BOOK REVIEW

LOCAL RABBI OFFERS BOOK ON READING PSALMS

By Rabbi Jack Reimer
Broward Jewish Journal-North
January 1, 2004

The Lord Is My Shepherd: Why Do I Still Want? By Rabbi Paul Plotkin, Eakin Press, Austin, TX, 2003, 200 pages, $21.95.

Rabbi Paul Plotkin's life was falling apart. His wife had left him, and he was overwhelmed by feelings of failure, fear, self pity and despair. He lay awake wondering: who will want a divorced rabbi? What will happen to the children? What will happen to me? How could what was once a dream have become such a nightmare?

In this time of his confusion and depression, Rabbi Plotkin turned to the book of psalms. And he stumbled across a verse there that spoke to his heart and gave him hope. That verse helped him get through this dark time in his life and to hang on until a better time came.

And this experience led him to studying the psalms, not just academically, as he had done in school, but as a treasure house of the human spirit, that can help us live through the dark times in our lives and that can enable us to celebrate in the bright moments of our lives.

The scholars ask their own kinds of questions when they study the psalms. They want to know what the different manuscripts say, what period to date each psalm to, what are the parallels to this text in ancient literature, and what precisely does each word mean. The human being who reads the psalms comes with a different set of questions: why do I feel so alone and so abandoned, why do good people suffer and bad people prosper, who and how can I thank for all the blessings and wonders in my life, and what is the meaning of my life. After years of reading the psalms the first way, the way that students are taught to read them in the academy, Rabbi Plotkin began to read them the second way, and this book is the result.

Space permits only one example of the kind of question that Rabbi Plotkin deals with in this book and the way he finds answers in the psalter.

He asks: What is the spiritual problem of the rich? It is that they think everything is coming to them and that they deserve all that they have. Some rich people, not all but some, are simply infatuated with themselves. They think that because they are wealthy, they must be smart too, and that they can sing well too, and that they are entitled to everlasting reverence. Rabbi Plotkin recalls one recent example. A wealthy man donated a large amount of money to a certain synagogue in Washington, D.C. and the synagogue named its lobby for him. Some time later, the synagogue put the names of some other wealthy donors on the wall of the lobby, and this man took them to court, claiming that he had been promised that his name and his name only would appear on the lobby wall. In his presentation to the court, the man argued that having other names in "his" lobby would diminish his honor. The judge found for they synagogue and gave the man a lecture on what true honor comes from.

Had this made read Psalm 49, he might not have sued. Psalm 49 is a meditation on the limits of what wealth can achieve, and it contains the famous line: You can't take it with you. It says: "men who put their trust in their wealth and glory in the possessions will eventually learn that wealth cannot redeem a person nor can God be bribed."

From the pyramids of Egypt to the mausoleums that we see at cemeteries today, the rich have tried to impress others by the size and the fanciness of their graves. I once saw an ad for mausoleums in a certain cemetery that said: "You have lived with class; surely you should be buried with class. Buy the kind of mausoleum that will testify to all who come to visit that you were a success in life, and that you are a success forever. You deserve the best." I think that ad is the shortest, simplest definition of the opposite of Jewish teachings that I can think of.

Whoever thought up that ad ought to go back and read Psalm 49 again with the blunt words it contains: "Fear not when a man grows rich, when the glory of his house is increased, for when he dies he will carry nothing with him, his glory will not descend into the grave after him."

This is the way this book words: constantly juxtaposing the values of the world in which we live with the values reflected in the words of the psalms. It deals with the real questions that are on the minds and hearts of all of us, the questions that come to us in the middle of the night and that give us no rest: who am I and what am I doing with my days? Why am I so terribly lonely and where can I find the strength that I need so much? How and to whom should I give thanks? Whom shall I turn to when other people mock me for being different in my dress, or in my behavior or in my values?

If these are your questions, then read Rabbi Plotkin's book.