“Rabbi, I’m going to need someone to help me tomorrow. Can you find me an assistant?”

Photos: AbstractZen

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ixing eiruvin can be complicated business, but there are some factors that really smooth the way. Having excellent assistants is one crucial element. In some cases, I’ve had assistants who are handy and capable, and in others, it’s been a bit more interesting.

“Rabbi, I’m going to need someone to help me tomorrow. Can you find me an assistant?” I asked Rabbi Silverstein after Shacharis. “I’ll be working on Main Street and I’ll need someone to do traffic control.”

I really hoped Rabbi Silverstein was listening. Main Street was a busy thoroughfare with three lanes of traffic in each direction. I would be stringing a wire across all six lanes of traffic, and I needed an assistant who could ably keep an eye on the whizzing vehicles and halt the traffic flow as needed. But Rabbi Silverstein’s mind was elsewhere, his eyes on his phone and his fingers tapping urgently.

Rabbi Silverstein was the rav of a large kehillah in the Midwest, and he regularly had weddings, funerals and a slew of important meetings on his agenda. Eiruv assistants were only one of a myriad of items to be checked off his to-do list.

Yet, he had also been the one to insist on upgrading his community’s failing eiruv and had committed to doing whatever it took to get the job done. Now what I needed was help sourcing a local volunteer to assist me.