Build nothing of splendor over the hole, was the rule. If it were not for hostile visits, a naked hole would be ideal, a hole not hidden by any hut.
Rabbi Ira no doubt envisioned a hut-free world, where anyone could stop at a hole, crouch down, and avail himself of a sermon flowing up from the earth. The religion would be on all the time, would pour from the earth. But the world didn’t accommodate this ideal. Disguises were required.
The technology of the hut was a glowbug setup. The hut covered a hole and the hole was stuffed with wire. From our own hole came bright orange ropes of cabling, the whole mess of it reeking of sewage, of something dead beneath the earth. This wiring was grappled to the listener, and the listener, called a Moses Mouth by Bauman, even while we were instructed to never refer to it, was draped over the radio module. I’m understating the complexity of this. But on a good day, it just worked.
Transmissions flowed into the hut on Thursdays, usually at noon. Sometimes no messages came, or they arrived in broken notes from the radio and we suffered through services in languages too foreign to know. Our gear was faulty and old. The glowbug had one dry little input that always needed grease. In the winter it cinched shut and I’d have to stretch it back open with my finger.
Sometimes it was not word that we received at the hut, but a hissing silence, months of it, even as we waited for guidance, freezing in the hut under a pile of rotted blankets, groping beneath each other’s clothing to dispatch little moments of pleasure.
We did what we could, within the bounds of the rules, to make the hut cozy. We filled a wooden crate with extra hats, sweaters, mittens, then painted on it, instead of our names, the word Us.
Each time we visited the hut we brought a pink rubber ball to feed into the hole. We took turns dropping it in, listening for the distant, wet bounce. We wondered how many balls it would take, how old we’d be, when the balls piled up so high in the hole that they overflowed into the hut.
If we missed a visit sometimes we could coax a summary from the archive, my private term for the expired messages festering in the wire. But the summaries, if I released them, were skeletal, in bones of language that often could not be joined for sense. Such messages were often hammered flat, their meaning ripped out, as if the rabbi’s mouth when he spoke had been filled with glue. Transmissions expired into garbled tones if we did not enter the hut in time. But if we squatted in the hut and waited, if we slept there or overstayed, the transmissions receded, failed to issue in language we could understand.
From Buffalo the connection could be severed at any time, when tampering or illegitimate listening was attempted, and of course it was attempted all the time. Which meant that if the line was dead for too long, someone was out there trying to hack into Rabbi Burke’s broadcast.
The secrecy surrounding the huts was justified. The true Jewish teaching is not for wide consumption, is not for groups, is not to be polluted by even a single gesture of communication. Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin. Bauman told us the only thing we should worry about regarding the sermons was if we understood them too well. When such a day came, then something was surely wrong.
At the hut a few days after Esther’s return from camp, when there could no longer be any doubt about what was sickening us, Claire scooped grease from the tub in the bin, then lubed the orifice in the floor by plunging her entire hand inside. I crouched behind her and when her hand popped out, I draped the listener over the fixture.
The listener, a warm bag filled with conductive gel, stripped away the hiss to reveal the underlying speech. Ours was scissored for us by Bauman from a larger bolt, and he gave us a quick course in its care. A small box of maintenance tools was entrusted to us, but I’d never needed it. I’d stashed it in my bedroom dresser, a box with a chisel, a thimble, some rubber clips, and clear sheets of what looked like gelatin.
The listener could not endure sunlight, nor could we risk hiding it in the hut, so we kept it buried in an unmarked grave that rotated according to season, and we retrieved and cleaned it for each visit.
Today the listener gripped the fixture as it siphoned out a broadcast, sputtering sound into the hut. On the steps we waited as the system hissed to life. Claire huddled inside her parka, stiffening when I touched her.
Burke’s service, when finally it crackled on, centered on blame and how we might distinguish ourselves through its broader adoption. But first we had to listen to songs, Burke’s melodies distorted through copper wire. From the radio came warbled noisings filtered through miles of earth. It is possible that in person Burke possessed a beautiful singing voice that transformed the dull language of song lyrics into transcendent moans. Transmitted all the way to our hut, Burke’s incantations only made us feel that we were listening to the death throes of an old man in bed, someone uttering his last.
When the service began, Burke held forth on the opportunity called blame. In blame is a chance to step into responsibility, to make of our bodies absorbent parcels for the accusations of others. Burke discussed how we might extinguish doubt in our neighbors, make their fears small. He insisted that blame can have no literal meaning; there really is no such thing when you love the Name, our term for Hashem. Blame exists only in our desire to bestow cause locally, and there is no such thing. No such thing. When people seek to place blame, it means they have nothing left to give. It reflects their inability to appreciate the inscrutability, the all-knowingness of the Name. Taking blame is then a service, and now we are called upon to offer this service again.
“A tremendous opportunity has arisen,” Burke said. “We have the chance to take the blame for something extraordinary, an incomprehensible affliction.”
Claire and I sat together on the cold floor of the hut. I could feel her listening next to me. She had tightened with attention.
Burke started shouting, the higher registers of his voice distorting the speaker.
“We can take this blame as a curse, and rage against it, crying out about unfairness. How can my child be blamed for anyone’s sorrow? My child is innocent! Innocent! Or we can receive this blame as a gift to us, which is what it is. So much of what we must do today is sculpt our understanding to accommodate what we cannot bear. Now we must help people who do not understand, even if we are lost ourselves. This is our role. And we do this by stepping forward, saying, I, it was I who did this. I did this to you. Not my child. I did it.”
Claire sounded like she’d been struck in the chest.
“Understanding itself is beside the point,” Burke said, more calmly. “Do not make of it a fetish, for it pays back nothing. That habit must be broken. Understanding puts us to sleep. The dark and undesired sleep. Questions like these are not meant to be resolved. We must never believe we know our roles. We must always wonder what the moment calls for.”
Rabbi Burke did not officially exist in public. There was no such person. Our system of worship was likewise kept secret, which means that our practice at the hut suffered its share of misinformation and rumor. The more we concealed it, the more it troubled people, so they invented actions for us, ascribed false powers to the radio. It was guessed to be a hole in some secret location that speaks only to Jews. From the hole came bits of data: sound, word, and pulse, that Jews alone could decode, using their oily gear, their hacked electronics.