A Few More Thoughts from In Front of the Church

Plotnik was so cheered to read two blog comments this morning from choir members at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, after his joyful experience and posting of last Sunday morning.

There's half of Plotnik above, in his orange shirt, already wondering how do all these internet messages travel across cyberspace and end up in the hands of people you've never even met? But it makes sense, doesn't it?...after all the years that Plotnik has spent on stages of various sizes and in countries around the world, where he has never stopped musing about what effect, if any, his music might have on people whose names he would never learn.

Plotnik's favorite songs from when he was young -- like Marvin Gaye's "Brother, Brother, Brother," and Randy Newman's "I'll Be Home," and before that Barbara Lewis's "Hello Stranger," and before that Eddie Fisher's "Oh, My Papa," songs that were maybe not the world's greatest songs but dug themselves inside Plotnik and left their mark -- this is what he has always wanted to do in his life as a songwriter and performer.

He can't tell you what the names of the songs were that the choir sang the other day, or who wrote them, and he doesn't know which choir members Joe and Renee J. are, but they and Plotnik and a couple thousand other people got to share some sense of empowerment the other morning, of optimism and hope, and it had to do with both the music and the heart of the people who were playing and singing it.



The Big Shmapple can be hard to endure, if only because there are so many people attempting to share a space from which nature has been systematically removed. You can put a green sward in the middle of Brooklyn and give it a nice name like Prospect Park, but when most of the people live most of their lives in concrete apartment blocks with minimal exposure to anything alive and growing, their lives have to turn inward.

Walking around Clinton Hill it seems like every other building is a church...a big one with a steeple and made out of stone, or a little one with a hand-written sign on a window and made out of surplus boards. Maybe that's because renting a storefront can be a simple means for an entrepreneur with a big voice and lots of charisma to remove the daily bread from his parishioner's pockets, and that is certainly so, but we shouldn't forget that nobody forces the people to walk into the churches. They're looking for something.

Plotnik sometimes feels like this too -- he is proud of his own tradition, and he will defend it against people who try to slight it, but to be honest it's the tradition, not spirituality, that he feels. He knows the prayers and can read some of the right-to-left words, but they have no hold on him. Maybe that is because there is so little music attached to the prayers.

Plotnik, truly, does not give a damn what Rabbi Shmendrick said to Rabbi Gamaliel in the year 420.

Some of you will remember his story about being cabnapped in Bangkok, Thailand, and through an impossible confluence of events finding himself becoming part of a minyan, a group of men gathered to pray, in an unmarked, hidden synagogue on a muddy side street. His face still dripping blood after a ridiculous earlier experience in a rainstorm of biblical proportion, Plotnik, was primed. He was ready to find his roots, to be converted to something or other. The time was now. God had spoken.

But no He hadn't, or at least not in English. Plottie wrestled with the prayer shawl -- which end is which here? How do I attach this little boxy gizmo? -- and then it was time to beseech God to help the newcomer discover Him.

What did the other nine men do? They walked to separate parts of the room, turned their backs on each other and began to chant an endless amount of repetitive prayers to themselves and the wall.

Plotnik could not have felt more -- well, alien. Who are you to talk to God if I can't too? How has this ancient tradition become Holy Men Only?

Back to music -- it's about all of us, everyone who is listening. Everyone who has two hands to clap can choose to clap them together or turn away and face the wall. Maybe he can't buy the part about Jesus and virgins and immaculate babies and all those nice-sounding homilies that don't always seem to translate into kindness in real life, but The Great Plotnik is so very thankful to Joe and Renee J. and the rest for inviting him in to give it a shot.