Round behind the wall that separates the outer sanctuary from the Rebbe a hundred men in white dish-dashes were jumping, all chanting, with rhythmic power that frightened me, over and over the same syllables.

"Na-Nach-Nachma-Nachman of Uman. 

"Na-Nach-Nachma-Nachman of Uman."

A bearded wild thing grabbed me. "Say . . . Na-Nach!" 

I clapped. I chanted. It happened quickly. The heat met the loss of self in rippling energy out of hundreds of thumping feet, swallowing me up. 

"Na-Nach-Nachman!" 

They began to scream — deep male, ungodly wails. Before sound left my mouth I imagined a hook inside my head and called it my reason. I pulled onto it. Screwing up my face, I tried not to let go, then ripped myself into the next room — the tomb itself.

The Sephardic wail of the silver-bearded cantor rushed through me. A hundred or more men crammed into small pews rocked back and forth. These were Aramaic prayers. I saw a man with pupils horrifically dilated. I saw a man in such ecstasy I thought he was convulsing. I saw a man collapse back, overcome, from the tomb. I saw sobbing men rip each other back by their shoulders just to touch it. 

I tried to imagine who they were in their everyday lives in Baltimore or Eilat. But they had ceased to be those things. Behind the wall, behind the tomb, the men in white were thumping and wailing and howling out through the stone to the Rebbe. Howling that could wake the dead. Trance overcame me. Then the name of the Rebbe. In the enormity of that space I found inside me I named every family name for-whatever it was— to bless them. Then, red-eyed and tearful, I pulled myself outside. Terrified of collective hysteria. This was not my Judaism. 

An old friend was sitting unfazed on the bench outside — a miserable and depressed sacked Russian diplomat. He liked to remind people he had "worked with the President himself", but I knew his attaché position in the Delhi embassy had mostly involved dealing with the visa problems of mad Russian Hari Krishnas refusing to leave ashrams.