Sunday, October 5

Ancient balm for aching hearts

By Elizabeth Clarke, Palm Beach Post Religion Writer
Sunday, October 5, 2003

The rabbi's wife had left him. Shocked, heartbroken and scared, he spent every night crying himself to sleep.

Although he was a spiritual leader, Paul Plotkin didn't know where to turn.

Until one day, during his morning prayers, Psalm 30 spoke to him:

O Lord my God I cried out to You, and You healed me ...

At night one goes to sleep crying; in the morning there is the ringing cry of joy.

"The psalm gave me the sense at that moment that I would get through," says Plotkin, rabbi at Temple Beth Am in Margate for 21 years. "But it also became a personal place to go back to, a place to receive a positive charge to give my soul and my psyche an auto-immune booster."

It also became the catalyst for a book. Plotkin, 53, describes The Lord is My Shepherd: Why Do I Still Want? as the Book of Psalms meets Chicken Soup for the Soul. Released in April, the volume is filled with personal stories and snippets of psalms addressing fear, anger, loneliness, old age, sibling rivalry, parents and more. Chapters with titles such as "Geeks, Nerds and High School" and "Are You a Frog, or a Prince?" link ancient psalms with aching hearts. "Psalms are the repository of people talking to God," he says. "They're transformational. They're about people dealing with loss, fear, paranoia, feeling sorry for themselves, enemies. And they've left behind this psalm that is the nugget of the journey."

That nugget can change lives, Plotkin believes. As Jewish people observe Yom Kippur, a prayerful and somber day of fasting and seeking God's forgiveness, Plotkin offers these stories about the power of Psalms and the power of faith.

May the words of my mouth

and the prayer of my heart

be acceptable to You,

O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

-- Psalm 19:15

Plotkin learned the power of prayer at the tender age of 16.

That summer, he and friends gathered at one house for the evening. They talked, ate and played a game of "Levitation," where one person lies down and everyone else gathers around to put two fingers under him. They chant, "He's dead. He's alive," while waiting to see whether he levitates.

On this night, a boy named Paul W. was the subject. He didn't levitate, leading kids to say "he's dead" in the language of the game.

Afterward, Plotkin and some friends were driving home when they saw the flashing lights and police cars of an accident. They got out to find that a car hadn't "held its curve" through a sharp left turn. It had fallen 30 feet and been flattened.

Plotkin and his friends were told no one had been hurt and continued with their evening, but the next morning Plotkin awoke to footsteps as a friend ran into his room. Paul W. had been a hitchhiker in the car. He was dead. As Plotkin rose in shock, he did something instinctive. He said the prayer that he had said every day upon rising, the prayer that his grandmother had taught him, the modeh ani. It's a short prayer thanking God for returning your soul to you each morning.

"It's an acknowledgment that waking up is not to be taken for granted," Plotkin says. "That not everybody wakes up."

It's something Plotkin had said every day for years by rote.

But that day, he relates, "I stop dead in my tracks. I start shaking all over, I feel this electricity buzz going on in my body."

It was his first religious experience. He realized that he and Paul W. had the same first name, had been at the same party, had been on the same road, and yet Paul W. was dead, and Plotkin was alive.

"It was an emotional moment when I was unbelievably aware of the nature of life and death," he says. "And the appreciation that I was alive all came from that moment in time from saying a prayer that I had said for 12 years."

So many recitations, and he had hardly noticed the words before this day.

But that's the power of prayer, he says. Regular, boring, everyday prayer prepares you for that special day when you'll hear more, and that prayer will be transformed.

"If you say the prayers routinely, you never know what's going to happen in your life to make that psalm meaningful," Plotkin says.

Who is the man who is eager for life,

who desires years of good fortune?

Guard your tongue from evil,

your lips from speaking guile.

Turn from evil and do good;

seek peace and pursue it.

-- Psalm 34:12-15

Plotkin addresses these verses in a chapter called "Guard Your Tongue from Evil." It's an important theme for the High Holidays, when many of the prayers seek forgiveness for slander, gossip and other "sins of the mouth."

In the book, Plotkin provides examples for controlling your tongue and converting evil into good, and he tells a story about seeking peace and pursuing it.

Plotkin's grandmother died years ago. She divided her estate evenly among her three children -- except for one thing. She left the rundown cottage by the lake in Canada to Plotkin's mother. His grandmother had lived with his mother for the last decade of her life, and the two had spent nearly every summer of their lives in the cottage.

Still, the brothers weren't happy.

Plotkin says the cottage wasn't worth much, so it must have been a psychological issue. They interpreted their mother's decision as a sign that she loved her daughter more.

Plotkin's dad saw the family peace eroding and worked to stop it. He had the cottage assessed and gave the cash equivalent to each brother, on the condition that it go to the grandchildren.

"My father, to his everlasting credit, decided that the tension and dissent in the family was an intolerable disgrace to the memory of my grandmother," Plotkin writes. "It should not be her posthumous legacy.... In so doing, he truly fulfilled the psalmist's injunction to 'seek peace and pursue it.' "

Plotkin sees this psalm as providing directions for how people deal with each other.

"It's not enough not to do the bad thing," he says. "You have to stop the bad thing from happening."

Paul Plotkin will discuss his book and sign copies next month in Palm Beach County. He'll be at Borders in Boca Raton at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 and at Borders in Boynton Beach at 1 p.m. Nov. 20. For information, call (954) 968-4545.

elizabeth_clarke@pbpost.com