When the High Holy Days come, when we walk into our beautiful makom overflowing with family and friends at the busiest time of year, after scrambling for parking, searching for tickets, jostling through the crowd, one thing is clear: everyone needs a chair.

1,380 chairs in the sanctuary, not a single extra, per order of the Wellesley Fire Department, each slipped into place by a TBE Softball player. It’s our annual mitzvah project, started a decade ago, when the building opened.

Converting TBE’s sanctuary into a triple-sized High Holy Day prayer center isn’t easy. It requires nearly 70 hours for TBE’s four full-time custodians and several seasonal hires to slide the 40-foot tall partitions into their storage closet, and to disassemble, move and reassemble the bimah. Each of the wooden benches along the circumference of the sanctuary—inside of which are stored 2,500 High Holy Day prayer books—needs to be lifted onto a dolly, and rolled aside.

Most of this work is finished a few evenings before Rosh Hashanah. The small custodial staff, already on overtime, has reached their limit. It’s time for TBE Softball to help them get the job finished.

2,000 rental chairs arrive on palettes. We arrange the wooden sanctuary chairs, function hall chairs, and white-folding chairs according to a seating plan provided by the building’s architects. Several hundred more go into the tent out back.

Longtime first baseman Art Priver, our tape-measure guy, ensures spacing between the rows and aisles meets fire code. We set out prayer books and pamphlets. We designate seats for greeters.

TBE Softball does all this behind the scenes. Our goal—to make sure that as the gentle strains of cantorial guitars fill the expanded sanctuary, everyone has a spot to sit, pray, and consider the coming year.