen and casualties and smashed up as necessary sacrifices in pursuit of their rabbi as he headed at breakneck speed to the graves in the North, in Tiberias, Safed, Meron, of such luminaries as Rabbi Simeon son of Yohai, Rabbi Moses son of Maimon, Rabbi Meir Master of the Miracle, Honi the Circle Maker, Rabbi Hutzpit the Interpreter, and all the other lofty souls with power to intervene and prevent the looming catastrophe.
Every night on their wild ride in pursuit of my brother, the pursuers would be pursued in turn by the police with shrieking sirens and flashing lights, and even occasionally by the military, a veritable chase scene as if from the movies to electrify the heart and leave the viewer breathless, but at some point the authorities would inevitably fall away, their wallets fattened, or simply wander off on the strength of the conviction that the world will be a better place if all of these nutcases simply self-destruct of their own accord without official interference. On the occasions when the speeders were forced to halt by an uptight rules-and-regulations type, it would be patiently explained to this obsessive-compulsive that religious law required obedience to the rabbi, and the rabbi required pursuit. There was no higher mitzvah than chasing the rebbe; the officer was welcome to join in the pursuit if he liked. Nothing could be done to stop it; it was a decree from heaven. If the earthly powers had a problem with the free and unimpeded exercise of these religious rights, they were welcome to go take up the matter with the holy rabbi himself. There he is, up front—see him? And they pointed to the posse riding furiously ahead astride their motorcycles, every one of its members with exceptionally long black sidelocks and long black beards whipping in the wind, large white crocheted yarmulkes pulled low over their heads, long black kaftans draped over the seats of their motorbikes, and fluorescent crash goggles. Which one of these bikers was the holy rabbi? They all looked exactly alike, like creatures of another species from outer space, you couldn’t tell them apart.
Yet despite this massive effort of pursuit and prayer, the cosmic forces remained in a state of agitation, the celestial sparks still lost in the putrid depths. In time, my brother, Reb Breslov, declared to his followers that the midnight rides as enacted were not sufficiently strong to avert the imminent disaster, much less restore the nobility of divine light. Greater risks and sacrifices were called for. Now under cover of darkness he raced into hostile territory—to the tomb of Mother Rachel in Bethlehem, the tomb of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, and potentially most powerful of all, Joseph’s tomb in Nablus, also known as Shehem, in the shadow of the mountains of the blessing and the curse. His followers pursued him in long speeding convoys over the hills of Samaria, through Ishmaelite territory, ignoring military and police checkpoints, heedless of warning shots, crashing through barriers, until they arrived at Joseph’s holy gravesite, desecrated and ransacked, where they fell to the ground kissing it passionately, and hugged the stone walls, praying and weeping.
Joseph’s tomb became the destination to which my brother now led his flock in pursuit of him night after night. Who but Joseph—favored son in the light-suffused household of his father the patriarch Jacob, twice cast into the darkest depths, the pit and the dungeon, then rising again like a brilliant star to the heights as ruler of Egypt—who but this first court Jew, this first paradigm of spectacular Jewish success in the diaspora could be a more perfect embodiment of the fall from paradise and ultimate elev
ation? Every night they arrived in pursuit of their rebbe, my brother, under a hailstorm of rocks and rotten vegetables and old shoes hurled by the enemy. “Not even old shoes will we throw at you,” one of the hooligans was quoted in the press. “Flip-flops we will throw at you—old stinking rubber flip-flops. You don’t even deserve to be hit in the head by a shoe.”
They worshipped and studied at the tomb and left before dawn, carrying away their casualties, but there were no fatalities. They were under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces in occupied territory, though they never gave the military advance notice when they would appear, as required. The site was their rightful heritage, it was their property as far as they were concerned. “You don’t have to make an appointment to enter your own house that belongs to you,” Reb Breslov, my brother, said. The fatality occurred the night the tomb was handed over by the Israelites to enemy jurisdiction—Joseph once again sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites, as so many had noted. One disciple dead, shot in the head by thugs masquerading as the official Muslim police force armed with AK-47s, a second grievously wounded, condemned to spend the rest of his days on earth as a cauliflower, as my brother so sadly observed—and the biggest prize of all, my brother, whose back was broken but not his spirit when he emerged half a year later jubilantly clapping his hands over his head and singing at the top of his voice in his speeding wheelchair to the ecstatic celebration of his followers dancing in the streets along the entire route from the private rehabilitation center where he had been put up by his benefactors, back to his headquarters in his compound in the Muslim section of Jerusalem.