‘If you want to extend that metaphor, yes. Into His hand I yielded my soul, as we say in our prayers. And the auxiliary care was an unexpected bonus. The wordless devotion of my colleagues and the yeshiva community nursed me back into feeling part of the human race, or at least their microcosmic part of it.’

‘You never felt connected to people when making music?’

‘Momentarily,’ he admits, ‘but only with a strapped-on culture, a prosthetic device.’

He is enjoying this hospital game too much for my liking; presumably, he cannot indulge mild pleasures of free association with his severe, book-blinkered colleagues. I bring him smartly back to business with a confrontational proposition. ‘Music, I suppose, gave you no spiritual shelter?’

He strokes his beard, like a security blanket, before sighing a reply. ‘What does a Dovidl from Warsaw derive from Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven?’ he ventures, in Talmudic sing-song. ‘When a Dovidl needs to mourn, does he sob a kaddish or intone a Dies Irae? In pain, we become tribal. I love music, of course I do, but Bach and Beethoven do not heal my wounds.

‘With Rashi and Maimonides, on the other hand, I share a heritage of suffering and an ironic turn of mind. Their approach to life is much the same as mine, albeit often above my reasoning. I used to think I had a good mind until I attempted rabbinical exegesis, the whole world predicated on a pinhead. How did medieval scholars achieve such insights? Read Freud on grief and guilt; then read Rashi on Jacob’s remorse after the death of Rachel. It’s the same idea, expressed eight hundred years earlier and in a single, devastating phrase.’

It is my turn to play for time, rustling in my pockets for a roll of sweets as I wonder whether to mount a defence of modernity, or lunge again for the bobbity jugular. Offering him a fruit gum which he declines, not certifiably kosher, I fight both fronts at once.

‘I am aware,’ I affirm drily, ‘of the consolations of scholarship. But your actions were not the outcome of a mystical epiphany, a eureka moment. They were a conscious substitution of one way of life for another, modern for archaic. You stepped back in time, liked it and decided to stay there.’

‘Not entirely,’ he objects. ‘I did not shut out the world I knew before. I recognised certain parallels between Brahms and Rashi, the Vilna Gaon and Strindberg. To me, privately, they were all honest searchers for truth, brother pioneers in the fight to make sense of suffering. I could not share this thought with fellow-rabbis, who would have thought it heretical. But for me this calm acceptance that there are many paths to understanding was the nexus on which my old self acquiesced to the new, the answer to your original question.’