The Show Goes On: Singer Maya Shaw Searches for Freedom in a Post-7th Diaspora

Where were you on October 7th, 2023?

Maya Shaw, a rising Israeli singer-songwriter, was in New York City, feeling small in a city whose skyscrapers are dwarfed only by the towering legacy of inspiration felt by Maya and so many artists before her. On the 7th, her dreams and aspirations suddenly played hollow, sounded selfish, against the silencing finality of a tragic coda.

Maya got stuck in New York for what would become two of the most difficult months of her life. In a single moment, the city she had always dreamed about became a nightmare of distance and alienation, keeping her away from the people she loves at a time of great danger and suffering. Like all of us, Maya was filled with fear, sadness, and uncertainty, forced to confront the questions many Jews and Israelis have had to ask themselves since that dark day. Are my family and friends safe? Is it safe to go home? Or is being with my countrymen in a warzone safer than being an Israeli in the diaspora? Where is my place in this world — as an artist? As a Jew?

But the show must go on. 

No one feels that more than those of us living in Israel, where the waning summer has been full of dichotomous tensions. A Saturday morning spent tanning on Tel Aviv’s beautiful beaches is bookended by an evening at a demonstration, posters and bullhorns in hand, alongside tens of thousands of other Israelis who have taken to the streets to air grief and grievance alike, only to wake up the next morning and ride the bus to work alongside those same familiar strangers. The silence of a quiet week under the facade of life’s return to normalcy may be shattered by sirens warning of enemy rocket fire. By the news of another friend or loved one or stranger lost in the war. The buoyant levity of Sunday’s wedding, deflated by Monday’s funeral. 

Yes, the show must go on, for those of us still granted the privilege to keep up the act.

And so, the past year has been the most pivotal yet in Maya’s budding career. She wrote dozens of new songs; fell in love; shot three music videos; became verified on Instagram; returned to New York with new fire in her soul and new songs in her pocket; and released her first album, Unfocused Freedom.

Much like her personal style — thrifted and eccentric, vintage in its elegance but indebted to a 21st century, social media-informed fashion sensibility where a vast range of influences are never more than a swipe away — Maya’s music is a unique meeting of old and new. Her piano forward blend of catchy melodies with complex compositions owe themselves equally to the ethereal musings of Lana Del Rey and the expressive ballads of a Broadway musical. Neither comparison is such a stretch. Lana is a major inspiration to Maya and, while in her final year as a student at the renowned Rimon School of Music, she wrote an entire musical with some classmates.

But even more than the influence of any pop star, central to Maya’s work is the legacy of her late grandfather, Irwin Robert Shaw, a New York City native who worked as a psychologist and lived as a poet. Over the course of his life, Irwin penned a collection of more than ten thousand poems. It’s a staggering archive of material that has served as a wellspring of inspiration for Maya — sometimes word-for-word, sometimes on a broad thematic level — in her art and in her life. His keen sense of human emotion and the intricacies of the inner self are themes that echo throughout Maya’s music. Her debut album, “Unfocused Freedom,” which she released this year on Shavout, is a celebration of his literary contributions and an homage to his lasting impact on her artistic journey.

Maya says that the centerpiece of the album is the single “44 Pieces”, a stripped back and melancholy bossa nova tune about the pining, shattered heart of a woman longing for lost love. About picking up the pieces in the wake of loss. It’s affecting and catchy, replete with a hum-along-worthy “ba-da-da-dadum” section. The sort of song that makes you wish you were smoking a cigarette in a Parisian cafe. But it’s the track “Freedom,” to which the album owes its name, that stands out to me most. 

In the chorus she sings: “I want freedom in the most unfocused way.”

At first glance it’s just a snappy hook; a simple line that ties together a song about searching for freedom while burdened by the overwhelming possibilities that a new city can offer — themes explicitly in line with Maya’s own journeys to New York. And yet, like much great poetry, its depth lies in that it invites interpretation. It is pointed and specific to the frame of mind in which it was written (which only Maya truly knows), while also serving as the perfect blank slate for any listener to project their notion of freedom onto.

Indeed, we all want freedom. But freedom is hard to define. It takes many forms. The idea of freedom as something “unfocused” is inherent to the pursuit of freedom itself. Or at least to a certain type of freedom. It’s a freedom that runs antithetical to the one we read about in the Book of Exodus — what the Jews beg of their Egyptian overlords is not merely freedom from slavery, an unfocused freedom where the function of liberation is a total lack of boundaries and restrictions. Rather, it is a freedom towards something. The freedom to be bound not by chains and labor but to be bound by the word of G-d and the service to his Mitzvot. 

In the centuries since the story of Exodus, the people of Israel have had freedom granted and revoked countless times. Most recently we have been shackled by fear, trauma, grief, and sadness in the year since the October 7th attack. We find ourselves, collectively and individually, yearning for freedom from these heavy chains. Freedom for our hostages in nightmarish captivity; freedom to be proudly Jewish in our homeland and around the globe; freedom from the misplaced ire of the world; freedom to un-tremblingly defend ourselves. 

Is this latest pursuit of freedom unfocused because we don’t know how to reach it? Because there are simply too many things we need freedom from? Because, as Jews, we all secretly fear that we can never really be free of these burdens? Or is it, like the freedom in Exodus, not unfocused at all?

Maya, like all of us, does not know the right answers — the best she can do, through her music and the journey of bringing it to the world, is to keep asking the right questions. What Maya does know is that her own unfocused freedom, both that which she has already earned and that which she still pursues, is a privilege. It is something not given lightly at a time when all too many of us have had all too much taken away. Something she does not take for granted. 

So, the show must go on, if only for the sake of those on whom the curtain has already dropped.

If Maya is on the stage, you’ll find me in the audience.