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 elevation? 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.