"I’m just an exercise equipment salesman from Queens, and I can’t deal with all these issues"

Rabbi Klarberg was a pleasant enough person, though he still made it seem like he was doing Reuven a favor every time they met. This was their third conversation, and Reuven already felt like he would have a signature achievement to show the people soon.

He was winning.

The rav was getting remarried on Lag B’omer, and he was open to starting a new job at the end of the summer, in time for the Yamim Noraim, he said. But he still didn’t know if this job was it. He just didn’t have a good sense of what it entailed, he explained, and he wasn’t at the stage of his life when he could afford to make a mistake.

“It has to work, you know?” he said, smiling in a disarming way that made Reuven like him even more. “I’m not a yungerman who can dust himself off and say, ‘Okay, next, let’s move on.’ And I already was yotzei all the drama and politics over the last 35 years of rabbanus, I just don’t know. I have to be sho’eil eitzah and see if this is b’chlal for me… but anyhow, Reb Reuven, you know all this already. You didn’t come back here to hear my sefeikos again. Tell me what’s doing by you? Vos hert zich in the shechunah?”

Reuven knew that it wasn’t wise to unburden himself about neighborhood issues to a man he was trying to lure as its new rav, but he couldn’t help himself. Rabbi Klarberg had that manner that made you want to share, and Reuven wasn’t holding back.

“We need a rav, and every day that we don’t have one, the cracks grow wider. I’m just an exercise equipment salesman from Queens, and I can’t deal with all these issues.”