Album Artwork by Siona Benjamin

I’m sitting in the basement of my brother’s and sister-in law’s house in Hillside, NJ. It’s Saturday night after the first days of Passover and I just approved the final master of my new Pharaoh’s Daughter album. 

Songs of Desire, produced by Omer Mor, will be a part of Zorn’s Spectrum series on Tzadik Records in June.

Ironically, it is the time of year in the Jewish calendar when the full ‘megillah’ of Song of Songs, the inspiration for this album, are chanted in synagogues all over the world.

These songs are a celebration of sensual awakening and love as metaphor for liberation, just at the time of year when blossoms are opening. It would have been the perfect time to release this collection, a body of work that has taken 18 years to finish… and it didn’t happen.

I had to let that go.  

I had to let a thousand things go. 

From the moment I felt that the music was settling into its skin until the April 1st deadline, I agonized over every detail of this album’s release. The anxiety clouded my judgment, and I felt little brain implosions were going off at every turn. 

It’s been 12 years since Pharaoh’s Daughter put something out. I wanted it to be just so… What does that even mean? 

I wanted it to be beautiful. 

I wanted it to be as good or even better than my earlier work. 

I wanted it to be an emotional haven for people to swim in, giving others the gift that music has given me.

But, it isn’t going to be “just so,” and honestly, thank G-d it’s not “just so.” 

Da Vinci famously said,

“Art is never finished, only abandoned-”

my brother Yisroel reminded me on Yuntif, when wave after wave of regret of not choosing the right sequencing, fearfully forgetting credits, selecting the wrong version of the album cover, or a thousand other details would taunt me between the gastro-challenging olympic meals.  

Da Vinci’s words, vaguely familiar, hit me hard.

For me, abandoning my art feels like choosing one baby over another. 

The word abandonment for art is particularly intentional and really strong. How that has shown up in my life, how I have searched for love, and what comes through me artistically are all very intertwined.

I remember releasing Daddy’s Pockets, my first Pharaoh’s Daughter, produced by the truly gifted Richard Julian in 1999. The title song, one about a primal abandonment, made me a songwriter who could sublimate  painful experiences.

(There are also love songs, traveling songs, and animal ones… all in English).

Production wise, I had begun the basic tracking in 1995. It took four more grueling years to reach the finish line.  Much like this go around, every decision taunted me because it meant abandoning another.  

The summer of 1998 while working on the final mixes of  the album, I would lay in an outside garden every night after the sessions on my portable foam mat (in my G-d sent $275 artists loft shared with my friend Andrew Vladek) and listen to the frogs croak in the pond in front of me. 

Under the stars, I processed the simultaneous birth and death of the album- and of myself- making peace with all the things it was, and all the things it wasn’t. If I wasn’t going to finish this, I would never be able to move on. Perfect is truly the enemy of good enough, and I was learning the hard way. 

By January 1999, I was so relieved to release my first album.  It felt amazing and I was proud of the songs, and how the production came out.  I sent it to Michael Dorf. He loved it, and signed my second album to Knitting Factory Records. From there things slowly took off. 

Even in the 90s, I knew I could not put myself through the decision making torture. Not worth the agony. I vowed I would move more intuitively, more gracefully… like swinging on a trapeze from the end of one idea into the next decision till I’m flying. 

Out of the Reeds, produced by  Anthony Coleman took about three months from beginning to end. 

That was a miracle. 

It was all very organic, recorded live at the Knitting Factory - magical, raw and extremely imperfect, and probably my most successful album in terms of sales and career shaping.  

Anthony, the musicians and I recorded tirelessly for a short time. We celebrated every milestone along the way with Roast Duck in Chinatown, NY Noodletown. We worked hard, played hard, and left very little room for second guessing with all of our lavish dinners. No space to overthink for too long. 

Despite their different gestations, with one of my “babies” being a hard labor, and the other one popping out - I truly don’t love one album more than the other. 

Each piece of work after that had a different trajectory, its own birthing story…. Which brings us to this 6th Pharaoh’s Daughter album, “Songs of Desire,” 18 years in the making.

After one of the holiday meals was over, and everyone  went to sleep, I did one of my before sleep rituals binge watching  the brilliant late night satirists of this political landscape- Kimmel, Meyers, and Colbert.

I felt assaulted by what’s going on in the world: the war/cease fire in Iran, the major instability and theatricality of the geopolitical messaging, and most metaphoric of all - a spaceship beginning its circumnavigation to the far side of the moon… 

And just like that, one mistake or regret after another about my music became increasingly more inconsequential. 

It’s true that the work I’m releasing is important; and, in the scheme of things, these details don’t matter. It will be what it will be. We are blip. 

I turned off the news and went to sleep. In the morning, outside on my brother’s epic front porch, I gave myself time to breathe and witness the blossoms of spring unfold in this semi-utopian orthodox enclave.  I was reminded of the holiness I used to feel on holidays growing up. 

In this space, I was reminded of how tight and frenetic my life is, and how there are other, more spacious ways to be in the world. 

When the three day “chag”  was over and the separation into regular life ritual completed, we listened to the revised masters. 

This was truly the last decision to be made, and this one actually felt just right. 

The levels boosted, the songs felt more spacious and impactful- even the sequencing was growing on me (minus a few glitches and regrets). 

Afterwards, my brother and I researched the Da Vinci quote. Sure enough, AI confirmed that given how many famous masterpieces he left incomplete made it a compelling story for it to have been written by him, but - he never actually said those words. 

The quote belongs to French poet and essayist Paul Valery. In 1933 he wrote an essay about his poem Le Cimetiere marin (The cemetery by the Sea):

“In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed… but abandoned…. “

This quiet roof where doves walk to and for

Between the pines and tombs, throbs like the sea;

The noonday sun composes fire below-

The sea, the ever-recommencing sea!

O what reward after a thought’s long gaze

Is calm of gods upon a roof of blaze!

What pure work of a fine cause consumes 

So much flickering lighting in the air!

What peace seems to be born of all these tombs!

When over them the noon stands still and fair, 

The sea, the sea, forever re-begun,

Gives back to light it’s immaterial sun

Fair sky, true sky, look at me as i change! 

After such pride after such idleness

But full of power, i give myself afresh

To this bright space, so calm and yet so strange;

The house of death is crowned with quiet flame,

And life begins beneath that blazing frame.

Yes mighty sea of delirious dreams endowed

With skins of panthers and with ancient might,

Unmoved beneath a thousand idols bowed,

The hydra drunk with its own azure light,

Biting its tail in a tumultuous ring

In a silence that the world seems echoing..

The wind is rising! We must try to live! 

The vast air opens and closes my book,

The wave in powder dares to leap and give-

Fly, pages fly! I see you burst and brook

Break, waves break, with your rejoicing foam,

Rush toward the rocks toward that quiet home!

Throughout the poem, Valery analyzes and questions stillness/movement in relationship to both the cemetery and the sea. Pledging allegiance to each one becomes something to wax poetic about, examine and reconsider. 

Is it the definitive finite space, or the unpredictable pages of art flying, and becoming like waves in his sea? 

“We must try to live..”

We leave the artwork, and step right back into the current of life - only  to begin the cycle again. 

So, from this quiet suburban home, in the middle of the night approaching dawn, Congratulations to me for finally abandoning this work of art…

NOTE: Written Saturday night, but finally “released” Friday morning.. :) Letting that go too. 

“When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water…” GENESIS

These words which begin the Torah have different translations. Many besides Sefaria call the “Tohu vavohu,” the mysterious universe before God’s creation, some form of primordial “ch…

Read more

It’s good to be back in this space.

I took a quiet mid-winter break with musical work and social media, while my son was on his school vacation. 

He caught  the stomach flu. We spent 3 days shuttling back and forth from the doctor, cuddling on the couch in between bathroom runs and a slew of barf bags. For him it was grueling; for me, while I felt for him, I also enjoyed the deliciousness of his hot breath near my face, his dependence and my clear role in caretaking. 

For those 3 sick days and when he recovered at Kalahari Waterpark, I gave him my full attention. I followed his rhythm, went on his preferred slides, watched a plethora of “Young Sheldon” episodes in our room, and soaked in hot tubs.

With single parenting, leading spiritual communities, carrying a musical solo career, self care time, social media, and sometimes the need to numb out… I am learning again and again, staying present in the relationships that matter most are not easily juggle-able. So, for winter break, I was on Saadya time.

He is back in school now. It’s a relief. It’s quiet. While I do miss spending quality time with him, I appreciate having time to space out much of the day. Silence has a way of opening doors. I need a lot of time doing nothing, to make something happen. 

This song I’m bringing this week is Dumiyah (2014) which literally translates to “Silence” - the title track of Pharaoh’s Daughter’s most recent album, and it carries inside it the story of how I named my son, Saadya, born in 2016.

The Fax

WINTER, 2008. MONTREAL.

I was staying in a small guest room at Frederick Bohbot’s home, the producer of Leaving the Fold (2008) while helping sync my album Haran (2007) to it. Directed by Eric Scott, the film was a deep exploration of people who had left ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic communities- worlds I knew intimately.

At 7 a.m., the fax machine started screaming.

Beeps. Whirs. A long exhale of paper.

It was Jonte, my promoter in Israel. There was a new festival- Piyyut. The concept was to pair composing artists with “paytanim,” or poets from mostly the Golden Age of Spain and before. I was asked to participate and assigned to Saadia Gaon, the 9th-century Egyptian genius who translated the Torah into Arabic and helped shape Jewish law. A right-and-left-brain mystic-intellectual.

Two poems slid through the cross-Atlantic machine:

Zikaron - Remembrance.

Dumiyah - Silence.

“To You, silence is praise…” (Dumiyah). 

I did what I always do:

I read. I sang. I read again. I waited for the melody to lift the words off the page.

Eventually, the first line of Dumiyah began to form a slow, majestic introduction.  

Echoes from my childhood swept in, and I heard the familiar melodies of Bais Yaakov girls harmonizing during recess. Sweet. Minor, slightly naive, with satisfying and predictable resolutions- something I usually shy away from.  

How ironic.

The documentary Leaving the Fold was about the complex painful  life paths chosen by young Hasidic Jews who decide to turn their backs on the insular fundamentalist worlds into which they were born.

But those worlds rarely leave us. My childhood had its own rigid jagged cadences, featured in the film - and my music was about to become the soundtrack to stories of departure, and new identity formation.

Breakfast Next morning With Leonard Cohen

I was still singing, “To You, silence is praise…” when I looked at my watch and panicked.

Snowpants. Boots. Gloves.

Two feet of snow. The flakes hit hard and sideways.

That was the morning I was meeting Leonard Cohen for breakfast at Bagel Etc. on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, across from his house on Parc du Portugal. He had invited me the night before, where we met at a cafe I was performing at.

This is another story that deserves its own telling, but for the story of “Dumiyah,” and eventually, the naming my son Saadya, it’s meaningful. 

Because something about that morning — the heavy snow seemed to have sucked out the city noises, and there was a palpable silence. Almost a shared secret when people leave their homes to meet during blizzards. It was a magical day.

Singing What I Couldn’t Yet Feel

SPRING, 2008. ISRAEL.

Two months later I stood in Israel at the Piyyut Festival, offering new melodies to those faxed poems.

“To You, silence is praise… “ praise and gratitude expressed aloud.

Neither silence nor gratitude were my defaults. But they became seeds to water. 

For those of us who carry complicated family love stories… the well of gratitude and praise can run dry. Much of the time, I work from adrenaline. Hyper vigilance. Inspiration. Diligence. I create motion, to fill up silence, which feels threatening no matter how much I crave it. 

When I returned to NYC and brought “Zikaron” and “Dumiyah” to Pharaoh’s Daughter, the arrangements began to expand. And then they exploded into a rich orchestral world- infused with a Bulgarian styled choir near the coda- under the care of Jamshied Sharifi, brilliant, MIT-trained, New England Conservatory-honed, arranger for The Band's Visit and The Black Rider.

Jamshied illuminated the songs and gave them a larger global musical world outside of Bais Yaakov. 

He also recorded the foundational tracks for my upcoming album Better than Wine, which he forecasted could be my best Pharaoh’s Daughter album yet. This past summer, after a heartbreaking battle, he succumbed to cancer, and I miss him terribly. His gifts were extraordinary, and his creative spirit was bursting at the seams. 

When Dumiyah, the album  was released in 2014,  I remembered the morning the song came through the fax machine - the snowy day I met Leonard for breakfast. We remained in touch for seven years, and I eventually mailed him the entire album. He wrote back a stunning email, which - with his permission - became a review of the work.

"Listening to Dumiyah in the car yesterday with a Turkish friend

such a delight

the groove, the purity, the skill

so fresh and yet so familiar

as the work of the heart always is-- "  (Leonard Cohen) 

The Name

SPRING, 2016. GREAT BARRINGTON, MA

Two years after the album’s release, I was seven months pregnant.

After leading a retreat at Isabella Freedman for the community that I served as Cantor - I drove to Race Brook Lodge - a vibey B&B tucked into the hills that had become a kind of personal refuge after years of playing music at a music club, Helsinki, in Great Barrington.

I took myself out to dinner at the Stagecoach Tavern.

Casey, the owner’s son and someone I knew from the music world recognized me, came over to my table, and introduced  the woman standing beside him.

“I just got married,” he said. “This is my wife — Saadiya.”

Saadiya.

I smiled at the familiar name.

I told her about the 9th-century Egyptian born Jewish scholar. About “Dumiyah” About the album. She was Muslim Indian. In my tradition, Saadya is a boys name, and it  means “helper of God,” or “G-d helps..” “ In hers, it was a name for a woman, ​​Fortunate, Blessed, Happy Bringer of Fortune, One who is Prosperous or Auspicious. 

Those sounded good to me too. 

That night, the name joined the baby name list.

It rose quickly to the top.

As my due date approached, it became clearer that it would be just he and I. I noticed the cadence: Basya and Saadya. 

Basya — Daughter of G-d. Pharaoh’s Daughter.

Saadya — Helper of G-d. Born in Egypt.

When my son was born, pale and luminous - not the dark Yemenite complexion that often carries that name - I wasn't so sure. Would it be weird? Could he carry it, could I carry him? But there was so much significance already, so I stayed with the flow of what had already been unfolding. 

Saadya Nisim Max Schechter. God’s help, miracles, and my Zaidie’s name. 

Silence, Again

WINTER, 2026. NYC

When my son sleeps, especially as he is working through illnesses like this last bout of stomach flu….silence. 

In those moments, I return to the words:

“To You, silence is praise.”

But these words hold different meanings now. 

Silence no longer signifies absence: It is love without adrenaline.

Every song carries a story.

Some begin in a fax machine. Some in the snow. Some in grief. Some in a diner. And some — quietly — become your child’s name.

“Give me your tired, your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these your homeless tempest tost to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door... “ Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus, one of the most forward-thinking poets of the 19th century, was asked to write a poem to help fundraise for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Rather than merely writing verses, however, she engraved her moral vision through her art. As a Sephardic Jewish woman, whose family arrived in the 1600’s after fleeing the Inquisition in Portugal and later Brazil, Lazarus became actively engaged with her Jewish Ashkenazi cousins - immigrants fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, reframing America as a refuge for the persecuted of all lands. Back then, the borders were more permeable to support the growth of the vast new democratic experiment. Lady Liberty symbolized, in Lazarus’ words, the Mother of Exiles, holding a torch for people yearning to breathe free from terror abroad. Below is the full piece.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These verses became the lyrics I chose to compose to music for a downtown outdoor celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s 120th anniversary in 2006. These words lived in my bones as a part of my heritage. Maybe it’s really possible to be embraced and nurtured after escaping persecution and inequality. With the Hudson River behind us and the faint silhouette of the statue glowing in the mist, Pharaoh’s Daughter performed and sang these words, culminating in the repeating mantra, “ Give me your tired…”

About a decade later, serving full-time as a cantor at Romemu on the Upper West Side, I excerpted the mantra to accompany one of Rabbi David Ingber’s sermons on immigration abuses. At the same time, I was fortunate to receive a position as Cantor of the FIS, where I’ve been serving for the last 13 summers. On weekends, friends and musicians would come over to my small white cottage to cook, eat, sing, and jam. This became a yearly tradition. One summer, Daniel Ori, a frequent guest and musical artist, bass player, and producer, and I finally decided to collaborate on a project.

We created a series called Songs to Live By - excerpting potent quotes and setting them to music as inspirational incantations with lyric videos to highlight the messages. Back in the city a couple years later during COVID-19, we began recording with a portable setup in my apartment while masking up. “Give Me” became one of those pieces. I chanted the melody, Dan produced the track, and we paired it with a lyric video portraying images of immigrants arriving by ship to our harbors, gazing at the colossus.

Immigrants like my grandfather Max from Galicia, who sold fruit from a pushcart in the Lower East Side, have been the hard-working salt of the earth that made this country diverse, robust, and culturally teeming since its origins. Lazarus’ poem is a time machine to a moment when our Mother of Exiles promised the moral blueprint and energy of hospitality and possibility, instead of intimidation and discrimination..

I recently saw footage of a song being sung in Minnesota from protesters urging ICE agents to put their weapons down and sing. I love that image, and envision the hearts of these ICE employees melting and moving to a kinder place.

It’s heartening to be in creative circles where people draw from their heritage and mother tongues to create. Like Bad Bunny celebrating his Puerto Rican heritage in front of millions of people, or the yearly Goldenfest in Queens that raises Balkan tradition and music, and Globalfest at Lincoln Center… This is the America I believe in. So many friends and I are singing from our traditional backgrounds in native language.

Today, when I walked into my building, a fellow resident was opening a package. It was a candle. She shared that she will light it every night in her window as part of an action called, “We Are the Light.” A way to show solidarity with immigrant neighbors and lift her lamp outside the golden door.

When I sing Lazarus’ words, they become a protest for the cruel, undemocratic treatment I see ICE committing all over the country. I also feel Lazarus’ words in song as a sanctuary, a place for uplifting, unifying, the non-violent energy of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. What does it mean to invoke these luminaries who open doors and illuminate rather than raise fists, though that’s often how I feel.

I welcome you to freely share this piece at gatherings, protests, song circles, and services and a way to tell your own origin stories. May Lady Liberty’s promise of freedom live on, along with the legacy of our ancestors.

Give me your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

I lift my lamp beside the golden door

Listen again here:

THE NEW COLLOSSUS/Give Me:

Thank you for open ears and hearts. Thank you to a few of the editors, Julie Shapiro, Rabbi Dianne Cohler Esses, Bracha Schechter and Alice Frank,. As you continue to receive these articles, I invite you to become a paid subscriber, if you are able to, to help me continue to thrive in my work as a musician and storyteller.

Links to Photos:

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/emma_lazarus_ny/

https://share.google/chWYH4LAErknJL5eG

https://share.google/6cHTVq84QNh3MbVh1

Every Song a Story: Shnirele Perele/String of Pearls

Listen to Pharaoh’s Daughter’s Shnirele Perele

Listen to Ben Newman/AI Generated String of Pearls

My friend, and AI-creative genius Rabbi Ben Newman, called me last week with his wife, Rabbi Shosh, buzzing with excitement.

“Listen to this,” he said.

An email popped into my inbox. I clicked play on his AI-enhanced version of String of Pearls, and suddenly I felt winded.

My career is over.

It was that good.

He blew my mind and broke my heart at the exact same moment: how could this folk melody- this song that had shaped my musical life- transmogrify into something so fresh, so contemporary, sung by a completely fabricated voice named “Cassie,” and still somehow be the same song?

Shnirele Perele was the first song I ever covered. I’d been writing all my own till I encountered it. A violinist named Jeremy taught it to me when we were accompanying services at B’nei Jeshurun in the late 90s. He learned it by listening to the Klezmatics, and when he shared their version with me, I was instantly hooked:

I realized the melody was already inside me- I barely had to learn it.

The song translates as “String of Pearls.” It was first printed in 1901 in an anthology of Jewish folk songs in Russia, edited by Saul Ginsberg and Pesach Marek and published in St. Petersburg. There’s no known author. Like so many Yiddish songs, it seems to have been stitched together through oral tradition, shaped by local performance, passed hand to hand, voice to voice.

The lyrics are full of luminous images—little ribbon, little pearl, golden flag—celebrating the coming of the Messiah and a future of peace in the land of Israel. Shtetl poetry doing what it always does: holding out hope despite surround sound persecution.

The song traveled from folk memory into Zmiros, concert halls, holidays, communal spaces.

Even though the text was in Yiddish and deeply messianic, the melody sounded Turkish or Egyptian to my ears. Around that time, I began playing the oud - and when I plucked out the melody, it felt instantly right.

So I brought it to Pharaoh’s Daughter.

We arranged Shnirele Perele with tabla, Middle Eastern percussion, flutes, violin, electric guitar. It was raw, youthful, alive. Produced by the jazz great Anthony Coleman and recorded at the Knitting Factory studio, it found its way onto my second Pharaoh’s Daughter album, Out of the Reeds first on Knitting Factory Records (2000) and then on Tzadik Records (2004).

It ended up being one of the most listened-to tracks of my catalogue. It helped shape what became our signature sound: bridging East and West, old and new.

One of my brilliant mentors, Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein - a former formidable Rabbi at BJ, a gifted spiritual guide, coach and therapist living in Costa Rica, and a deeply present human and friend- once said to me, “Basya, you are a bridge.” That sentence never left me. I am often hovering between vastly different shores, and crossing over.

Two weeks ago was Parshat Va’era. In my role as a cantor and spiritual leader, I shared some reflections inspired by Yiscah Smith’s writing on this portion, the second chapter of Exodus.

Va’era gives us the four stages of redemption:
Hotzeiti—I took you out.
Hitzalti—I saved you.
Ga’alti—I redeemed you.
Lakachti—I took you as My people.

These four movements become the four cups of wine at the Passover Seder, carrying us through our annual retelling of enslavement and liberation. We narrate suffering and freedom through story, ritual, and question.

Yet there is a fifth stage in the Torah: V’heiveiti—“I will bring you into the land.”

That stage doesn’t have its own cup; instead, we leave a glass full on the table and open the door for Elijah- the mythic messenger of the messianic age. “Shnirele Perele,” imagines that world, and the prophets define it as a time when swords become plough-shares, where peace is no longer theoretical.

My friend Rabbi Annie Lewis sings a beautiful lyric drawn from Emma Lazarus “Until we are all free, none of us are free” (Hear her singing in this Podcast).

That’s the bar.

We are not living in the 5th cup Messianic consciousness right now. Right now, we are living in a country that’s turning their back on their commitment to all people, and openly being fascist- unregulated in their “management” of immigrants. All over the world, people are telling the same old stories and using the pain within the narratives to justify immeasurable infliction on others.

It’s also often true for me. Whenever I’m telling liberation stories—really telling them, I eventually bottleneck and back into victimhood and pain. For those of us who have lived through real forms of trauma and enslavement, that may be inevitable.

Storytelling can be one of the most expansive traditions, but I often end up working myself into a rant. Storytelling alone might not be enough to get us to liberation. With familiar wounds also feeling like home, I’m not surprised that I’m drawn to exile.

Can we collectively imagine that countries at war for millennia could live like cousins in a shared sense of all beings being free, not as a future fantasy- but as a present vibration?

Fast forward a few decades.

Ben Newman finds his own inspiration in “Shnirele Perele,” frames it with his beautiful original written English lyrics, plays it in a songwriter’s guitar style, feeds a few precise prompts into AI—and suddenly there it is. A version that sounds like it could live on an indie label, or soundtrack of a moody moment in a Netflix series.

When we talked, Ben shared it was a collaboration with him and AI.

But my reaction was visceral.

Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly integrating my earlier path as a performing artist after a long hiatus—single parenting, working full time as a cantor, keeping the music alive where I can. And now, as I’ve been birthing and producing my own work again, daring to imagine making part of my living through it, I find a thoroughly unrecognizable musical landscape.

Is this the exact wrong moment to try?

If someone can do this with a few lines of direction to an AI, can the music I make ever live up? Could I book a show at Joe’s Pub and just open my laptop to a live audience?

I had to sit with that fear for a day before it softened.

Ben Newman is an AI creative genius. He’s done the work. He stays up nights manifesting full albums of freedom anthems, so his work is about bringing equality and goodness to the world. He just released a book called “AI for Clergy,” a practical guide for spiritual leaders learning how to partner with this technology. He’s even offered to teach me what he’s doing.

I’m a luddite. Spent the early 2000’s running around with quarters all over the city till I surrendered to a flip phone in 2009 and then an iPhone in 2013… Instagram, very recently.

What now?

I know protesting leaves me in the dust. Perhaps lowering my guard and contributing to the conversation, with my resistance, might be something to explore.

Every song is a story.

Ben’s AI collaboratively generated “String of Pearls” brings me way back, to my rendition of Shnirele Perele, while simultaneously propelling me way forward. Can we hold that goblet of wine and declare a new era where we collaborate with AI, herald peace and celebrate creativity? Is this all part of Messianic wisdom?

I’d love to hear your thoughts

The Song That Was Already There

A response- Rabbi Ben Newman

When I sent Basya the track, I didn’t expect to knock the wind out of her.

I wasn’t trying to provoke an existential crisis or announce the end of musicianship as we know it. I was genuinely excited. The way one gets excited when a melody you love suddenly reveals another face, like light hitting a prism at a new angle.

But her reaction made complete sense to me. Because the feeling she described—wonder braided tightly with dread—is the feeling I’ve been living with while working creatively with AI.

Let me say this clearly up front:
AI did not write that song.

It didn’t discover Shnirele Perele.
It didn’t live inside that melody for decades.
It didn’t carry it through synagogues, clubs, studios, exile, return, breath, fingers, throat.

What AI did was something both less magical and more unsettling.

It mirrored.

And mirrors are dangerous objects in spiritual traditions.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working with inherited forms—prayers, melodies, texts, myths—that were never meant to be static. Judaism survives because it improvises. We swap melodies. We remix liturgy. We comment on commentaries until the margins swallow the page.

In that sense, using AI to explore a melody is not foreign to the tradition. It’s almost aggressively Jewish.

What is new is the speed, the polish, and the way the result arrives without visible labor. No sore fingers. No late-night rehearsals. No failure baked into the sound.

That’s what unnerves us.

We’re not afraid of replacement. We’re afraid of disappearing process

When I worked with the melody that became String of Pearls, I wasn’t asking AI to “be creative.” That language is misleading. I was asking it to explore interpretive space.

What happens if this melody leans indie instead of klezmer?
What happens if the voice sounds like someone who never existed?
What emotional temperature emerges if the arrangement strips away lineage cues?

AI didn’t answer those questions independently. It responded to constraints, references, and aesthetic values that came from me—from my ear, my history, my listening life.

And crucially: from my relationship to the song.

That relationship is not reproducible.

Basya is right to ask whether storytelling itself is enough.

I’d extend the question: is authorship enough?

We are entering a moment where the authority of “I made this” no longer guarantees meaning. Craft alone won’t save us. Neither will nostalgia.

What will matter is presence.

AI can generate sound. It cannot generate stakes.

It doesn’t risk anything by producing a song.
It doesn’t fear being misunderstood.
It doesn’t wonder whether it still has a place in the room.

We do.

That vulnerability is not a bug. It’s the signal.

As a rabbi, I’m used to working with technologies that already feel supernatural to people. Writing. Musical notation. Printing. Recording. All of them were once seen as threats to presence.

AI is different in scale, but not in kind.

The danger isn’t that AI will make artists obsolete. The danger is that we’ll let it seduce us into disembodiment—into confusing output with encounter.

A laptop can’t hold a room.
A generated voice can’t listen back.
An algorithm can’t feel the moment when a melody breaks someone open.

Basya’s work has always lived exactly there—in the break.

When I imagine the future of music, I don’t see fewer humans on stage. I see a clearer distinction between sound and song.

Sound can be infinite. Cheap. Everywhere. Generated endlessly.

Song, though—that’s something else.

Song requires someone who has crossed water and remembers the crossing. Someone who knows what it means to hover, as Basya says, between shores.

No machine knows that feeling.

So what is AI for, then?

For me, it’s a study partner.
A sandbox.
A provocative mirror that shows me what I might sound like if I weren’t afraid.

It’s not a replacement for musicians. It’s a stress test for meaning.

And meaning, inconveniently, still requires us.

Basya asks whether to engage now, later, or never.

My answer isn’t prescriptive. It’s relational.

Engage if it deepens your listening.
Step back if it flattens your presence.
Refuse if it tempts you to bypass the work that matters.

There’s no mitzvah to use every tool.

But there is a responsibility to remain awake while tools reshape the world around us.

The melody of Shnirele Perele survived because it kept moving. Because it welcomed reinterpretation without losing its soul.

That’s the test now.

Not whether AI can make music.
But whether we can remain musicians.

Not whether technology can generate beauty.
But whether beauty can still interrupt us, unsettle us, demand something in return.

Every song is a story.

But not every sound remembers why it matters.

That part is still on us.

But over the last couple of days, in the process of telling the story of a song, I somehow ended up here—with this post, which very clearly wanted to be a Substack entry. Timely, because in the Jewish Calendar we sing the “Song of the Sea,” a liberation song, and the first one that appears in the Torah. So here we are.

“Every Song a Story” is the first installment in an unfolding exploration of the inner lives of my songs: where they come from, how they travel, how they change, intersect, and how they might carry us across time, culture, and identity.

In this series, I’ll be recalling memory, spirituality, and experience—how new and old melodies find me, how I shape them, and how they shape me back. Some pieces will start with a song. Others with a moment, a text, or a question that grips me.

That way of working keeps reminding me of a teaching from Rebbe Nachman: that each person’s good points are like individual notes in a melody. On their own, they can feel small or incomplete, but when you gather and string them together, an orchestration emerges that’s larger than the sum of its parts. That idea feels like a quiet engine under everything I’m writing here.

This first piece begins with a melody I’ve been living with for decades and a recent encounter that unsettled me—in the best and most uncomfortable way—raising questions about tradition, technology, authorship, and what it means to make music right now.

More to come…

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