One Friday night in early August, Tamar Fox stands at her stove in Philadelphia cooking Shabbat dinner when her cell phone rings. The voice on the other end asks whether she would like a one-month-old baby girl. She says yes. The voice tells her to expect the baby in a few hours.
She calls her partner, Jesse Bacon, who is somewhere across the city, and tells him they are having a baby, and asks if he can stop on the way home for diapers and wipes. He does not flinch. He treats the news as good news, which is the kind of man he is. A few hours later two strangers arrive at the door and hand over an infant, and the handoff carries no ceremony, no labor, no months of swelling. There is a baby, and then there is a family.
The next morning Fox waits until nine, late enough to knock on a neighbor’s door without shame. Her friend Sharrona lives a few blocks away and has cheered the certification process from the start. Fox will not buy anything in a store on Shabbat, so she goes to borrow. Sharrona descends to the basement and comes back up with bags of baby clothes, socks and onesies and swaddling cloths, more than one baby could wear. Fox carries them home and feels she has won a lottery.
This is how Fox tends to enter a story. She begins with the ordinary surface, the diapers and the borrowed socks and the dinner left half-cooked, and she trusts the surface to carry the weight underneath it. She has built nearly two decades of writing on that trust.
She grew up in Chicago. She took a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from Vanderbilt University, which gave her a working knowledge of narrative before she ever called herself a journalist. A summer fellowship at Yeshivat Hadar pushed her study of Jewish text further. For four years she worked as a Senior Apprentice Artist at Chicago’s Gallery 37, early proof that she liked to combine making things with teaching people. She published her name in full, Tamar Elisheva Fox, on her first book.
Her career as an editor began at Jewcy, where she covered religion, Israeli society, politics, and Jewish identity with a quick voice and a taste for argument. She wrote about kosher food fights, Israeli culture, gender, and religious practice. From there she moved to MyJewishLearning as an associate editor and helped shape one of the largest online libraries of Jewish study, writing on holidays and ritual and history and recipes, and editing pieces that opened Jewish learning to readers across denominations. She sat on the editorial board of The Jew and the Carrot, a publication devoted to Jewish food, sustainability, and the ethics of what people eat. She worked, too, at Haggadot.com and Shma.com.
As a freelancer she has reported for The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, Tablet, Lilith, The Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kveller, Hey Alma, and Motherly. She has written about Suriname’s Jewish past for the Post and about modesty and dating in the Modern Orthodox world for the Jewish press. She treats Jewish identity as one thread in a larger American conversation about family and obligation, and she pulls it through subjects most writers keep separate.
The deepest of those subjects is foster care, and the deepest root of it runs in her own family. Her grandfather survived the Nazis because a foster family in England took him in. In the winter of 1979, her mother, Bev, then twenty-six and a young social worker, and her father, Sam, sponsored two teenage refugees from Vietnam, Mai and Thai Tran, who had escaped by boat and waited in an Indonesian camp until the Jewish Federation in Chicago brought them to the Foxes’ living room. Sam found Thai a job. More than thirty years later the siblings still live near Chicago. Fox grew up understanding that a family can expand to hold a stranger, and that the holding is a Jewish act.
So in 2014 she and Jesse began the certification that ends with a stranger handing you a child. The intake worker who walked them through it was not Jewish and worked for a Jewish agency, and she would call and announce accessibility as Keisha, from the Jewish, a line that made Fox laugh and that she has repeated in print. The agencies that once placed Jewish orphans now serve other poor families, sometimes families broken by addiction. Fox refuses to gild the work. She has written about feeling defeated, depressed, and furious at the way the system runs, and she has also written that she would do it again.
The first child was Dafna Penina. She came at one month old on that August Friday and stayed almost a year. She sat through dozens of hours of synagogue services without complaint and celebrated Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah and Passover with the family, though she was not Jewish and not, in the legal sense, theirs. Her face went up on the walls. Her gear spread across the floor. She loved matzah ball soup above all other foods and turned every bath into a flood.
In April 2015 the family learned Dafna would return to her mother, who loved her and meant to care for her well. Fox called the news good and admitted she was heartbroken, both true at once. Rather than let the parting pass in silence, she and Jesse built a ritual. They modeled it on a Jewish baby naming. They handed guests slips of paper that asked for one big wish and one small wish for Dafna. They gathered everyone under a chuppah. Jesse and Tamar told the story of how Dafna came to them and told the older story of the grandfather saved in England. Guests called out their wishes. Everyone sang her “Shalom Aleichem,” which closes with the line that sends the angels off in peace, and that is how they sent off the child. At the seder that spring, with Dafna on her aunt’s lap, Fox thought of Moses in the bulrushes, plucked from the water by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised to leave the palace, and she decided she was grateful the small ark had washed up on her doorstep at all.
The second child was Adira, eight weeks old, and she enters Fox’s writing through a bar. One afternoon Fox meets Jesse at the South Philly Tap Room. She has been craving a Bloody Mary off her Instagram feed. That morning Jesse took the baby to the farmer’s market while Fox ran to Ikea for a changing table and then sat in a coffee shop to work on her novel. By three they have both earned a drink. Adira gets thirsty too. Fox treats her into a ring sling so her own hands stay free for the glass, props the bottle, and the scene becomes an argument. Out of it she wrote a defense of formula. She has nothing against breastfeeding and bows to the mothers who do it, but as a foster mother she could not nurse, and she came to see formula as the choice that lets a parent feed a child at all. She looked into Adira’s eyes over the bottle and told the baby that she and her Papa would keep her safe and help her grow into a strong adult, and she meant it the way you mean a vow.
Gender runs through her work alongside the children. She has written about modesty and about the men no one asks to dress modestly, about women’s leadership, and about the weight laid on mothers and daughters. She tends to approach a contested subject through a single observed life rather than through a position paper, and she leaves the reader room to land where the reader will.
Food keeps its own place in her journalism. Through The Jew and the Carrot and elsewhere she has tied Jewish food traditions to farming and to memory, and she treats a recipe less as a set of instructions than as a way to carry a family forward.
She writes for children too. Her picture book No Baths at Camp, illustrated by Natalia Vasquez and published by Kar-Ben in 2013, became a PJ Library selection. Its hero, Max, refuses the tub and recounts a week of camp to prove he never needed one, rock climbing and canoeing and face paint and campfires, the only shower coming before sundown on Friday so the camp can scrub itself clean for Shabbat. The book does Jewish summer camp the way Fox does most things, through the small comedy of a kid who does not want to bathe rather than through scripture.
Beyond her bylines she works as a content strategist, carrying the same craft into the work of helping organizations explain hard subjects without flattening them. She has hosted a roundtable podcast, Talking in Shul, with Mimi Lewis and Zahava Stadler, trading talk about Jewish politics and culture, a format she took to at once because she is, by her own account, a podcast fiend.
The thread that ties it together is her refusal to wall off Jewish life from the rest of life. Holidays, parenting, food, foster care, politics, and prayer arrive in her essays as parts of one moral world, and she keeps asking how an inherited tradition can guide a person through a problem the tradition never named, without pretending the answer comes easy. Her essays on grief and belonging and childhood reach readers far outside the synagogue while staying rooted in its language. She started with fiction and ended up reporting on her own kitchen, and the kitchen turned out to be where the largest questions live.
Tamar Fox and the Sacred Act of Giving the Child Back
The baby comes on a Friday in August. Tamar Fox stands at the stove with the Shabbat food half made when the phone rings, and a voice asks if she would like a one-month-old girl, and she says yes, and the voice says a few hours. She calls Jesse. We are having a baby, she tells him, can you get diapers on the way. He says yes the way a man says yes to good news. Two strangers carry the infant to the door that night and set her down and leave, and the thing is done with no labor and no blood. The next morning Fox waits until nine and knocks on a neighbor’s basement door and comes home with bags of borrowed socks, and she feels she has won a lottery.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would read that morning as a small theology. In The Denial of Death he argues that every culture is a hero system, a set of beliefs that lets a man feel he earns a durable place in an order larger than his own short life, and so holds off the knowledge that he dies. The hero system issues a currency. Becker calls the spending of it the causa sui project, the attempt to father oneself, to author a self that death cannot cancel. Sacred values are the denominations of that currency. They look universal from inside one house and turn strange the moment you carry them next door.
Fox spends in a single coin. The coin is rescue. It comes down to her through three generations and she did not mint it. Her grandfather lived because a foster family in England took him in while the Nazis worked. In the winter of 1979 her parents, Sam and Bev, brought two Vietnamese teenagers off a boat and out of an Indonesian camp and into their living room in Chicago, and the brother and sister are still near Chicago now. Fox takes newborns. She has written that the pull toward fostering runs stronger in her than the pull toward any other commandment, and a man who tells you where his strongest pull lives has told you where he keeps his soul.
Two fears stand behind the coin. The first is erasure, the boat and the camp and the family that did not get out, the child who floats past while the bank stays empty. Fox has written that she wishes her community stood at the water’s edge and plucked out some of the children floating by. The second fear is the closed circle, the home that pulls the door shut once it has climbed into the middle class. These two run together in her account. The Jewish agencies that placed Jewish orphans were built in an age of Jewish death and Jewish poverty. The Jews rose. The Jewish children left the system. The institutions stayed and now serve other poor families, and the obligation that built them went looking for someone to feel it.
That is her subtraction story, in the sense Charles Taylor (b. 1931) gives the term. Something got taken away to produce the present, and the present mistakes the absence for the natural state of things. What got subtracted from Fox’s world is the Jewish child in need. Prosperity removed him. The removal left a duty with no object, an ark with no Moses, and Fox spends her writing trying to hand the duty back to a community that no longer feels the old pull because the old pull came from terrors it escaped. She is not asking her readers to invent a value. She is asking them to notice they stopped paying one.
So watch the coin change its face. Take the farewell.
In April 2015 Fox learns that Dafna, who arrived at a month old and stayed almost a year, will go back to her mother. The news is good and Fox is heartbroken, both true and neither canceling the other. She and Jesse refuse to let the parting pass without form, so they build one. They model it on a Jewish baby naming. They hand the guests slips that ask for one large wish and one small wish for the child. They gather everyone under a chuppah. They tell the story of how Dafna came and the older story of the grandfather saved in England. The guests call out their wishes. The room sings the child “Shalom Aleichem,” whose last verse sends the angels off in peace, and that is how they send off the girl, in peace, back to the woman who bore her. For Fox the return is the point. Rescue, in her house, ends in surrender by design. She loves a child she is built to give back, and the giving back is not the failure of the love. It is the love completed.
Now stand in the next house and watch the same chuppah.
The permanency caseworker reads rescue as the closed file. His heaven is a child placed forever, a case stamped and shelved, a permanency hearing that ends the churn. He has seen a thousand temporary homes and he files the foster parent under instrument, a warm berth between crises, useful and replaceable. The ritual under the chuppah reads to him as noise around a routine outcome. Good, he thinks, reunification, that is the goal, next case. The thing Fox holds sacred, the year of love that knows its own end, is to him a means with a metric, and the singing is a parent making a feeling out of a procedure.
The birth mother in recovery reads rescue another way, and she is the one whose reading should stop you. For her the hero of the story is herself. She got clean. She kept the appointments and passed the tests and clawed her daughter back from a system that takes Black and poor children faster than it returns them. The rescue is hers, and the rescuer is herself, and Fox is the kind stranger who kept the baby fed and warm in the interval. From that seat the chuppah can sit heavy. The slips and the songs and the family history of saving can look like a stranger writing herself into the center of a child who was never hers, draping a borrowed year in the language of a covenant the mother does not share. Fox returns the daughter and calls it a gift she gives. The mother receives a daughter and calls it a daughter she won.
The evangelical foster-to-adopt family reads rescue as the soul kept forever. Their commandment is to bring the orphan all the way in, to adopt, to baptize, to make the temporary child a permanent child and the saved body a saved soul. To hand a child back to an unfit world is, on their account, to build the ark and then push the child into the flood a second time. The telos is permanence, and permanence carries an eternal warranty. Fox builds an ark on purpose to set it back on the river. To them her sacred act looks like a wound she chooses, a love that quits at the threshold of the only rescue that lasts.
The effective altruist reads rescue as arithmetic. One American foster infant sits inside a system that, broken as it runs, will feed and place her. The counterfactual is small. The same year of a clever woman’s attention, costed and redirected, might pull more children from death by a wide margin somewhere cheaper, and so the chuppah is sentiment, the priciest help bought for the fewest helped. His heaven is the falling integral of the world’s suffering, and a man who keeps that ledger cannot enter Fox’s house without flinching at the inefficiency of her love. He would not say the love is wrong. He would say it does not scale, and to him that is the only question worth asking of a rescue.
The lineage elder cannot read the chuppah as rescue at all. His coin is the unbroken name, the ancestors fed, the grave tended by descendants who carry his blood. A stranger’s infant carries another man’s line and another man’s dead. To pour a year of the family’s substance into a child who will not bow at your tablet, and then to give her away, spends the house on nothing. He watches the singing and sees a generous error. Rescue, for him, means the line continues. Fox lets the line walk out the door in a borrowed sling and sings it goodbye.
There are more houses. The Catholic Worker in the manner of Dorothy Day (1897-1980) stands nearest to Fox and still diverges, reading the foster child as the face of Christ in the least of these, the work of mercy aimed at the poor as poor rather than the kin as kin, indifferent to whether the saved child is Jewish or carries on any name. The antinatalist reads the whole household as the problem and rescue as the refusal to add another sufferer to the wheel, and Fox’s fierce holding strikes him as the denial Becker named, a woman warming herself at a fire she calls a child. Each house keeps the word rescue on its lintel. Each means by it an act the others would call failure, theft, waste, or denial.
Three bearings, then, for anyone who wants to keep the map.
The first is that Fox’s strangeness is structural, not temperamental. She did not decide to love children she returns because she enjoys grief. She inherited a hero system whose only escape from erasure is the open door, and the open door, by law and by design, swings both ways. Reunification is the system’s heaven, so her causa sui has to locate its triumph in the letting go. A man who needs permanence to feel he mattered cannot run this project for an hour.
The second is that the chuppah does the work the value cannot do alone. The slips and the songs and the recited family history are not decoration on the love. They are the machinery that converts a private wound into a transmissible duty, that lets a room of guests carry off a piece of the charge and lets Fox tell her community, in a form it already trusts, that the door it shut should open. Take away the ritual and you have a sad woman handing back a baby. Keep it and you have a liturgy of rescue addressed to a people that forgot it was poor.
The third is the one to watch in her readers. Fox writes for a community that escaped the terrors that built its obligation, and she is asking it to feel a pull it lost the reason to feel. The evangelical, the elder, the altruist, the recovering mother each have a live reason for their version of rescue. Fox’s reason died of prosperity, which is the best thing that ever happened to her people and the quiet death of the duty she loves most. That is the front to watch. Not whether her readers admire the chuppah. Whether any of them, having no boat behind them and no camp, walk down to the water and pluck a child out anyway.
December 3, 2008
She’s an elegant writer. Check out her her blog and her work on Jewcy.com and MyJewishLearning.com.
We talk over the phone for an hour today..
From Chicago, Tamar, 24, lives in New York. She recently got her MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt.
Luke: "Tamar, when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Tamar: "I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was seven. I recently found a whole bunch of stories I wrote at that point. The only other thing I really wanted to be was a farmer."
"The practicalities of being a farmer are not attractive to me but the ideology of being a farmer is really nice… I don’t like living far away from other people."
Luke: "Could you tell me the story of you and Judaism?"
Tamar: "I grew up in a family that was not a member of an offical synagogue. My parents started a minyan when they were just married. It is unaffiliated and doesn’t have a rabbi and is lay-led. It’s a fantastic tight-knit community. We kept Shabbat and kashrut in the house. My sisters and I went to Jewish day school. [Tamar is the middle child.] I went to a Modern Orthodox high school. I was pretty unhappy. It was Modern Orthodox getting less modern and more orthodox. A lot of what I was hearing in classes was, ‘If you don’t do this, then you’re not a good Jew.’ Sometimes it was framed in a not-a-good-person kind of way. My family didn’t do a lot of the things they thought we should do. It was a complicated and upsetting experience. I should’ve talked to my parents about why they made the choices they made.
"I went to the University of Iowa where myself and the Chabad couple were the only shomer shabbat people. That was strange but also great because I didn’t have people looking over my shoulder and telling me I wasn’t being frum enough. As a result, I became much more religious than I would of if I had gone to a school with a huge Jewish community.
"I studied abroad. I had an excellent experience in Oxford, which has a small but fantastic Jewish community. When I graduated, I had half a year teaching and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and was offered a position at a graduate program at Vanderbilt in Nashville… The Orthodox rabbi in Nashville is married to a friend of mine. When I saw that the two of them were doing OK, I decided to give it a shot. I loved Nashville and had a positive experience with the Jewish community there.
"I spent the summer between my two years at grad school learning at an egalitarian yeshiva in New York City. It was a renaissance for me in terms of how fun it can be to learn, what it can mean to be part of a community that is into the same things you are.
"After grad school, I made my way to New York City where I’m an editor for MyJewishLearning.com."
Luke: "Is it interesting that you made no reference to God while describing your Jewish journey?"
Tamar: "It’s somewhat interesting but not really because my relationship with Judaism has changed a lot but my relationship with God has not changed at all… I believe in God wholeheartedly but I don’t have a super-clear vision of what that means. If I didn’t believe in God, I’d be done with Judaism entirely."
Luke: "What do you love and hate about Orthodox Judaism?"
Tamar: "I don’t want to say that I hate it more than I love it, but I am definitely not Orthodox. For me, the benefits don’t outweigh the costs. I don’t want to say that I hate it. The things that I hate about it are how often it is close-minded, the narrow understanding of what it means to be Jewish, always trying to out-frum each other… I love the incredible warmth, how well they take care of each other in times of need, and the learning of Torah, which unfortunately is not as big a deal in non-Orthodox communities…"
Luke: "When will we see a book from you?"
Tamar: "I don’t know. I’m working on a novel. It’s about a family who moves to Ireland. It focuses on the mother figure. In the midst of writing it, my mother got ill and died. I’m not overjoyed about writing a novel about a mother right now."
Luke: "There’s a Tamar Fox who wrote a book on Holocaust survivors. That’s not you."
Tamar: "That’s not me, though a lot of times on first dates people are like, ‘I see you’ve written a book on the Holocaust.’ I’m like, no, but thank you for Googling me."
Luke: "How important is it to you to count in a minyan?"
Tamar: "Pretty important… It feels really debasing and upsetting [to not count]."
"I’m upset that a lot of my religion bores me now because it has been reduced to being pro-Israel and against intermarriage."
Tamar says she’d prefer to live in Chicago or England. It doesn’t affect her happiness whether she lives among Jews or non-Jews.
Luke: "How do you notice the practice of Judaism affecting people?"
Tamar: "I went to a minyan on Sunday. It was a lot of young Modern Orthodox guys who were all in jeans and sweatshirts. I ran into them for Ma’ariv. It occurred to me that these guys are in the same room twice a day. If you spend that much time with people, that’s a big deal and is going to affect your life in many ways. Not every Jew I know is socially adept, but it’s going to make you comfortable in certain situations. You’ll get to know communities pretty well pretty quickly, especially if you move to a new place. The way people interact with text if they’ve done serious Torah learning is different."
"I find that people who are seriously involved with a Jewish community are usually pretty socially graceful. That gets you pretty far in life. I sometimes find myself wondering when I’m watching movies and stuff where there’s a real bad character, I think that I don’t know anyone who fits that bill. I can’t think of ever having met any of them. I do think that most people who are really invested in a religious community are likely to be [decent]. Most of the people I know who are religious are pretty self-critical. They’re thinking about what they do and are not just going through the motions."
I ask Tamar about men.
Tamar: "I am one of those people who’s monogamous because the thought of having to deal with more than one man at a time is horrifying. I really like my boyfriend but I don’t think I could deal with anyone on the side."
Luke: "Do you think men and women can be friends without one side wanting more?"
Tamar: "I wish that I did but I don’t think so. I don’t have any guy friends that I’ve never felt like some tinge of something with, which isn’t to say that I hook up with my friends. I think there’s always a little bit of sexual chemistry. I don’t think that’s a problem."
Tamar wishes she could go out on Friday night once. "I have no idea what happens in the real world on Saturdays. I’m always in shul or with friends or napping."
