The next day my brother-in-law, my sister, my father, and I went to the shop together. We thought we'd take a first look and try to organize. But when we got there and saw the extent of the damage to the building, we realized we should at least open up the door to let the sunshine in, because we couldn't see anything in the back rooms at all. We had no electricity.

When I say it was a disaster, I'm talking about fifteen thousand square feet of what looked like a bomb site. After a while, my father was able to pry open one of the two doors, but the other door had about twenty-five shelving panels leaning up against it, each of which weighed three hundred to five hundred pounds. My brother-in-law, Richard, and I decided that we would try to move the panels ourselves. It took both of us, two big guys, with all our strength, to physically move each one. We had about fifteen panels standing up when a tremor hit.

The tremor made the whole floor shake. The bottoms of all the panels were moving, sliding! I looked up just in time to see the panels ready to topple backward and to see Richard's head right at the point of impact. They were going to crush his head.

Suddenly a voice rang inside my own head, "Stop them! Try and stop them!" And the next thing I knew, my arms, with all my body weight, went up to stop these enormous weights, just long enough to delay the panels from falling, for about two seconds. It was just long enough for Richard to get his head out of the way.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get my right hand out, too, and the weight of the panels fell directly on my hand. I had seventy-five hundred pounds crush my hand. Each of the fifteen panels did, in fact, weigh over five hundred pounds. But the strangest thing happened.

I was rushed to the hospital emergency room. Amazingly, when the doctor saw the X rays, there were just two fractures. He said, "You must have had God's hand in there with yours, you must have had an angel help you, because anyone else's hand would have sustained total demolition." I realized how lucky I was and thanked God, but the doctor still told me that even with surgery, I wouldn't be able to use my hand for a year or more. He immobilized it right away, saying, "You're going to have to get used to this." But the incredible thing is, a month later, I had almost total flexibility in my fingers. I was 87 percent recovered when I should have been only 7 percent recovered.

The doctor said again, "God must have been sitting right on your shoulder." Each time the doctor said this, I felt as if angels were with me, truly protecting me, and had been with me throughout the whole experience. And they wanted me to know it. They just had the doctor mouth those words. The doctor himself had to bring up the subject of angels, because he himself was looking for a spiritual understanding of the situation. It was pretty obvious there was a miracle involved.

Also, a couple of weeks after the first incident, I was a passenger in a car accident, and I automatically braced myself by putting my hands on the dashboard. We were going pretty fast and we hit quite hard. I rushed to the doctor again, who said both fractures should have been reopened, but they weren't. They were fine.

I'm a musician, and a year of inability to use my hand, in music business terms, could mean the end of a career. But in only a few weeks I was already using my pick again.

The Torah says you get rewarded ten times for the good that you do. I believe that's exactly what happened. I look at it as an example of giving somebody a hand, lending a helping hand, or showing an outstretched arm. I like to help people whenever I can. I work with people closely in a variety of capacities, and no matter what our interaction, I always do my best to do something positive for them however I can. I believe God saved my hand for me to use so I could keep giving to others.

-ALAN POLLAK, STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA, PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN WITH A GOLD RECORD AND PSYCHOTHERAPIST WHO WORKS PRIVATELY AND IN HOSPITALS, PRISONS, AND STATE PROGRAMS, AND ALSO THE OWNER AND OPERATOR OF THE PROP SHOP IN NORTHRIDGE, CALIFORNIA