It is the fate of the righteous man of the generation to absorb the suffering of the world in order to save mankind, Rav Nahman taught. My brother, Reb Breslov, as his gilgul, now felt the truth of this observation even more keenly, weighed down as he was by the confinement of his wheelchair and the increasingly painful urgency of his prophetic vision—the inexorable approach of the next and final holocaust. Averting this calamity was a priority. No personal suffering inflicted upon him would be too much in the fulfillment of this mandate, but given his revised circumstances, the performance of tikkun through pursuit no longer seemed the best option. Rather, it was necessary to repair the world by retrieving the divine light through an act of extreme degradation—by crawling again and again down to the lowest depths of sin and transgression where so many of the holy sparks had fallen and were lost, crawling on his belly and eating the dust of the earth, like a snake.

The gematria of the Hebrew letters adding up to snake (nakhash) is exactly the same as the numerical value for messiah (mashiakh)—358. Together, they equal 716, the numerical value of the Hebrew word found in the second book of Kings, le’hitrapeh, to heal—holy healing! It was impossible to overestimate the significance of these confluences both in terms of my brother’s personal physical circumstances and his overarching obligation to enact tikkun, which bottom line amounted to nothing other than ultimate healing; only an idiot would regard this convergence as coincidence. Now that my brother no longer was able to stand up and move about on his feet, the only way to perform the necessary healing act of tikkun, retrieving the hidden light that would bring on the messianic age, was to crawl, to turn himself into a snake, the most vulgar and naked of seducers.

According to a secret scroll, it was mandatory for the purpose of carrying out this tikkun that eighteen women be attached at all times to different parts of his body like tumors, like an affliction of elephantiasis, causing him excruciating pain and rendering him grotesque in the eyes of the world. Each would submit to him, but afterward she would despise him and tread on his head. The suffering he would absorb would be endless, but the sins he would be obliged to commit with these women would be essential to bringing about the redemption. Instead of being pursued as a holy figure, he would be pursued like the most base and repulsive of criminals. Yet through this suffering that he took upon himself, the imminent catastrophe would be averted, and the hour of reunification of the lost sparks with the infinite source of the mystical light would draw closer and closer, the radiance beckoning just over the horizon.