Tamar Taback illuminates a new path to Jewish femininity

Imet Tamar for the first time in my kitchen, as I tried to figure out how I could warm up her gluten-free muffins in my very pizza-crusted toaster oven. Our conversation was engaging and all over the place. Soon, Tamar shared her dream: to create a community of women who would engage and together grow into our feminine fullness.
I’m of Galician origin. Which means I’ve got a snickering cynic within me. I thought Tamar was well-meaning and cute, but probably a bit delusional — what is she thinking? who does she think she is? — and I’m a person whose ambition exhausts those around me.
Tamar’s very feminine and gentle demeanor threw me off. And really, what could a chassidishe veibel, third-generation Boro Parker, have in common with a third-generation South African of pristine litvish origin?
Though I followed her as she developed her material, teachings, and network, I didn’t know how intellectually profound and all-encompassing her material was until around two years later, when I listened to her shiur “The Evolution of the Feminine as Seen Through Megillas Esther.” It was then that I was finally convinced: Tamar was unlocking an entirely new and breathtaking dimension on the topic of the Torah’s position for women in a post-feminism world.
The journey of exploring the development of the feminine, as well as women’s unique connection to Torah, is being charted by many women and some men as well. Devorah Fastag, followed by Miriam Kosman, were key figures in clearing a path with their groundbreaking books, The Moon’s Lost Light and Circle, Arrow, Spiral, Understanding Gender in Judaism, respectively. Building upon their works, and including many other sources, primary among them Sarah Yehudit Schneider, Tamar Taback is shedding a new light in her sincere and gentle way.

Discovering the Feminine

Born on Purim in South Africa, Tamar’s family soon moved to St. Louis, where she grew up. When she was 14, her parents, both baalei teshuvah, took a brief sabbatical in Israel. When her parents returned to America, Tamar stayed in the home of Rabbi Akiva Tatz — who’d been in medical school together with her father — to finish the school year in Israel, after which she returned to Bais Yaakov St. Louis.
She later attended BJJ seminary in Eretz Yisrael, and lived there a few years after her marriage to Ari Taback. Then the couple moved to South Africa, where Rabbi Taback took a position in rabbanus and Tamar taught in high schools and seminaries. During this period, she was learning and translating Ohel Rachel, a sefer describing the traditional feminine role, written by Rav Refael Menachem Schlanger, a student of Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l.
As she studied, though, she was troubled by an issue that had bothered her since she was a teenager — although then she’d had a hard time articulating it. “If it’s good if a woman loves Torah and wants to learn it,” Tamar asked, “Why, then, are there so many descriptions that seemed to assume that women aren’t personally studying Torah?”
As Tamar continued to learn, she began to notice a pattern: The entire world is composed of masculine and feminine — Heaven and Earth, mitzvos aseh and mitzvos lo saaseh, Kudsha Berich Hu and Shechinah (Hashem’s transcendent Essence and His imminent Presence).
“I had learned so much about femininity, I was determined to get it right, to be the perfect akeres habayis, the woman whose ruchniyus was only what she was mekabel from her husband, who thrived in the traditional role,” Tamar shares. “But doing so strained me emotionally and left me feeling depressed. For example, the mashpia-mekabel model [in which the male is the giver and the woman the receiver] doesn’t mean that a woman should receive her happiness solely from her husband — this misapplication leads to enmeshment and worse.”
As Tamar continued to learn, she discovered the higher feminine archetype. “I realized that a woman cannot expect to get her spiritual needs met by only her husband but if motivated, needs to and can go higher — to Hashem.
“I also had to learn that archetypes are not people,” she adds. “Both men and women have the energy of both archetypes in them, though the feminine is expressed by women as a whole and the masculine by men.”