Zachary Salsberg was 11 years old when he was asked to make a wish. Any wish. His sister hoped for a Disney cruise. But Salsberg wanted a guitar. (video)
Zachary (Zacharia) Salsberg donates a portion of his CD sales to the Starlight Children’s Foundation.
Salsberg, now 28, was diagnosed with Burkitts lymphoma, a rare form of cancer, when he was 11. At first, Salsberg’s doctor assumed he had the stomach flu.
“I had a stomachache and was feeling flu-like symptoms, but my mother knew there was something much worse going on,” Salsberg said. After getting an ultrasound, Salsberg learned that he had a huge mass in his abdomen.
“They did a biopsy, it was a final-stage tumour,” he said. “I pretty much almost died. [I had] a collapsed lung, no kidney function. It was just a mess.”
It was during his six months of chemotherapy that Salsberg’s father called the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which works to improve quality of life for children with chronic and life-threatening illnesses.
“They came to my floor and asked me if I had a wish, what would it be,” Salsberg said. “For some reason, unbeknownst to myself, I asked for a guitar, an amp and lessons.”
After a haze of chemo-induced depression, nausea, hair loss and mouth sores, Salsberg, now in remission for about 17 or 18 years, learned to play his guitar.
“I really just immediately got into it,” he said.
Salsberg, who goes by Zacharia when he’s performing, spent most of high school in a band called the Steel Toed Sandles.
By his late teens, he started focusing on songwriting and the acoustic guitar.
“I think that I was always drawn toward, you know, storytelling and song crafting,” he said.
Wanting a backup plan, Salsberg attended York University, where he went through several programs before settling on psychology, a degree he’s still finishing.
In 2006, when Salsberg was in his third year of university, he ran into more medical problems.
“I suffered a major physical trauma. There was severe damage to the right side of my body,” he said, adding that, while the trauma remains undiagnosed, doctors thought it might have been due to the amount of sports he played in the past.
“And I couldn’t play music for a full year. I couldn’t play guitar, I couldn’t physically sit upright. I had to drop out of school,” he said. “I lost everything that was important to me, save for family and friends.”
Trapped in a world of pain, Salsberg started looking to his religion.
“During that time, I started to go back and discover Judaism. I was looking for spirituality. I was looking for just anything.”
So the musician took a 10-week course on Judaism given by Aish HaTorah at York University.
“I completely fell in love with it. It gave me a lot of hope and encouragement because my situation was so awful,” he said.
Eventually, Salsberg decided to study at a yeshiva in Israel, where he spent two years.
“By then, I had started to get a little bit better and I started to play music again,” he said. “I was so inspired, in such a good state of mind, that I wanted to play through the pain.”
In Israel, Salsberg met Eli Schwebel, a producer from New York who was visiting the country.
After speaking with Salsberg and hearing him play, Schwebel, who has a studio in Israel, offered to help produce his first album.
“I only had three songs. The next day, I went into the studio and ended up writing 14 songs,” Salsberg said.
The CD, called Beautiful Mystery, explores Salsberg’s life and illnesses, as epitomized through the title track, Beautiful Mystery.
“That song is just really how I was looking back on my life and seeing… all the difficulties I’d gone through and how they’d always wind up leading towards something profoundly amazing,” he said. “I had to go through cancer in order to find music. I had to go through physical and emotional challenges… to find Judaism and… this album.”
Salsberg, who sells his CD at concerts and online through iTunes and CD Baby, decided to bring his life full circle and got involved with the Starlight Children’s Foundation. He currently donates a portion of every CD sale to the organization and hopes to get a hospital tour going soon.
“I want to continue to play for people and tell them what I’ve gone through,” he said.
For more information, visit www.zachariamusic.com.
