Rabbi Micha Shotkin: The Rabbi Who Builds Eruvin

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections. 

Dovid Bashevkin: I am so excited to introduce, for our conversation on tractate Eruvin, my new friend, Rabbi Micah Shotkin.

Micah Shotkin: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dovid Bashevkin: Show us what’s on your jacket because I love it.

Micah Shotkin: Says Eruv Rav.

Dovid Bashevkin: Eruv Rav, which is really great. That is a very clever pun, ’cause the erev rav were kind of the villains in the story of leaving Egypt and wandering in the desert, but you are the rabbi of the eruv. And I wanted to talk a little bit—we just finished in Talmud Daily our overview of tractate Eruvin, the key concepts, the key words. Your work is actually building the structure of the eruv.

Micah Shotkin: Building it and maintaining it, building it, and repairing it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Number one: How does the modern eruv differ from the world of the Talmud?

Micah Shotkin: In Talmudic times, it was mostly—the people lived in very walled structures. So they lived in, the Talmud calls a chatzer, in a courtyard, and houses open into a courtyard, but it was an enclosed courtyard. And then that would open up into a street, but the street was walled on each side, and kind of like alleyways.

If one goes into contemporary Meah Shearim in Israel, it’s somewhat like that old structure, or sometimes in the Old City you can see little areas of it that have that same type of structure, where many houses open up into a little courtyard, and then that courtyard opens up into a larger street, many courtyards into the street, and then that goes to the main thoroughfare. Nowadays, all of our homes open straight into the main thoroughfare, and we don’t have these small little communities or small little catacombs. So in the Talmud, a lot of the discussion is, how do you make an eruv in these small areas, and there was never really a thought of building an eruv around an entire city.

Dovid Bashevkin: Correct.

Like a whole neighborhood, ’cause they didn’t—it wasn’t structured that way.

Micah Shotkin: It wasn’t structured that way. Maybe there was no necessity for it. As well, the telegraph hadn’t been invented, and once the telegraph was invented, now you had poles and strings going around the entire city, and that enabled you to build an eruv going around the city.

And until then, the only citywide eruvin that they had were when you had like a Jewish ghetto, which kind of had a wall most of the way around it, or something like the Old City of Jerusalem where you had a wall around it and just a few openings, so then they would close it off, and they could have a city that was entirely in an eruv. But to have that every city had an eruv, and that we could build them all over the place, and now it’s almost the mainstay of any Jewish city—if you go to LA, or you go to Miami, or you go to—

Dovid Bashevkin: Any major Jewish population to have mass Shabbos observance, it’s going to have an eruv.

Micah Shotkin: Going to have an eruv there.

Dovid Bashevkin: Let’s talk a little bit about the contemporary eruv and how it’s built.

And I wanted to start with a basic question that surely you have been asked, I see it asked online all the time, they kind of poke fun at it: Isn’t this just a ridiculous loophole? Meaning, how do you make the case for the integrity of the system of eruv when somebody’s like, ‘What, and this little string means that all of a sudden you’re allowed to carry and violate the laws of Shabbos?’ Where you must interact with, I don’t know, electric companies, with local government, and you need to explain what this is, and do it in a way with the integrity that like, well, they look at you and they’re like, ‘What is this ridiculous loophole that you guys are doing?’ So how do you explain the integrity of the eruv?

Micah Shotkin: I was once at a meeting, a very contentious meeting about an eruv, I won’t say where, and there was one fellow there who was very antagonistic towards the eruv. He also was completely tatted up. His whole face was covered with tattoos, his whole neck, everything, he was like top to bottom with tattoos. He says to me, ‘Rabbi, I’m not going to let you use a loophole to circumvent your own laws.

I’m not going to let you do it.’

Dovid Bashevkin: He’s too—he’s too religious! He’s like, ‘I don’t want to have any part in you violating…’

Micah Shotkin: I understand where that’s coming from, because there’s truth to it. It is somewhat of a loophole. But the rationale behind it, and the way I like to explain it, is that in the Talmud, they have discussions about, well, let’s say you need to be in an enclosed area on the Sabbath. You can’t carry from an enclosed area to an unenclosed area.

Your house is an enclosed area, so you can move items and carry them around inside your home, but you couldn’t take them outside of your home. But what if the front door is open, is your house still enclosed? So the Talmud says, ‘Yeah, ’cause you have a doorframe.’ What if the front and the side door are open, is it still enclosed? And said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s a doorframe in each one.’ And even if the front, back, and both side doors are open, it’s still enclosed because there’s doorframes. So then the Talmud says, ‘Well, what if you just have only doorframes?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, well, technically that will work.’ So basically, we need to make doorframes around the entire city so that it’s enclosed. Most eruvin do incorporate a lot of walls.

There are some eruvin that it’s mostly walls. You’ll have sound barriers from highways that go halfway around a community, and you’ll use that fence, or fence of a—we’re here in Teaneck, for about a mile we use the fence of the golf course. We can enclose it using real walls, but for the most part, we use these forms of a door using the…

Dovid Bashevkin: You came literally with a bucket truck, and we we had a blackout right before you came, and when you pulled up, I was convinced it was the electric company.

I’m like, oh they they came—

Micah Shotkin: Yeah, you didn’t notice me when I pulled up. I thought that was funny. You were giving a blank look and I’m like, hi, I’m here.

Dovid Bashevkin: I thought it was for sure the electric company cuz we had to postpone because literally as we were coming up this is how life works out, I’m ready to record, I have all the equipment set up, all the power goes out in the whole neighborhood.

And then you pulled up in your bucket truck, I said, “Wow, they came so fast.” I walked upstairs, and I saw you there. Thank God we have electricity back. But you’re like you’re going up on telephone poles. I want to understand what you’re doing, but I first want to understand, explain very clearly what does it mean, the Talmudic term is a tzuras hapesach, which is the frame of a doorway, what are the components of that, and how does that then translate into the work you do on top of telephone poles?

Micah Shotkin: The idea in the Talmud is that a door frame is made with post-lintel construction.

So you have two posts, let’s say like this, and then you’re going to have a lintel, which is going to go across the top. I haven’t played with blocks for a while, by the way, this is fun.

Dovid Bashevkin: No, this is great. The posts, in language, what do we call the post?

Micah Shotkin: So we call the post a lechi.

In the eiruv industry, it’s called a lechi. There’s discussion as to where that word comes from, the word lechi, and what it means, but that’s what we call them. You might be more familiar with the term mezuzah, which is a side post of a door, and the word lechi and mezuzah are really interchangeable. Then you have a a piece on the top, the lintel, which the Talmud refers to as the kaneh she’al gabeihem, the rod that goes across the top.

Dovid Bashevkin: But this now, when you have two posts, and then you have something on top, now I see, like a very clear doorway. Okay.

Micah Shotkin: Main thing that the Talmud is worried about is that it has to be on the top. What if it’s over to the side? So if it’s like this, cuz you could take you could you could build it like that, especially if you were using wood, and you just put these were two-by-fours, and you screwed this two-by-four onto the side, so that would not be valid, because it has to be post-lintel construction.

A lintel is always on top of the posts, and this is on the side. So this would be called a tzuras hapesach min hatzad, and that would be invalid.

Dovid Bashevkin: To the side. And that’s invalid.

It needs to rest on top.

Micah Shotkin: That’s the issue that we run into. On our telephone poles, the poles have the wires attached to the sides. They don’t often don’t make a a valid tzuras hapesach.

Dovid Bashevkin: Because they’re running right on the sides of the pole, not resting on top of it.

Micah Shotkin: There are times when it’s configured that that their wires do run over the top of the poles, and that’s what Rabbi Jachter refers to as eiruv builders’ nirvana, cuz we don’t have to build anything.

Dovid Bashevkin: Cuz it’s already set up, meaning the the telephone wire is running on top of these poles, so you have kind of that tzuras hapesach, the door frame. But what happens when it’s not? So what are you doing up there? Tell me.

Micah Shotkin: If you look at a telephone pole, there’s the power sector, which is near the top, and then there’s the communication sector, which is ten there’s a 10-foot break usually, and then there’s the communication sector where you’ll have Comcast and Verizon. They’ll run all of their internet lines or phone lines. We run a little piece of conduit up the side of the telephone pole. The bottom 18 feet of the telephone pole, nobody’s using really.

It’s there just to hold up the wires above the traffic. Yeah. We just install a little piece of conduit going on that pole underneath the wire, and now there’s the two posts which are piece are two pieces of conduit on the side of the telephone pole, and the wire that runs along the top, that’s the lintel. Most of what I do is installing those things on the side of those telephone poles, and knowing how to safely install them and, you know, how to stay away from the power and all of that.

Dovid Bashevkin: This is going to sound like the dumbest question of all time. Meaning we already have strings. Now the string that you’re using is running really parallel to the telephone wire.

Micah Shotkin: Oh, I use their telephone wire.

I don’t put my own string usually, unless—

Dovid Bashevkin: So you use the existing telephone wire? That’s fine. Yeah, we use the existing telephone wire. As long as you have that post that it now rests on top of.

Micah Shotkin: Right.

Now you have certain places where the telephone wires are all the telephone and the electric is all underground. Let’s say Queens, New York, Kew Gardens Hills. Sure. Most of their grid is underground, and their transformers are underground.

So what we need to do then is we just go from light pole to light pole, and we run our own wire from the top of a light pole to the top of a light pole, and that’s how we build those eiruvin. So, different eiruvin have different infrastructure that’s preexisting, and we work with what’s preexisting in order to build our eiruv.

Dovid Bashevkin: A lot of communities, the topic of eiruv is extraordinarily contentious, and it can be contentious for different reasons. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve seen about why does eiruv become so contentious when communities say we’d like to build an eiruv, sometimes the existing community is against it, or sometimes it’s very religious and serious Jews who are against it? What are kind of the major classes of eiruv controversies that you see that emerge when a community decides to build or maybe refurbish their eiruv?

Micah Shotkin: The truth is, I think that it has died down.

I think it used to be much bigger in the past. Sure. And the reason, I think, is, and I’m playing historian here, but in the past they didn’t have eiruvin. People were used to living without them, and now if you would go to build one, there would be opposition.

There’s very little opposition left, although there is some, we’ll discuss it. Most people have grown up with them, and most people want them. Most communities feel that if they don’t have an eiruv, then no one’s going to move there and that’s going to be the death of their community. So, almost all communities have an eiruv, and the opposition to them is very minimal.

In the Chasidic communities, they’re even more lenient. The place where there maybe is the most opposition would be a place like Lakewood, where they have plenty of their own eiruvin, but they have their stringencies and their their things that they want to be stringent on, but even there, there’s very little politics left, as opposed to when we were when when you and I were younger, I think there was more more of it around. But now, well to explain what it is, we often have to use halachic leniencies to build our eiruv. Every community has different leniencies they need to use.

Let’s say, for example, you have having bodies of water inside your eiruv, is that allowed? Is it not allowed? Well, only a community that has bodies of water in its, you know, gets into that debate.

Dovid Bashevkin: What would be the issue of a body of water within an eiruv?

Micah Shotkin: The body of water gets into an issue which the discussion in the Talmud called karfeif, where if we have a certain area which is not inhabitable, so sometimes rabbinically they said, well, an uninhabitable area can’t be an enclosed area. It’s considered like a public domain, and therefore, it’s not considered enclosed. I’m oversimplifying it.

Sure. But that’s the the idea of a karfeif. How you define a karfeif, what’s inhabitable, what’s uninhabitable. Well, let’s say I could use that water for my cattle to drink, so some would say, well, that’s inhabitable because we can use it for the living space.

A contemporary rabbi might say, well, we don’t have cattle anymore and that’s not contemporary use, so we don’t consider it to be a living space. And they’ll debate whether it has the status of an uninhabitable area, a karfeif, and can you have karfeifs in your eiruv? The place where this was is is in areas like in outside of Lakewood, and in Jackson there’s a lot of swampland, and we run the eiruv through the swampland using the high-tension power lines, so then some people there say, well, that swamp area is uninhabitable, and the Chasidic opinions are actually more lenient when it comes to this, they’re more lenient in general when it comes to eiruvin, and they would allow it. They would say it’s not a karfeif where other rabbis would say it was. So then you have a debate, and if people are mature, it should remain as a halachic debate.

You’re Sfard, I’m Ashkenaz, you think it’s a karfeif, I think it isn’t, and we get along. But sometimes it gets contentious, and I can’t explain why it gets contentious, but I’ll tell you the the funny story with this in Jackson. So they brought in the Chasidic rabbi, Rabbi Steinmetz, and they said, this this swamp, it’s uninhabitable. He said, well, we know that there’s halachic precedents that if it’s drinkable water, that’s part of the inhabited area.

And the guy said, this water’s not drinkable. So Rabbi Steinmetz took a cup out of his bekishe and he filled up the cup, he made a shehakol, and he drank the water. And the guy says, that’s no proof. If you’re alive in a week, then it’ll be a proof.

So, you know, that’s the type of debate. And if we can debate it and have different standards and get along, I think that’s where we’re headed. And I think that that’s going on. I think that that that’s the way it is in a lot of communities, where one person will say, I choose to be stringent on some ruling, so I don’t use the eiruv, but I respect the fact that other people have a lenient opinion that they’re relying on, and that’s fine with me and live and let live.

And I think that’s the predominant attitude you’ll find in most areas nowadays. You’ll always find hotheads.

Dovid Bashevkin: And kind of the most contentious major eiruv were probably the ones, and for for different reasons, in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Micah Shotkin: Right.

So Rav Moshe Feinstein, who was the, you know, predominant halachic authority of the last generation, so he had a very novel ruling that didn’t allow the building in Brooklyn in the way he defined the term reshus harabbim. His definition of reshus harabbim Meaning a public domain, that’s what it literally means. a public domain, was very novel, but it was a very, you know, rational, a very good explanation. I mean, he doesn’t need my haskama, but he doesn’t need my agreement, but that was his ruling.

Therefore, you couldn’t build in Brooklyn or Manhattan, because of the way he defined things. Other authorities didn’t accept his definition of reshus harabbim, and they felt it should be allowed. And that’s always where you find the biggest machlokes, is where you have one person feels this way, another person feels the other way. Meaning, they didn’t have a fight over whether pig was kosher or not, because that was clear.

But whenever you get to an unclear halachic ruling, so it still shouldn’t be a machlokes, it should be, well, you have your ruling and I have my ruling, which is, I think, where we’ve headed. I think most of the Jewish community is pretty much there. And, you know, there’s always going to be a couple of hotheads who are going to say, well, no, you’re—

Dovid Bashevkin: But there is another kind of contentiousness, and I think this might be even the one that you’re able to weigh in on even more. And that is that there are people who, I don’t want to ascribe motivations, but let’s say they’re they’re worried about changing the character of a certain community, that if we build an eiruv, that’s going to mean that all the Orthodox Orthodox Jews are going to come in, and sometimes when, you know, that that that’s a fair concern, I think, if it’s not directed at Jews, but people have their own communal character.

But sometimes in in effort to ensure that an eiruv will not be built, which is very often courts have argued about this, they’ll have other concerns, where they’ll say, “Well, aren’t you going to ruin the telephone wire? We’re going to have rabbis going up there and and snipping away and building, and it’s going to be obtrusive, and it’s going to be difficult, and you’re going to have strings everywhere.” They’re worried about the whole character, the look of their town changing. Now, you actually build eiruvin, this is what you do. Can things go wrong? Do you attribute any credence when they say, “Well, if we build an eiruv, isn’t it going to ruin the telephone poles? Are we going to get the same level of telephone service or internet or wireless or whatever it is?” Are there any real concerns about, like, messing up a community?

Micah Shotkin: So in terms of the physical structure of the eiruv being unsightly or harming the utilities, of that, there is no concern. Generally, people who do even come with that claim, you have to kind of look into what’s really driving it.

Yeah. And it’s generally the first thing that you mention is that they’re afraid of the nature of their community changing. The Jewish community is growing, the religious Jewish community is growing. Let’s say you have an ultra-Orthodox community, and they’re having a lot of children, and they’re having housing issues, so they start to expand, and they expand into the neighboring communities where there never was a strong Jewish community.

And now they’re building their own schools, their own restaurants, and the local restaurants are closing, or the local schools are having trouble, the public schools aren’t getting the students they need, and then the population that doesn’t want it is usually I think that’s what they’re afraid of. Now, sometimes the fear is rational, and sometimes it’s not rational. Like in the Hamptons, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a chance that it’s going to become an ultra-Orthodox—

Dovid Bashevkin: Enclave in East—

Micah Shotkin: Hampton, where there was a pretty contentious and I think there was a contentious lawsuit. I think that the people who were against the eiruv, with time will eventually admit that you’re right, I lost the court case, but my fears never I would love to meet the people in Tenafly who fought the eiruv there, and just to ask them, you know, you had fears, and you lost the court case, did what you thought would go wrong go wrong? And I think that they would answer no, because I think Tenafly looks the same as it always looked.

I don’t think you could find the eiruv if you went to look for it. I could, but I don’t think the average person would know which attachments to the telephone pole were eiruv-related and which were not. There are places where it is more valid, right outside of some very densely populated religious areas, if it does spread out, then the community will become a very and you have to know the difference. Sure.

But the thing is, it’s a free country, people can move wherever they want, so you can’t really object to people moving into your neighborhood.

Dovid Bashevkin: Hang that objection on the eiruv, blame—

Micah Shotkin: Right, eiruv usually is the flash point, but it’s really not the eiruv that’s the issue, is that we think they think that by fighting the eiruv, they’ll stop the people from moving in. It never does. The people move in, and then we just wait till there’s enough of them, and then we build the eiruv, because they already have they have enough political clout, and they have enough infrastructure of their own, and they they build the eiruv.

Dovid Bashevkin: I have no doubt that when you’re actually building an eiruv and you’re going on that bucket truck, my sense is that the best team that you could find are probably not fellow rabbis. If I know the little bit that I do know about rabbis is we don’t feel most comfortable on bucket trucks, working with telephone wire, that is not our our natural habitat where we feel comfortable. When you’re building an eiruv, how do you find your team, and also, what are the permissions needed? When you go build an eiruv, are you allowed to just, like, go on a bucket truck and and play with I don’t even know who owns the telephone wire. Is it the company? What permissions do you need before you go and build an eiruv?

Micah Shotkin: Just as an aside, before getting into the question, that point you mentioned that I’m a big advocate of having professional eiruv builders, and that they be trained and be knowledgeable of the safety, because what was going on for years, every community would build their own eiruv, try to figure out how to do it on their own, maybe ask another couple communities, but they didn’t really know what they were doing.

And a lot of them were doing stuff that they didn’t it wasn’t necessarily safe. It wasn’t dangerous to other people, but it wasn’t necessarily safe for themselves. They didn’t know what materials to use, they didn’t know what fasteners to use, they didn’t know fasteners, they didn’t know materials, they didn’t know ladders. If you don’t know how to use a ladder safely, you shouldn’t be using a ladder.

Dovid Bashevkin: That is a good tip—

Micah Shotkin: If you walk—

Dovid Bashevkin: Away with anything from this. Right.

Micah Shotkin: Yeah, don’t get don’t get on a ladder unless you know how to use a ladder. And now, it’s really a new phenomenon over the last five, ten years that we have professional eiruv builders.

We have Tuvi Zamek in Far Rockaway, and I shouldn’t list them because I know I’m going to leave somebody out, but you have Baruch Gore in Cherry Hill, he operates a bucket truck, you have Mordechai Poretsky out in Chicago area, you have Avraham Granat down in the Florida area, Chaim Yadlovker in Elizabeth. All these guys are good, and we all learn from each other. We have, like, a WhatsApp group, and we’ll post different things of, you know, how can I get this done or how do we Yeah. My hydraulic fluid is leaking out of my truck.

Does anybody know what I should do? Like, you know, insider type of stuff. Sure. So there are now guys who are professional eruv builders. They’ll design the eruv.

They’ll go around and look where can we build it, what infrastructure exists, how do we get it, how can we get it done. These builders will come in, so first you determine where you’re going to run the eruv, you figure out where all the Jewish institutions are that need to be included in the eruv, and then you find what walls exist, is there a highway wall, where are there telephone wires running. Sometimes there are no telephone wires. There are sometimes communities that can’t have an eruv, it’s just not possible.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s just it’s not going to work.

Micah Shotkin: It doesn’t work, right. And it’s hard to tell them that, because they really want it, but sometimes it’s legally and safely, but there’s nothing we can do. In most of them, it’s just telephone poles and you get what’s called a pole-attach permit.

Poles can be owned either by the electric company or by the phone company, or we don’t have phone much anymore, it’s really internet companies. Let’s say you can have a pole that’s owned by Comcast, you can have a pole that’s owned by PSE&G, or in some places it could be the city that owns the pole. And then other entities rent space. So, basically you get a pole-attach permit, which gives you permits to attach.

We’re using the bottom 18 feet, which no one else is interested in using anyway. So what we attach is just that little piece of conduit going in the area of the pole that they’re not using anyway. Once you get your pole-attach permits, you’re good to go, and you can work on the poles. But it’s incredibly important when you’re working on poles to know where the power is, what to stay away from, and—

Dovid Bashevkin: And do you have contacts? Like, I love the fact that like part of your like chevra, your colleagues are not only just rabbis, you have that rabbi WhatsApp group, like do you have contacts in the telephone companies, like that you’re like, “Oh, it’s Rabbi Shotkin calling.” Like do you have some way of like I’ve worked with linemen.

Micah Shotkin: My funniest thing with a lineman, I was training a What’s a lineman?

Dovid Bashevkin: I’m like, I’m thinking football.

Micah Shotkin: Right, exactly. A lineman is the people who install the electrical stuff on the telephone poles. You can have the cable guys, they install the cable for the for the, you know—but if you see a—

Dovid Bashevkin: Guy in an orange vest—

Micah Shotkin: With a yellow hat—the guys who have the insulated gloves and who are dealing with the high power, they’re called linemen, and they’re very, very specially trained, and they know what they’re doing up there with the power.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s serious dangers. You get electrocuted.

Micah Shotkin: Exactly, yeah, you will. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will get electrocuted.

It’s just a matter of time. Gotcha. I was training one of them. So, I went up to Norwich, Connecticut.

They were so intrigued by the eruv, they gave me four linemen and two bucket trucks, in addition to mine, just to help me. So, I was showing the linemen what we needed, how we needed to install this conduit up to there, and in the middle of our discussion, one of them looks to me and he goes, “You mean it doesn’t need to work?” And I said, “No, I guess not.” He goes, “How can I get your job?” You know, how does a lineman know if he did his job, is if the power comes on. If the power doesn’t come on, then it doesn’t matter how well he did his job, something’s wrong. Exactly.

He was marveling at the fact that I get to install stuff that doesn’t even work, so to speak.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely fantastic.

Micah Shotkin: Once you get your pole-attach permits, you just install those lechis on the telephone poles, and that’s about it.

Dovid Bashevkin: How does one get into eruv building? Like, it’s such a niche part, but literally all of Jewish life hinges on it.

Jewish life hinges on Shabbos observance. It is really challenging to observe Shabbos without an eruv, especially if you have young kids and family. How did you get into this as a field?

Micah Shotkin: I ask myself this question all the time. How in the world did I get into this? I don’t even have a good answer.

When I moved to Ottawa, Ontario, the fellow who builds the Toronto eruv lived there, and he showed me how to build an eruv for myself in Ottawa, but he was coming very much from the technical part. He would say, “The rabbi allows this and doesn’t allow that.” He didn’t really know the halacha, but he knew what needed to be done, and he knew which aisle to go to in Home Depot and get what. Well, that’s impressive. So, I hung out with him for a while.

Then when I moved back to the tri-state area, I said, “I could hang up my gloves. I’m sure that everything’s fine here.” And what I noticed was that there were a lot of halachic experts, but there were very few people who were technical experts in the materials of what do you build… I remember reviewing an eruv, and I came to one of these attachments on the side of the telephone pole. They took a piece of Sheetrock that obviously they found in their garage leftover from some construction or something, and they attached it to the telephone pole, but it was mushrooming because it was absorbing all of the rain, all the moisture.

It wasn’t the right material. And so I went to remove it to put something proper that could withstand the elements, and no two fasteners were the same. One was a nail, the next one was a screw, one was a Phillips screw, one was a Robertson screw, one was a star bit screw. I needed every single type of screw attachment that I could to get the thing off.

The guy just found whatever he found laying around in his garage, and he banged it until it held the thing in. And it’s just not professional, and it doesn’t last, and then you keep having problems because everything keeps breaking because it wasn’t built right in the first place, and then you have more time that you’re spending out on the poles and stuff. So, I slowly learned, and as I came back to the tri-state area, I saw that there was nobody who knew the technical part of it. I guess it appealed to me, I don’t know.

And then I was doing more and more eruv work. I was dreaming of the idea of maybe having a bucket truck. It would be really cool. I was doing everything with ladders out of the back of my family van.

Really? And then my wife one time, she called me—this was one of the big moments—and she said, “Carpool is in five minutes. Remember you’re picking up today.” And I was in a harness, harnessed onto a telephone wire, telephone wire 20 feet up in the air. And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll be there very soon.” And I really You know, I need to get a bucket truck. I can’t be doing this out of the family car, out of the family van.

And I looked on eBay, and a friend of mine who’s in trucking, he showed me how you put in the parameters of what you’re looking for, and it sends you emails of things that came up. And this one truck came available. It had 7,000 miles on it, and it had been garaged, so it was with no rust. It was like a perfect machine.

So I know they sell for about 100 grand, so I put in a bid for 40 grand knowing I would lose.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s that expensive, a bucket truck?

Micah Shotkin: Wow. Yeah, they’re not cheap. I’ll lose if I put in a bid for 40 grand.

So I put in the bid, and I forgot about it. Two weeks later, I get an email, “You won an auction on eBay,” and I’m like, “Really? I’m not in an auction. What’s this about?” And I look it up, and I see I won this bucket truck. And it was kind of God’s way of pushing me into the industry.

I said, “This is great, and it’s a great price, but I still don’t have $40,000.” I checked my pockets. I looked in my wallet. Honey, did you check? Checked for the coins in the sofa. I found a friend who had been very grateful from some of the eiruv work that I had done, and he lent me the money, which was also God’s way of pushing me into it.

I bought the truck, and then one community after the next, after the next. Teaneck was one of my first big big jobs. I redid the entire Teaneck eiruv, upgraded all the materials.

Dovid Bashevkin: After a lot of time in this field, do you have like a favorite eiruv, or like an eiruv when you visit a community it’s like it’s like watching like a young child that you helped raise grow up? Do you feel like a little bit of a connection to the eiruv, or it’s—

Micah Shotkin: The Passaic eiruv, and the Teaneck eiruv, and the West Orange-Livingston eiruvs, those are my babies.

Dovid Bashevkin: Those are your babies.

Micah Shotkin: Yeah, definitely my babies. I definitely will have trouble giving them up to somebody else, but I will, one day.

Dovid Bashevkin: I absolutely love it.

Okay, that was a fantastic overview of eiruvin, what’s needed, what’s used, and again, as you mentioned, do not try this at home. Do not take a ladder. Do not try to go up there. We have real professionals who do this.

But this is really what allows communities to be formed, and I think there’s something very beautiful. There was a debate about this. People think that Jewish communities were putting up walls to wall people out. There’s something very beautiful that what binds a community together is actually doorways to come in and out, rather than erecting walls to keep everybody out.

It’s actually doorways where we’re looking to build the character of many communities, and that really makes your work so incredibly special. But as a part of Talmud Daily, we always like to go through some of the basics of a Talmud questionnaire. And my first question is: Who do you consider your primary teacher of Talmud, and what did they teach you?

Micah Shotkin: My primary teacher of Talmud was Rav Henoch Leibowitz from Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim. That’s beautiful.

Dovid Bashevkin: We could just do that. The picture, it’s right out of frame, but you could probably reach it if you get it right there. That’s my grandfather with, in the center there’s, on the chair, you could look over right over here. This is Rav Henoch’s father, Rav Dovid Leibowitz.

This is Rav Pinchas Scheinberg, and this is my grandfather. So you consider Rav Henoch Leibowitz your primary—yeah—

Micah Shotkin: I was a student of his for many years, and I had the privilege of living in his house when I was single. Wow. And was very close to him.

Dovid Bashevkin: How would you characterize like what it is that he taught you?

Micah Shotkin: He taught the theory of how you approach Talmud. Everything had to make sense. Every question, you had to understand the question, how did the answer answer the question, what switched from the question to the answer, really making sure that you were thorough in your understanding. I can’t say I’m the best student regarding this, because it requires academic rigor, but to whatever degree I’m able to do it, it’s from him.

And he didn’t like cursory readings of things. He liked things being read carefully, and in depth, and trying to extract the depth from it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Chofetz Chaim is renowned famously or perhaps infamously for moving very slowly.

Micah Shotkin: Right, and I think that there’s always a place for that.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah, for sure.

Micah Shotkin: I don’t always do it in my personal study when I do now. I now try and, you know, finish the Talmud like you’re doing. I’m doing Sotah now, making some of my way through.

But just even when you’re going quicker, the methodology doesn’t change. I’m just doing it faster. I’m just trying to make sure, but always trying to make sure that everything makes sense, that you’re really understanding the topic and getting the depth of it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Now, if you were introducing someone to Talmud for the very first time, how would you explain what the Talmud is, and where do you think you’d begin?

Micah Shotkin: I haven’t thought about that.

My guess would be it’s an explanation of the Mishna, which was terse notes. This was the oral law that we were reluctant to write down, so it was written down reluctantly first as very terse notes, and then the Talmud kind of expounded upon it, but it’s trying to flesh out those notes that are in the Mishna and that understanding of the Mishna, and contradictions between different mishnas and trying to resolve them. And it’s really a didactic debate and a discussion about those previous notes or understandings that we can flesh it out more.

Dovid Bashevkin: And where do you think you’d start if you were teaching somebody for the very first time, introducing them to Talmud?

Micah Shotkin: I would just dive in.

I would just Dive right in the beginning. pick a tractate and start with it. You know, ArtScroll has great stuff out there. Everything’s translated now.

It’s really accessible.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you have a favorite tractate?

Micah Shotkin: It probably was Berachos. Why? I felt that it added a lot of meaning in life, the blessings that we say are really an act of appreciation, and I found that from that tractate, more than anything, I gained a lot more gratitude and appreciation of things, and it was a practical gratitude. It was like, now you’re going to make a blessing over the drink that you’re going to have, and I felt that that was very life-changing in the way you- where I viewed the world.

That and Maseches Ta’anis as well.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely beautiful. Do you have a favorite story in the Talmud?

Micah Shotkin: Probably my favorite story is the story with Rabbi Akiva, and maybe I’m only saying this because I studied it with my son this morning, but gam zu letovah, that even this is for the good.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s around page 60 in tractate Berachos, somewhere around there.

You want to tell the- tell the story?

Micah Shotkin: The story was that Rabbi Akiva came to a town, and he needed a place to rest. Nobody opened their home to him, and he had to sleep out in the field. And instead of getting dejected about it, he said, “Even this is for the good.” And then he had- Gam zu letovah. This too is for the good.

Dovid Bashevkin: What he learned from his rebbe, yeah. Yep.

Micah Shotkin: He had a donkey, and he had a rooster, and he had a- a candle or some- some light, some lantern with him. And a lion came and ate the donkey, and he said, “Gam zu letovah, this is for the good.” Some type of cat came and- Scared away the rooster, yeah.

-and killed his rooster, and he said, “Well, even this is for the good.” And then the wind came and blew out his light, and he said, “This is for the good,” and he went to sleep, and he was happy, and he was content, and he just had faith in God that everything was going to turn out for the best. And then that evening, there were some marauders that came to the town, and ransacked the town, and he was saved. And they didn’t notice him because he didn’t have the donkey- Didn’t have a light, and the donkey wasn’t making noise. -rooster wasn’t crowing.

They never saw him, and they left him alone, and he was saved. That’s one of my favorite stories just because it just- you always- there’s always challenges in life, issues, there’s always different things that you have to deal with, and having a positive attitude, the power of a positive attitude is- I think that’s my favorite story.

Dovid Bashevkin: I absolutely, absolutely love it. Do you have, and I assume I know what the answer to this is, do you have a favorite, not story, but a favorite legal topic in the Talmud? And I can only assume-

Micah Shotkin: The ones that interest me the most is Eruvin.

Correct.

Dovid Bashevkin: Because—

Micah Shotkin: It’s practical to me, but they all interest me.

Dovid Bashevkin: Absolutely fair. Do you have a favorite time and place to study Talmud?

Micah Shotkin: Yes.

It’s in the morning, prior to Shacharis. So, this morning between 5:30 and 6:30, I meet every morning with Reb Gopin, and we’ve been studying for years. That’s my favorite time of the day, no distractions. And where? We meet in the kollel avreichim in Passaic.

They have a great library, and it’s the best time of day. No phone calls come in at 5:30 in the morning. There’s never any weddings or bar mitzvahs or any- there’s nothing ever I have to attend.

Dovid Bashevkin: Nowhere else to be.

Micah Shotkin: Yeah, it’s the best time of day because it’s just your mind is clear, you just had a good night’s sleep, and that’s the best time.

Dovid Bashevkin: Rabbi Micah Shotkin, thank you so much for joining Talmud Daily.

Micah Shotkin: My pleasure, and keep up the good work.