The wheelchair became Shmelke’s defining 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.