Breslov in My Backyard

I was born in Brooklyn, where davening happens in shuls that are heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer. If people get emotional during davening, maybe their whispers are a little loud. But most keep their emotions to themselves.

The wadi in my current backyard — a ravine hugging the edge of Jerusalem — is a long way from Brooklyn.

Those first few nights after we moved in, I was alarmed to hear repeated desperate yells outside my window. But when morning came, I realized that no one was being attacked out there. The screams were coming from a motley group of Breslover chassidim who’d chosen this wadi as their destination for daily hisbodedus — some in the early morning hours, some shrouded in the lonely darkness of the Jerusalem night.

With time, my take on those yells changed from annoying to curious to passionate to inspiring. And my view of the men who visit the raw valley changed, too: from foreign, off-putting wanderers to authentic spiritual seekers.