I nodded.

"Can you . . . kick me in the stomach! I want to fight . . . Karate!" 

Ringing laughter rushed past me. Little boys with shaved heads and shoulder-length blonde sidelocks raced their fathers to the synagogue. I struck up conversation with two Yiddish-speaking hoodies from Brooklyn's most fanatical enclave, the dominant one comically thin, his friend grotesquely overweight. They let me in on the subtext in exchange for a promise to help them track down 60 cartons of Marlboro Lights. 

"This whole fucking thing is the most fun a Hasid gets all year. It's the furthest he gets from his wife he was forced to marry at 18. It's the furthest he gets out from his community. It's the furthest we get from our moms." The fat one butted in. "Is this what a festival  is like?"   

They swore me to anonymity before a Canadian neurologist engaged me. Between answering calls from his clinic in Toronto he made it clear it was time I faced up to "the Rebbe". We passed giant corrugated-steel warehouses turned into mega-synagogues lined with hundreds, thousands of plastic garden chairs laid out for pews. The three of them together, fleetingly, turned into the biggest synagogues in the world. 

The neurologist was exulting: "Not since the Temple have so many Jews prayed in one place." The hour was here and he left me at the gate. Hebrew letters curled round the curved arch one must pass through to the Rebbe's tomb. Inside, the believers were speaking rapidly to each other as if the Rebbe was still alive: "The Rebbe is to the left." "The Rebbe is waiting for you." "May the Rebbe help you, my friend." 

I do not believe in the Rebbe. Yet at the hour when Galilean seers warned not only does the Moon mark New Year but God himself decides to destroy or remake this world anew, I was afraid of him. 

In the first prayer hall hundreds of Hasids in black beards and black coats twirled round a Tel Aviv Yemenite, resplendent in a white hoodie, pushing his crippled Falasha schoolmate to the parading Torah scrolls. Wild circle dances formed between Jews from different worlds: Russian physicists, Hasidic furriers, Tel Aviv locksmiths, New Jersey accountants and shivering junkies, all calling to Nachman to pull them out of Hell.