“I don’t know, I don’t remember, he wasn’t even two, he couldn’t really talk yet.”

“Something’s definitely not right here,” the rebbetzin said, pushing hard, baring her fangs like a tigress sensing danger to her cubs. “Why didn’t they stop him from sticking his hand in the fire? It’s criminally irresponsible. What kind of parents would do such a thing? They could have lit the Shabbes candles in a high place where he couldn’t reach. They should have been reported to the child protective services if you ask me.”

“The answer is right in front of our noses,” Shmuly said. “They were grooming him to take over the world for their own gain and profit, trying to clone him into Moshe Rabbenu, turning him into a Moshe Rabbenu celebrity starting with that public relations bit about the hand and mouth burning, like those Indian firewalkers, whatever they’re called—the fakers—excuse me, fakirs.”

Before my inner eye Geeta with the charred soles of her feet rolled off into the sunset in her wheelchair, never to return. The old woman next to me brought her mouth up to my face. Her breath was stale, her lips bubbling with white foam, like fat on the fire. “Pay attention,” she sprayed into my ear, “the child is in danger.”

She was referring of course to her grandson Shmuly, eighteen years old, from her perspective still a child. He had been reared with all the entitlement of Chabad royalty. Now he was being dethroned by an upstart little kid. The brilliant future they had all envisioned for him at the center of the innermost Chabad court, a major player sought out by presidents and prime ministers and kings on anything related to the Jewish question, with all the collateral benefits flowing to them as a family in terms of power, prestige, prosperity—all that was now on the endangered list. According to the rebbetzin, the overreaching, the sheer heresy in the circles surrounding baby Moshe was mindboggling. She sat there spuming as if a valve under pressure had been released. There was talk that baby Moshe was saved from the slaughter by a miracle, an angel from God in the form of the little Nepalese peasant Sandra; that he had been set apart, chosen for a special destiny, there were even some who called him a Holy Child. Excuse me, but the last time I heard Holy Child it was in reference to you-know-who, Yoshke Pandrek, JC, I’m not even allowed to say his name, a very goyisch idea to put it mildly, plain old apikorsus. Then there are the other heretics, the ones who say that baby Moshe is the Rebbe’s gilgul—like the Rebbe’s reincarnation? As far as I’m concerned, this is not one iota different than the fairy-tale garbage they believe right here in this cesspool of idol worshippers—Vishnu-Pishnu, Krishna-Pishna. Please! How can the Rebbe have a gilgul? You can only have a gilgul if you’re dead already. Everyone knows that the Rebbe is not dead. Any day now he will come out from that grave where he’s taking a short rest and rise up again as the Messiah our King.