Rabbi Micah Shotkin is one of a handful of rabbinical experts in the United States who serve full time as professional eruv builders.
For some rabbis who know a lot about constructing and repairing the eruv in their communities but want to know more, Passaic, a small city twelve miles west of New York City, has become the go-to place. That’s because Rabbi Micah Shotkin lives there.
The rabbi, a native of Silver Spring, Maryland, who has lived in the city of 70,000 (with a Jewish population of about 11,000) for nearly two decades, is one of a handful of rabbinical experts in the United States who serve full time as professional eruv builders. “I’m the most active one,” he says.
In addition to taking his tools to disparate communities that need an eruv built or fixed, the rabbi has become a mentor to his colleagues, inviting some of them to spend an individualized day or two with him in Passaic each year to share what he has learned on the job; the out-of-town rabbis accompany him on his inspection rounds of the city’s eruv, for which he is responsible. This is typical in the small circle of rabbis who share their specialized expertise. “There’s no competition” among eruv professionals, Rabbi Shotkin says.
He is also in charge of the eruvin in nearby Teaneck and West Orange/Livingston, and is responsible for the upkeep of “numerous other eruvin.” This, in addition to handling the eruv she’eilot that come to him by phone each day.
To outsiders, putting up or fixing an eruv seems like simple work. Like paskening on the kashrut of a chicken. Can’t anyone with semichah build a kosher eruv with some string and poles?
“A lot of people think that,” Rabbi Shotkin says. In truth, most rabbanim agree that the Talmud’s Eruvin tractate is one of the most difficult to master; the details of constructing an acceptable eruv are among halachah’s most complicated. Though many rabbis have studied the relevant halachot, he noticed, when he began building his first few eruvin, that “there weren’t [many] people who knew the construction aspect of eruvin.” Much study was required.
Part of the challenge: no two eruv sites are identical. Each offers unique physical settings—featuring trees, bodies of water, gaps between buildings, et cetera, which an eruv builder must deal with.
The demand for eruv professionals like Rabbi Shotkin has grown in recent decades. “Eruvin are everywhere,” the rabbi says.
An independent contractor, Rabbi Shotkin, who has done full-time eruv work for a dozen years, has his business based in his home on a Passaic side street, where he parks his 21-foot-long bucket truck (aka a “cherry picker”), which carries a boom lift (“forty-two feet high, twenty-eight feet high”) for reaching high wires on telephone and electrical poles. The vehicle’s row of sealed compartments surrounding the chassis are packed with an eruv builder’s tools and construction supplies, and the rabbi’s one-car garage behind the house is filled with even more supplies. It’s as though a yeshivah opened a Home Depot branch.
Equally at home sitting in a beit midrash or walking the aisles of a hardware store, Rabbi Shotkin peppers his speech with Talmudic phrases and references to such things as lasers, screwdrivers and plum lines.
Rabbi Shotkin’s eruv duties have taken him as far away as Nevada, to fields and streams, forests and swamps, the sides of cliffs and the shores of lakes. During his eruv-building years, he’s encountered countless ticks and insects, as well as snapping turtles and bears (which did not threaten him), deer, snakes (non-venomous), mosquitoes and swarms of bees (his construction garb fortunately protected him against stings).
His duties have included producing a series of educational videos for the OU, demonstrating the intricacies of a community eruv for the OU’s All Daf team when the Daf Yomi cycle reached tractate Eruvin.
All this from someone raised in a Modern Orthodox family who had no intention of becoming an eruv maven. “I wanted to be an engineer.” Then, he became “enamored with [Torah] learning.” He spent seventeen years in yeshivah. Like other Orthodox rabbis, he learned little in yeshivah (in his case, the Rabbinical Seminary of America—Chofetz Chaim in Forest Hills, Queens) about building an eruv, but had to learn quickly when he decided to build one at his family’s home while doing outreach work in Ottawa, Canada.
Mechanically inclined, he developed an interest in and aptitude for that type of hands-on work. He studied the topic intensively. His reputation grew. And he got calls to put up, or repair, eruvin in several out-of-town communities.
Rabbi Shotkin is “one of the most knowledgeable eruv experts in terms of materials and the how-to of building an eruv,” says Rabbi Baruch Gore, a colleague who lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
The demand for eruv professionals like Rabbi Shotkin has grown in recent decades. “Eruvin are everywhere,” the rabbi says.
Sometimes Rabbi Shotkin’s eruv work means assignments on short notice. Rabbi Chaim Jachter of Teaneck says he noticed “something very disturbing” about the community eruv on a Friday afternoon a few years ago—one of the poles along the eruv route was severely damaged. It was two and a half hours before candle-lighting time. Rabbi Jachter called Rabbi Shotkin, who fortuitously was fifteen minutes away in his car. “He quickly changed course and made his way to Teaneck,” Rabbi Jachter says. “Rabbi Shotkin made the repair rapidly and efficiently, and the eruv was up and ready for Shabbat.”
Over the years, Rabbi Shotkin says, he has had a hand—literally—in some 150 eruvin.
Admittedly, eruv builder is a rare career choice for a talmid chacham, the rabbi says. People who meet his wife or children typically ask: “What does your husband [or father] do?”
“He’s an eruv builder.”
“He can make a living at that?” the people ask.
“Yes,” says Rabbi Shotkin. It’s easier, he says, than serving as a teacher in a day school, which he did before turning to full-time eruv work. “Much easier.”
“And it pays better,” he adds.
On one job in Connecticut a few years ago, an employee of the electric company who worked alongside the rabbi at some electrical poles, remarked, after Rabbi Shotkin declared his work done, “That’s it?” No testing required? How do you know the eruv works?
Someone working for a utility or phone company needs to run some tests to ensure that the repairs work, Rabbi Shotkin explains. No such test is required for an eruv. “It works,” Rabbi Shotkin declares, “if it’s kosher.”
Nine years ago, Rabbi Shotkin was called to Milwaukee to supervise—and actually carry out—the construction of an eruv on the city’s east side; plans for the eruv had been initiated three decades earlier but stalled until all the government permissions could be obtained. Under the aegis of an Eruv Committee formed by the Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study day school and yeshivah (WITS), the Lake Park Synagogue, and the Chabad of the East Side, the eruv encompasses seven square miles.
The committee turned to Rabbi Shotkin, says Rabbi Dovid Brafman, the development director of WITS, because “we needed his expertise.” Over a period of a few years, Rabbi Shotkin drove his cherry picker to Milwaukee several times for a week. Without Rabbi Shotkin, says Rabbi Brafman, that Milwaukee eruv “never would have happened.”
One snowy Friday afternoon, one of the wires of the Milwaukee eruv snapped. The eruv became pasul a few hours before Shabbat. Members of the Eruv Committee, lacking the specialized knowledge or a cherry picker to effect repairs, were distressed. Rabbi Brafman called Rabbi Shotkin.
Rabbi Shotkin thought for a few minutes, then asked Rabbi Brafman, “Do you have a bungee cord?”
“Of course,” Rabbi Brafman answered; he had kept some of the heavy-duty elastic cords in his car after using them to tie some items atop the vehicle a few years earlier.
Following Rabbi Shotkin’s directions, Rabbi Brafman was able to fasten the bungee cord in place of the damaged wire; the east side of Milwaukee had a kosher eruv that Shabbat.
On the job, outfitted in a hardhat, a “highway yellow shirt” and steel-toed boots, Rabbi Shotkin is not readily identifiable as an Orthodox Jew, and most people he encounters assume he is a utility worker anxious to do his day’s job. Rabbi Shotkin is usually in no hurry to correct the assumption and engage in a theological conversation. “I always present myself as a utility worker.”
Many people—non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews—who learn that Rabbi Shotkin is working on an eruv, are intrigued by the details of the Shabbat enclosure. To those who are respectfully curious about the purpose of an eruv, he offers a simple explanation.
Since an eruv is often a sign of an expanding Orthodox community, Rabbi Shotkin has heard the occasional antisemitic remark from people who are not anxious to have frum families move in.
But he tells about the African American gentleman who was watching him do some repairs in Passaic a few years ago.
“Are you from the phone company?” the man asked.
“I said yes.”
“You’d better take care,” the man said. “That belongs to the Jewish community. They need it.” The onlooker kept telling the rabbi about the importance of the eruv wires. “He was very concerned about it.”
Steve Lipman is a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.