As my brother, Reb Breslov, formulated it, the unique attraction of Switzerland consists of two factors—money and sanitation. For him, the problem arose when these two values collided. From Lugano Airport they were conveyed in a fleet of limousines like dignitaries headed to the World Economic Forum, up over five thousand feet into the Swiss Alps to Davos, and settled into their magic mountain. On the face of it, this might be considered an obvious welcome change from the squalor of Western Sahara, but the problem was, it rained nonstop, through the summer and into the fall, so that even carrying out the daily practice of hitbodedut within the splendor of nature was a dispiriting, sodden affair. Most of the time they were stuck in the sanitarium of their Mottel Patel noshing chocolate, going stir-crazy staring at the cuckoo clock, Shmelke recalled.

It all fell apart in the month of October, when several thousand of his followers made a pilgrimage up the mountain from every corner of the globe with their families and other assorted relations to join him in celebrating the holiday of Sukkot, to partake with their rebbe in the Feast of Tabernacles, sit at his holy table and grab the blessed leftover crumbs from his plate. They put up their personal huts all along the promenade in the center of posh, immaculate Davos, constructing them out of cardboard and plastic and whatever salvageable materials they could find from the hidden trash dumps of this elite burg, reinforcing them with their own garbage, which they generated continuously, including soiled paper diapers and other toxic wastes, covering them with roofs of straw and twigs and a fantastic collection of material culture and junk.

There they lived in those flimsy booths for eight days oblivious in their ecstatic state to the rain as it continued to pound down, eating, sleeping, praying, singing, dancing rapturously in their ethnic costumes, which became less and less interesting as the days passed, drenched through and through. When the luxury hotels and shops lining the avenue refused to allow them in to use the facilities, they made do in the street beside their booths and behind municipal buildings, or squatted along the river, the men separated from the women of course. “What? Do you think this is India?” the town bosses demanded of my brother when they barged one day into the super-sukkah that had been erected for him in his Mottel Patel parking lot to accommodate his tisch. They went on to remind him that Switzerland had an extradition agreement with the State of Israel. Within twenty-four hours, if this eyesore weren’t removed and the freaks weren’t gone, he would be handed over to the Mossad or Shabak or whoever the appropriate Jewish authorities were. They had done the math. No amount of cash was worth turning their exclusive paradise into an Indian slum.