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COMING HOME

The Journey of a Baalat Teshuva

Tirtza Singer

N’shei Chabad Newsletter September, 1995

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when my personal transformation began to unfold. You might say I’ve always been searching for my spiritual roots.

For many years, from my late teens to early thirties, I was always trying out new techniques; healing with crystals, chanting with gurus, and attending personal transformation workshops, Indian drumming circles and mystical massage workshops.

I wanted to be healed, to feel a sense of connection, to feel whole, to understand why I was here, what was my soul’s purpose. It was a burning question inside me that propelled me to look everywhere. It took many years before I realized that I had been given a precious legacy - my Jewish roots, my Jewish soul.

My husband Reuven was very instrumental in drawing me back. Both of us had not come from religious homes. There were many wonderful and inspiring people who showed me the incredible richness and beauty of Shabbat and the Yomim Tovim. There was a sense of Kedusha, of peace and joy that radiated from their homes and their lives. It affected us deeply, and I knew that I yearned for that same richness and joy, wanted it more than anything else.

I remember hearing a beautiful story about the Pintele Yid, told by a Chasidic Rabbi. He said each Jewish soul comes into this world with a spark. In some of us it is closer to the surface, just waiting to be ignited. After a trip to Israel in 1984, that spark was ignited in my husband.

When we came back from Israel, Reuven wanted a more mitzvah-observant life. He wanted to have a kosher home, to keep Shabbat and to observe the laws of Taharat Hamishpacha, the laws concerning the relationship between husband and wife. Above all, he wanted to learn as much as he could about being Jewish.

I’ve always been a bit of a rebellious spirit. To me, all those laws seemed so constricting. My husband had the counsel of an insightful Rabbi who said, “You must leave her alone. She has to find her own way, in her own time”. They were wise words.

Many mornings I would look at my husband as he wrapped tefillin; as he was struggling with the Hebrew Shacharit, the morning prayers; each day gaining a little speed. Something inside me melted, softened, as I saw this beautiful soul wanted to be lifted towards Hakadosh Baruch Hu.

His davening, I believe, had an enormous effect on me, although I was not cognizant of it at the time.

Shortly after this I began to admire his beautiful tallit. I loved the idea of being wrapped and enfolded in that prayer shawl. A part of me wanted to be wrapped in that spiritual warmth.

I started to learn how to daven from the Siddur. That was the beginning for me. I found an incredibly gifted teacher, Vivi Deren. It was as if she lit the candle of my soul. There was such a thirst in me to learn. I began to see the incredible wisdom in Torah.

As I learned, I began to understand that men and women have specific and unique roles to fulfill in this world; different, yet complementary. As a wife and mother, the infinite wisdom of the Torah with regards to the needs and nature of women began to avail itself to me. Eventually I felt myself strengthening.

Lighting the candles on Friday night was a very powerful experience. It was as if something inside me also became illuminated. I was beginning to feel Hashem’s presence blessing our home. Gradually we began to take on more mitzvot and I could feel my soul beginning to heal.

Shortly after I started lighting Shabbat candles, my husband, myself and our six-month-old daughter, went to an inspiring weekend retreat to strengthen and nourish newly observant families – called Ruach. There was learning, dancing, singing, but above all there was an incredible warmth and feeling of community for which I had really been longing.

Music has always been a significant part of my life. During this retreat, I had the opportunity to meet a very powerful rabbi and musician, Michael Shapiro. He was a Baal Teshuva, who had recently returned from Jerusalem, where he had learned Torah in yeshiva and went on to receive smicha (Rabbinic ordination).

I remember Michael singing a song he had written entitled, “Twelve Gates” on his guitar. His voice penetrated a place so deep in me I will never forget it.

My eyes were like flood gates. I wept in such a profound way. His words and music touched my heart. Somehow he had helped me to connect with that longing to reunite with my Creator. He was instrumental in forging a very powerful link in my journey home.

There was a strong need form my husband to continue learning. He asked if I would mind if he took his vacation time to study at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem. Our girls were very young at the time, and I didn’t feel I wanted to travel such a far distance with them. Yet, I knew how important it was to him.

There was such an incredibly strong desire for him to follow his heart. There was a silent pleading and urgency. He needed nourishment and renewal. His medical practice seemed to be draining him slowly of his life energy. I wanted to see him whole again, although a part of me wanted him to stay.

Upon his return from Jerusalem, I noticed such a dramatic change in him. There was a softness about him, a radiance that emanated from his inner core. Unfortunately, with the pressures of his practice, that “Jerusalem Glow” lasted but a month.

In the evenings when he came home from work, he often curled up with maps of Jerusalem as if to internalize the city, and imprint it in his heart and mind. Jerusalem was beckoning him to return. In his mind, he had already taken up residency there. I knew life in Connecticut was becoming less satisfying for him.

As for me, I had achieved the American Dream. I had a husband who earned a good living, a beautiful antique farmhouse in Connecticut, two beautiful girls, and a wonderful career in music. My parents were happy, delighting in their grandchildren. What else could we possibly want?

My husband and I had many long painful, often heated discussions about his dramatic change in life – trying to pull me along. At times I was more malleable than others. I loved my husband. I wanted to support and encourage him in his religious journey. At the same time, though, I needed to retain my identity as an alive, creative free-spirit.

It took many years for us to find a balance and to enter into our lives together as a more traditional Jewish family. It was a gradual process, filled with a lot of soul searching and struggle. Most importantly, the path was filled with a lot of richness, warmth and kedusha that helped strengthen our commitment –both religiously and to each other.

As time went on, I felt I needed to combine my passion for music with my love for Judaism. In the 60’s I had been a folk singer in the Boston area. I then went on to study piano improvisation and composition in New York. I wanted to use music as a powerful, expressive tool. It was an elusive concept, but one that kept haunting me. As I became more observant, the path became increasingly clear.

Paul Solomon, a gifted lyricist and friend, presented me with some powerful verses from Tehillim (Psalms). The lyrics themselves inspired me to compose the music that had been deep within me. I felt so strengthened and nourished. I knew I needed to use my music as a tool to strengthen and nourish other women just as I had been strengthened and nourished by the Tehillim and by composing. This was the seed that started “Canfei Ruach” , a musical group devoted to performing for women.

I want to close with a quote from one of our original songs, “Who May Sing,” inspired by Tehillim 24 and 33:

"Lift up your heads gates of heaven

Be lifted up eternal doors,

So that His love may enter through your portals,

And fill the world with love, forever more."

In July ’93 my husband Reuven, myself, and our two beloved daughters, Rachel, 8 and Sarah, 5, fulfilled the beautiful mitzvah of making aliyah to Israel,

B’Ezrat Hashem.

Tirtza Singer: Performing for Women
Music of the Soul

The Jewish Voice/March 1996

Come to vocalist Tirtza Singer’s Ramot home on any Rosh Chodesh, and you’ll likely find some 60 women eagerly waiting not only to hear her sing, but also to understand how she feels about the music and lyrics. A composer who frequently sings her own works, Mrs. Singer writes about what she loves most: Jews, Judaism and the land of Israel.

On the jacket of her tape, Canfei Ruach, Mrs. Singer describes her work as “music to nourish a Jewish woman’s soul.” She writes in a folk idiom, using classical orchestration. Her lyricist is frequently Paul Solomon who makes liberal use of traditional Jewish prayers and Psalms.

Recently, at the Jerusalem Center, she sang “On the Road Past Rachel’s Tomb,” which depicts the matriarch weeping for her children “with tears of laughter and song, for her children have come home to their future, upon their homeland reborn.”

She also sang “Come Home,” a song based on an actual letter written by a mother in Israel to her estranged son studying at a secular university in England. “Come home, my dove,” the mother says, “Jerusalem calls you, and the voice of your spirit echoes from within.”

Tzedaka Concerts

Her concerts are frequently tzedaka affairs. The Rosh Chodesh concerts in her home raise funds for what she hopes will be the first shelter for Orthodox abused women in Jerusalem. Proceeds from the Jerusalem Center concert went to the Rachel Project, which supports the Kollel and other activities at Rachel’s Tomb.

Abiding by Jewish law which forbids men to hear a woman’s voice, she sings only for women, which seemed strange to many promoters who believed she was talented enough to achieve success in the secular world.

“I was told that my sticking to kol isha and singing only for women, I was committing professional suicide,” she recalls. “After all, I cut out half my potential audience.”

Folk Singer

Not that Mrs. Singer had not tried it. In the 1960’s, when she was in college in Boston, she wanted nothing as much as to be Joan Baez, singing in coffee houses to her own guitar accompaniment.

When she graduated, she made her way back to her native New York, and studied at the Dalcroze School, learning to teach Eurhythmics to young children.

In 1981, she met and married Reuven Singer, a physician with a practice in Stamford, Connecticut. A fellow music lover who sometimes collaborates with her on compositions, Dr. Singer received his own tribute from his wife in the form of a song. “Man of Valor,” part of the Canfei Ruach album, was written for him.

Connecticut Life

While Dr. Singer pursued his geriatrics practice, his wife taught mother-and-child music programs at the Stamford Jewish Community Center. The couple had two daughters, and seemed destined to grow old gracefully along with their 19^th century farmhouse – which they renovated themselves—on the outskirts of town.

But Destiny had other plans. In 1984, she and her husband traveled to Israel on a package tour. “It was the turning point in our lives,” she says

Her husband returned to the US determined to learn everything about Judaism. He taught himself Hebrew, and before long, was keeping Shabbat and davening regularly.

Meeting the Rebbe

For Mrs. Singer the process took longer. In 1988, while her husband attended a medical ethics conference in Crown Heights, she managed to meet the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. “Something powerful happened,” she recalls. “I felt he could see into my soul. He seemed to have power and love for every Jew. I felt something awakening in me.”

Keeping kosher and abiding by the laws of Shabbat were one thing, but Mrs. Singer also resolved not to sing in front of mixed audiences, which meant passing up an international song competition in Montreal. “ I found it very hard, but my husband has a lot of faith. He said when you go with the halacha, Hashem watches over you,” she says.

Today, she says she is pleased with the direction her career has taken. “There is such a strong energy singing to a woman’s audience,” she says. “I feel tremendous satisfaction working with women and sharing music that is close to my heart.”

Aliya

But back in the 1980’s, her husband was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with life in the United States. He wanted to make aliyah, and she just wasn’t ready. He spent some time learning in Israel at Aish HaTorah, and continually urged her to take the plunge. She went back to the Rebbe for a bracha and to seek clarity and in 1993, they left for Israel.

“He really was getting burned out,” she says of her husband, who in Israel, designs medical software for a computer company.

Life in Israel, she says, is changing. “It’s so painful to see the divisions between the secular and religious communities. They are at such odds with each other,” she says. “You can see it all around. On Ben Yehuda Street, the secular young people walk around half -naked and strung out on drugs while listening to American rock-and-roll. They’ve taken the worst aspects of American culture, and, as a religious mother, I don’t want my children anywhere near that.”

Future Plans

She knows that if PLO leader Yasir Arafat has his way, her family will have to give up their sunny home with its spacious garden, because tree-lined Ramot, a magnet for English-speaking olim, is over the Green Line. “I can’t think far enough ahead to plan what we would do,” she says. “I believe G-d has a plan and that it is good for our souls.”

Her plan is to continue singing for women, nourishing them, she says, with music. While her CDs and tapes are widely available in Israel, getting them in the US is a bit harder. They can be obtained through, Ben Spaiser, 2727 Henry Hudson Pkwy; Riverdale, NY 10463 USA. (718) 548-4744.

A Singer Aptly Named

The New Standard/June 1996

by Shifra Abramson

Israel Bureau Chief

It was an unlikely sight; a room filled with middle-aged women spanning Jerusalem’s Orthodox spectrum – from hausfraus with tightly-swathed heads to stylishly-dressed matrons in fashionable wigs –clapping their hands, snapping their fingers, stamping their feet, and playing tambourines to the beat of the music. One lively group pushed back the furniture and kicked up their heels, punctuating with their feet the cadence of the stirring music.

For some, it no doubt evoked echoes of secular pop concerts; others were simply moved by the pure sounds, moving lyrics, and haunting melodies that make a performance by Tirzah Singer a religious happening.

Tirzah’s voice, which reflects both the folk tradition in which she has her roots and years of operatic training, has a rich sweetness that brings tears to the eyes and calm to the soul. she draws from an eclectic repertoire that encompasses the range and depth of the Jewish experience. “The Shelter of Your Wings,” based on the Evening Service, beseeches, “Spread over us the shelter of your peace.” One of her most evocative pieces, “The Bird Song” – written by a child who died in the Holocaust –declares “the world is full of loveliness, the world is full of loneliness/then you know how fine it is to live.” Between the Braids,” adapted from a poem by Baltimore poetess Bracha Goetz, speaks of a woman’s conflicting feelings over her role as she kneads the challah.

It’s a long way from Boston coffee houses to Jerusalem salons and the spiritual distance is immeasurably greater. For Tirzah, it was a quantum leap from folk singing in campus nightspots (as “Terry” of the “Terry and Dave” duo) to performing for “women only” audiences under the banner of Canfei Ruach –The Wings of the Spirit. During that time she has experienced a journey that has transformed her life and led her to use her musical talent to express the yearning of a Jewish woman’s soul.

The challenging and difficult route began with an assimilated upbringing in Riverdale, New York, with a very limited sense of Jewish identity. Always musically precocious, at age four Tirzah was already picking out tunes on the piano. after finishing New York City’s High School of Music and Art, an incubator for aspiring young musicians and artists, she went off to college in Cambridge, Mass., where she received a B.A. and M.A. in early childhood education while training with a private voice and piano teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Inspired by folk singer Judy Collins, Tirzah began performing with a fellow student. He set poetry by Yeats and Auden to music and they performed at various clubs and nightspots. When the team eventually split up, it was traumatic for Tirzah, who says she didn’t pick up a guitar for years afterwards.

In the meantime, she had become interested in music education for young children. She returned to New York to study at the Dalcroze School of Music, and the Manhattan School of Music ( where she studied eurhythmics, improvisation, composition). “The Dalcroze method,” she explains, “is a holistic approach to training the musician, in which eurhythmics is used. In the study of eurhythmics the body becomes the instrument of learning the fundamentals of music, i.e. tempo, dynamics, metro changes, nuances, conducting. You learn to move to the music of Brahms and other great masters. It’s a wonderful way to study music because you really feel the music from the inside. You hear the music, express it on a physical level, express what you’ve heard and feel on an instrument. You really feel the neshama of the music. Dalcroze awakened in me my own inner music.”

In 1981 she married Rob (Reuven) Singer, a physician from Scarsdale. The young couple moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and settled in a pre-Civil War farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, which they renovated themselves. Tirzah began running mother-and-child music programs. Within several years, the family included two young daughters. “I had achieved the American Dream: a physician husband who earned a good living, an antique farm house in Connecticut, two beautiful children, and a wonderful career,” she recalls. “We had the perfect life, what more could I possibly want?”

Yet there was a gnawing inner emptiness, one that eluded definition.

In 1984 the Singers made their first trip to Israel, on a United Jewish Appeal tour. The trip had a profound impact on Reuven. He wanted to keep a Torah-observant way of life, and to learn as much as possible about being Jewish.

Tirzah was less enthusiastic. “I loved my husband, and wanted to support and encourage him,” she says. “But to me, all those laws seemed so constricting. I agreed, less than wholeheartedly, to keep kosher. We had many long, painful, and often heated discussions about his dramatic change in lifestyle, [and how] he was trying to pull me along. I tried, but I have always been a bit rebellious. I needed to retain my identity as a creative, free spirit.”

Reuven received wise counsel from Rabbi Kenneth Auman (presently of the Young Israel of Flatbush, but at the time rabbi of the Young Israel of Stamford), with whom he was studying. “Just leave her alone,” he advised. “She’ll come to it in her own time, when her soul is ready.”

Indeed, attests Tirzah, her metamorphosis was a gradual process filled with a lot of soul-searching and struggle. But slowly, she started seeing things Reuven’s way. She began studying the Torah portion of the week with Vivi Deren, the local Chabad rebbetzin. The turning point came when she went to Crown Heights and got a blessing from the Rebbe: “I felt that his eyes were penetrating right into my soul; that he would see into my inner depths. Then something in me melted and softened and I felt more open to being more observant.”

As she became more observant, Tirzah felt the need to combine her passion for music with her love for Judaism. She went to the Rebbe several times, and asked for a blessing to use her music to nourish and strengthen women’s spiritual lives.

And thus Canfei Ruach – a musical trio dedicated to performing exclusivexclusively for women – was born. Its professional debut took place in a performance for Chabad in 1991 at Baltimore’s Sudbrook Art Center. “I was very moved,” says Tirzah, “when after the concert several women came over to tell me how much the music had touched them.” The group began performing several times a year to female audiences up and down the East Coast. Tirzah has adamantly refused to sing for mixed audiences, and has passed up several potentially lucrative bookings including the opportunity to sing at an international song competition in Montreal. “I was told that by sticking to kol isha I was committing professional suicide,” she recalls. “But my husband said when you observe the halacha, Hashem watches over you.”

The next logical step on the road to living a complete Jewish life was to move to Israel. Indeed, in 1989, Reuven set 1993 as a target date for aliyah.

But Tirzah was reluctant to uproot herself and start a new life again. It took several visits to Israel “Before I started appreciating the specialness of the people and the sense of holiness that pervaded the country. But it wasn’t love at first sight at all.”

But what really turned the tide was concern over the future of their two young daughters: “We wanted a more spiritual and more meaningful life for them.”

Notwithstanding her initial reluctance, “once the plane landed, I knew that my soul had come home,” Tirzah attests. “I knew that this was the right place for me. Since living here, many hidden strengths have revealed themselves, and, Baruch Hashem, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” (These sentiments are documented musically in her new album, appropriately named “Come Home.”)

Since arriving in Israel, the former folk singer has performed for a wide range of all-femanle audiences, both for fundraising organizations and at prestigious entertainment events like the annual Klezmer Festival in Safed. She recently returned from a tour of the United States, where she performed at various locations, including the Bruriah School in Elizabeth, N.J., and the Chabad Women’s Convention.

Audiences everywhere respond to the primal quality in Tirzah’s songs that touches a chord deep in the female psyche. Whether it’s the poignant lyrics – many inspired by the Bible and the prayerbook – or the stirring tunes that raise goosebumps on the flesh, Tirzah Singer stirringly expresses universal themes and longings as her music resonates in the soul.

Soul Music

Tirtza Singer, petite and slim, adjusts her guitar and introduces her song In the Shelter of Your Wings. Her soft voice trembles slightly as she recalls a personal crisis a few years after moving to Israel. I felt that I had distanced myself from HaKadosh Baruch Hu on a very profound level through something I had done. One day I was feeling very sad. I picked up the siddur to daven, and these words jumped out at me In the shelter of your wings . . . safeguard our going and our coming. I was just so moved; these words gave me a lot of comfort, showing that Hashem is here to protect us. This song flowed out of me so effortlessly . . . the lyrics formed together so beautifully . . . as if Hashem were saying to me, Tirtza, its okay I still care about you.

Blinking back a tear, she addresses her female audience: We need to know that no matter what challenges we face, no matter how difficult things are, theres always that channel thats open to us, our connection to Hashem. Some people can do it through prayer; my way is through song.

Tirtza has crafted a career based on the premise that music is not an art unto itself, that it plays a role in overall physical and spiritual health. She is very much in demand as a folk singer, and her two albums have garnered high praise. But she has taken her holistic approach to a new level, with therapies and programs geared toward helping women and children cope with the stresses of everyday life.

Tirtza cites the best-selling book The Mozart Effect, by Don G. Campbell, subtitled Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind and Unlock the Creative Spirit. The author claims that music is not just entertainment; its medicine. Tirtza says, I have always felt this intuitively the power of music to heal, on both a physical and spiritual level. My music was always a tremendous comfort and healing for my own being.

Tirtza was raised in the Bronx in a Reform home, and religion did not play much of a role in her early life. But music did. Having started by picking out nursery rhymes on a toy piano at the age of four, Tirtza attended New York Citys High School of Music and Art. She later trained in voice and piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, while completing a degree in Early Childhood Education as a fallback. During this period she formed a folk duo with an English Literature student from Harvard who wrote lyrics based on Auden and Keats, and they performed in coffeehouses and nightclubs in Boston.

Subsequent studies at the Dalcroze School of Music opened up a more holistic approach to music training for Tirtza. Using eurhythmics (the philosophy that all elements of music can be experienced through movement), the body becomes the instrument of learning. It helped me to internalize the music and connect to my neshamah (soul).

After her marriage and the birth of Rachel, her first child, Tirtza resumed her exploration of the relationship between body and mind at the Bioenergetic Institute in New York. Here she met fellow student Paul Solomon, a talented songwriter and the musical adaptor of the Holocaust collection of child poetry I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Paul had written a song inspired by Psalm 18, and he asked Tirtza if she could help rework the melody. The resulting song, Canfei Ruach, placed as a finalist in the 1992 Chazzan Mendelsohn Song Competition in Montreal.

Ever since that collaboration, Paul has been Tirtzas main lyricist; she brings him themes or Tehillim that interest her, and he writes the lyrics to which she puts her music. Tirtza says, Paul has a deeply spiritual side. He is searching to integrate his love of Yiddishkeit with healing.

Since moving to a spacious home at the edge of Jerusalems Ramot forest, Tirtza has developed another way to help women. Sitting in her scented garden, filled with delphiniums, day lilies, roses, and an artfully constructed waterfall, her hands glisten from the essential oils she uses in her home-based Tirtzas Marvelous Mornings, wherein she offers women a revitalizing morning of Shiatsu and Swedish massage therapy, aromatherapeutic Jacuzzi, and organic facials.

Playing the piano has given me strong hands for my massage therapy, she says. My whole spiritual journey has been about trying to heal myself and, as I became stronger, sharing my knowledge and the gift of joy with people I come into contact with.

Tirtza is not the only healer in her family; her song Man of Valor is dedicated to her husband, Dr. Reuven Singer, an internist and developer of medical software. My husband holds more traditional medical opinions. He comes across as very intellectual and cerebral and was initially doubtful about the benefits of alternate healing, but from my work he has seen that massage and music can really be such a powerful tool for a persons health. They wrote Saras Song together when she was expecting her second child; the collaboration allowed her to see his softer, poetic side.

Tirtza gives her husband a lot of credit for allowing her to move at her own pace when he made the decision to become Torah-observant. He had elected to do so after the couple participated in a United Jewish Appeal tour of Israel in 1984. Her own spiritual growth came more gradually, and not without accompanying fears. I viewed myself as a creative free spirit, and all those laws seemed so constricting, she says. Yet far from stifling her creativity, Tirtza has found that she has benefited from her spiritual return. My favorite line from all my songs is Let me see my work as holy, from Between the Braids, and thats what I strive for. Music has the power to lift up to connect us to Hashem and to really nourish us on a very deep level.

Initially she kept her singing separate from her therapy, until a friend who is a family and marriage counselor suggested she accompany her massages with her songs. Tirtza was not comfortable with that idea, but she sometimes offers to play while her guests relax in the garden after a treatment.

I recently treated an architect; her first husband had destroyed her self-esteem, but she is now married to a wonderful man who asked me to give her a Marvelous Morning as a birthday gift. After lunch, I played her the song Between the Braids, which recognizes the different strands of a womans life family, husband, career and the need to integrate them by taking the raw materials and elevating them to something that has kedushah (holiness). When I finished the song, the lady was in tears. She told me, We are slowly becoming religious, and Ive been finding it so hard, but now I have the strength to really keep going, to keep a Jewish home. Her soul responded to the song more directly than anything I could have said to her.

Tirtza has also developed musical programs for children at different age levels, up to age six. These help kids integrate music as a part of their being, and include the rudiments of music composition and the sight-reading of musical notation.

Tirtzas daughters Rachel and Sara are now teenagers, but Tirtza recalls their younger days, when she found herself torn between her family and her creative needs. The time I was most productive in terms of composing, when a passion in me was burning to express my music, coincided with when my children were young three to six years old. At times I dont think I was the best mom I could have been, but I just had to sit down at the piano. It was as if Hashem were saying, Im sending a transmission, so get ready! It was very hard to balance that.

Tirtzas desire to use her music to nourish and strengthen womens spiritual lives led her, in 1990, to form a womens group, Canfei Ruach (named after her first song). When she moved to Israel three years later, she continued to perform, and she also began to hold small concerts in her home. Her home-based Rosh Chodesh concerts are very popular, with proceeds going to tzeddakah. A favorite charity is Women in Crisis, an organization that offers financial assistance to women who are going through divorce or have been abused.

Her two albums, Wings of the Spirit and Come Home, have sold well, and she is planning to tour the U.S. in the near future.

Women come to my musical evenings so tired, so depleted from giving to their families, says Tirtza. I feel so good when they leave feeling so uplifted and looking so bright.

Dr. Miriam Adahan, a noted psychologist and the author of several self-help books, agrees. Tirtzas music is so uplifting, enriching, and enjoyable. Women have so much sorrow in their lives, and she awakens their spirit.

But dont many of the songs have sad themes: infertility, tears, even death? I think sometimes the crying can act as a catharsis, a little bit of a letting go. It is true that when I started, there was a sadness I carried with me, and some of that I was able to transform through the writing, by putting it into music and moving past it. But in my show I balance the songs that reach deep into the heart with songs that bring joy.

Paul and I just wrote We Sing of Love, a very upbeat song about unity. And if you look closely, youll see that even the sad songs are not depressing. Chanas Song, about infertility, has a happy ending, with the message that theres always hope, that we shouldnt fear, that Hashem is there to hear our prayers. Even the Holocaust poem Bird Song, whose lyrics were written by a child in the Theresienstadt ghetto in the middle of unspeakable suffering, this magnificent neshamah was still able to focus on the beauty and purity in the world, which is such an incredible level to be on.

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