Help Create Rena's New Album, "Choose Life"

In the span of the past year and a half, I moved to Jerusalem shortly before October 7th and moved to Asheville, North Carolina shortly before Hurricane Helene. (Wildly, I was also a fourth-grader in New York City on 9/11.) Through all the surges of terror I experienced in the bomb sirens and the storm, I kept grasping for something solid to hold onto, and instead, song after song came through me. I am learning that there is no solidity—there is only the ever-moving, divine current of life flowing through, here to carry me like a melody if I manage to stop kicking and sputtering against the current. I am learning to say yes to life. I am learning to lay back and breathe. To choose the perspective that everything is happening for me and not to me, that each experience is an invitation to come more fully alive, to respond more skillfully and lovingly, to deepen my trust, to be more fully myself. I am learning that I have always been in the perfect places at the perfect times for the ancestral trauma of victimhood to be brought to the surface in order to get released from my body, expediting this healing process and allowing me to experience a degree of peace and freedom at age 32 that I may not otherwise have reached in my lifetime. As I integrate these lessons, they keep singing through me. I am called to share more lesson-songs with you all. B’ezrat Hashem (with Divine help) and with your support, this new album, Choose Life, will be here in the month of Elul. I pray that it can be a friend to you when life’s lessons feel inscrutable and just plain painful, when you want to say a big resounding NO. I pray that these songs cheer for you, at any choice-point in your day, to pick whatever feels most enlivening and expansive when conditions feel most narrow. The upcoming Jewish month of Adar, which precedes Nisan (the month of celebrating liberation), reminds us that joy can be a choice—a cause and not an effect of external realities. We get to keep creating new life-affirming, liberatory realities together. I am so grateful that we don’t have to do anything alone. In this spirit, I humbly ask for your help raising $30,000 to bring this music of spiritual sustenance out of my heart and into the world. This is a longer album than my last one, and $30,000 will help me to compensate all my collaborators on the recordings and the release concerts, as well as try something new this time—paying myself! If you have found sweet resonance in the music that comes through me, THANK YOU. Thank you for listening and helping me continue to sing. I would so appreciate if you share this fundraiser with other folks in your life, in addition to contributing whatever you can. Donations are tax-deductible thanks to fiscal sponsorship from Beloved Builders. Love, Rena