How Chayala Neuhaus Connects Modern With Ancient

There once was a prince with a fire in his eyes
And a palace he built of his dreams
With towering visions of chasing the skies
And the glory he'd bring to his King
But one day a black cloud of evil set in
A storm washed the palace away in the wind
And all that's left is the pain of one word
Written on his face

- Eichah, comp. Chayala Neuhaus

Tisha B'Av is not a day we usually associate with great spiritual awakenings. It is a time of deep, even paralyzing mourning, when we sit on the floor, read kinnos, and refrain from anything which could possibly be enjoyable or uplifting, even learning Torah.

Megillas Eichah symbolizes this sense of melancholy and loss more than anything, describing the destruction of the Temple and suffering of the Jewish people in great and deliberately depressing detail. A precious few consoling or reprimanding passages aside, it is not a call to action or prayer but rather reflection on what we lost through our aveiros and sinfulness against Gd.

Enter Chayala Neuhaus, author of a new and powerful song on Tisha Bav appropriately called Eichah.

A composer and musician of Jewish music for over twenty years, Neuhaus is the creator of four separate albums, all entitled “Miracles” (numbered 1-4). Her songs embody the power of Jewish hope, prayer, perseverance, and heartache, combining Jewish themes and ideas with modern American pop tunes and themes.

Neuhaus says she has been writing Jewish music since she was 11, and that she “drank” up every bit of the storytelling and songwriting of Moshe Yess and A.B. Rothenberg of Journeys fame since she was just five years old.

She was also greatly influenced by Mordechai Ben David, the Miami Boys and the work of Dina Storch – which went “from school to school, from camp to camp” almost like a “masorah” of Jewish music, as Neuhaus puts it.

Neuhaus has now used this knowledge and experience to produce an original musical interpretation of the most mournful of the books of the Tanach.

Eichah is, as expected, a very tragic song describing a “prince” (whom Neuhaus says represents the Jewish people) seeking to build a great palace (representing the Beis HaMikdash), only for it to be destroyed by “a storm” and “angry red flames,” leaving the prince  “heartbroken” and with “no comfort in sorrow.”

Neuhaus says Eichah was one of many songs she has written on commission – in this case, a song for a school play which depicted the messaging of the lamentations of Eichah.

Neuhaus explains that many often ask, “how we're still kind of mourning something that is gone for so many years. And the answer to it is that we're living a reenactment of that loss every single day in different forms. It's showing up in everybody's lives differently. This person is struggling with infertility…. This person is struggling with [Jews who are becoming] assimilated lost to the faith. And everybody's living out their own version of Churban. And even if it's hard for us to connect to the Beis HaMikdash, we can connect to the modern-day tragedies, right? We can connect to what we know about the Holocaust.”

Neuhaus says she wanted to go beyond that and to reconnect Jews to the Churban itself and why it remains so devastating: “I wanted to take it a step further than that. And I wanted to make the actual Churban relatable to people; I wanted to say we do have a connection. Really, we have a G-d who is longing to be home with his children, and he doesn't have a home.”

She says her goal was to create a “modern prayer connecting to the ancient prayers” and that it made her connect to it “not just through my own suffering, but through really the suffering of G-d being homeless in the world and having so many children who don't even know that they belong to him.”

Neuhaus is one of a number of prominent female Orthodox Jewish artists and performers who have made waves in the past few decades. They include the all-female band Bulletproof Stockings, Dalia Shusterman, Miriam Sandler, Shaindy Plotzker, Bracha Jaffee, and many others.

These music stars, some of whom started out working with big names in the general music world such as Julio Iglesias and Gloria Estefan, some of whom have always made and performed exclusively for Jewish audiences, have to navigate a world where the rules of kol isha restrict their ability to perform for male Jewish audiences.

Neuhaus doesn’t see this as a topic for taking stands or courting controversy, saying, “I'm just a person doing what I think is my shlichus in this world.”

She adds that she “can only make decisions for myself as a Jewish woman and a mother and somebody who I know is like it or not…and I'm choosing to do what feels right for me. [F]or me, what feels right for today is to sing live with women and girls.”

As to what other female artists do, Neuhaus says, “I think they're doing amazing work. I think everybody needs to define their own shlichus in this world, speak to their own rabbanim. I have mine. I don't make a move without them, and I don't have a stand so much on what everybody else needs to do and on what's right and wrong.”

She reiterated that what matters to her most is her own responsibility and mission in this world: “I could just make choices for me and my life, and this to me is a gift that keeps evolving, and when there are new opportunities, and I'm not sure, I speak it over with the rav, and I try to make the best decisions I can for me, my family, and my music and my business.”

As for plans for the future, Neuhaus says she recently took a break from working after having a baby, but that she wrote the lyrics for two of Yaakov Shwekey’s most recent songs as well as a brand new composition with Benny Friedman coming out after Tisha B’Av.

 “I'm excited to get back to some of the beautiful communities all over the world. It's such a gift and a treasure to just see how much beautiful Jewish inspiration and heart there is attached to the music and the women's scene.”