by Tamar Wisemon

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, it’s 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, there’s always that channel that’s 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; it’s 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 City’s 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 Tirtza’s 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 Jerusalem’s 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 “Tirtza’s 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 person’s health.” They wrote “Sara’s 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 that’s 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 woman’s 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 I’ve 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.

Tirtza’s 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 don’t 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, ‘I’m sending a transmission, so get ready!’ It was very hard to balance that.”

Tirtza’s desire to use her music to nourish and strengthen women’s spiritual lives led her, in 1990, to form a women’s 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. “Tirtza’s music is so uplifting, enriching, and enjoyable. Women have so much sorrow in their lives, and she awakens their spirit.”

But don’t 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, you’ll see that even the sad songs are not depressing. ‘Chana’s Song,’ about infertility, has a happy ending, with the message that there’s always hope, that we shouldn’t 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.”

Tamar Wisemon lives in Safed, Israel. Her “Shavuos in Jerusalem” appeared in the June issue of The Jewish Homemaker.