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Rabbi Dan Ornstein: Summer Camp Retrospective

When my children were younger, one of their most precious refuges from me and my wife was the Jewish summer camp that they attended.  It is one of several summer programs in our religious denomination that, for over half a century, have built lasting friendships, produced marriages, perpetuated the values of Judaism, and left kids with cherished memories well after they have grown up. 

When my wife and I would drop our kids off at camp and pick them up a month or two later in the summer, I was always mystified by its power to draw them away from the comforts of home and into the secret society of their circle of friends and activities.  I attended one of these camping programs only once, the summer that I was thirteen. My parents made me go for a full eight weeks, and as a scared, insecure, un-athletic homebody, I wanted nothing more than to escape that prison and hitchhike back to our house in Queens.  Though I recognize now how they were wisely helping me to cut the cord and become independent, at the time I was miserable.  That is why, even though we gladly dealt with all the fuss of getting our kids to camp summer after summer, for the longest time, I had a hard time understanding what they got from the whole experience.

That all changed several years ago, when two days after we picked them up, I drove back out to camp to spend some time teaching at a youth group conference .  Other than the voices of excited teenagers socializing and playing softball in the distance, the usually noisy, energetic campgrounds were deserted and quiet.  The summer season was really over, but in the gentle movement of the wind as it passed through the tall pines trees, I imagined echoes of children, mine and others, singing, laughing and pledging their loyalties as they greeted one another then bade each other tearful goodbyes all too quickly.  Almost immediately upon arriving I was haunted by images of my daughters running back and forth from one activity to the other with their bunkmates, their sweet smiles and complex, spunky personalities filling camp with joy and warmth.  I kept thinking about my son, then a teenager and not yet on the camping staff, walking around with his buddies, one year older, just dying to rule the place and to seek out the new, awesome adventures of adolescence.  Walking from my car to the camp’s library I stopped and wept as these images filled me with memory and meanings.  For me, camp had been a necessary evil, without which my learning to leave home would have been so much more difficult.  For my kids, camp was a blessing that taught them to feel at home wherever they are, whenever they are in the company of friends, community and tradition.  Yet each year of camp also meant that they were getting older, slowly taking their leave of us as each summer passed. They created memories and friendships to which my wife and I will mostly never be privy, as the three of them move into adulthood and we all get older.

I cannot stop myself from aging, but this summer I am taking a second shot at childhood, forty years after that one disastrous camping season.  After so many summers of my driving my kids to camp, my youngest child has aged out of the program and will spend her summer doing other things.  My older children have moved onto other summer work. None of my offspring will be at camp in 2015.  But I will be.  As a guest teacher for one week, I am looking forward to a full schedule of teaching, programming, and Jewish community, 24/7.  Most of all, I am looking forward, as the adult I am, to kicking the pine cones dropped from the trees with the wildest joy, like the teen I never was.

Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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