HaMirpeset Shelanu -13: Jacob Cytryn, Program Director

Judaism offers the world great wisdom on many subjects. It has always failed me, however, on friendship. Though I have searched and searched, and probably should search some more, the Tanach, Talmud, and the massive corpus of religious texts including midrash (late antique exegetical writing), kabbalah (medieval mystical texts), parshanut (medieval commentaries on the Tanach), and chasidut (modern mystical texts) have come up empty for me when it comes to friendship. As someone who figuratively carries Jewish texts around at all times, relying on them for mundane puns and holy advice, momentary glimpses of meaning and eternal truths, this is a pretty big problem. It is a problem compounded by the sad irony that the place where I remember falling in love with those texts, Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, means so much to me because of the friends I have made there, and yet those texts have so little to say about these relationships which mean so much to me.

This all came into sharp focus during an emotional few days in Houston last week as I celebrated the wedding of my best friend and long-time collaborator at Ramah, Jonathan Ross (JAR) to his stunning, bright, driven, and passionate wife, Jen Pehr. JAR and I have known each other for eighteen years; we met in Tzrif Bet (Cabin 2) during the first day of the first summer of the Halutzim program, on June 24, 1992. Our friendship began in earnest on Ramah Seminar six years later and this upcoming summer will be the twelfth we have had the pleasure of spending on staff together. Our friendship, like so many other camp friendships, has always been difficult to describe to the outside world. It was formed in an intense crucible of shared experiences in the Northwoods, a place where, as we used to say when I was a camper (and maybe they still do), the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like days. Time moves faster in camp, and, somehow, it moves slower too, all at once. Things that take weeks to develop at home happen in a few hours at camp, even without the instant communication of iPhones, texting, and instant messaging. The stakes are greater at camp; everything is a big deal. Perhaps most importantly, we are bounded at camp by both space and time, acutely aware of the metaphorical bubble we live in for eight short weeks in Northern Wisconsin.

In the history of the world, I think the notion of friendship we know today is remarkably recent. The choices we are afforded in so many aspects of our lives, from what we want to do professionally to how we want to spend the money with which we are blessed, allow us to choose people on shared journeys and enable us to have the opportunities to develop deep and abiding friendships. In this way, friends can become, if we are lucky, a type of voluntary extended family, people we come to love and respect as siblings, parents, or children. Though the relationships never quite rise to the level of those defined by the homes we live in, they carry profound meaning within them, meaning that nurtures and supports us in the good times and bad. JAR and I have been through what we now know were petty moments of minor sadness and fleeting joy but we once thought represented so much more, as well as moments we will always recall as bringing us to the edge of our human limit to experience pain and love for each other.

JAR and Jen asked me to speak at the rehearsal dinner last Saturday night, one of many friends and family members so honored. In reflecting on the greatest friendship of my life at this moment of blissful transition for JAR and Jen, I spoke about how, looking back, the collected memories we have together - and we have many, mostly related to or happening at camp - are the memories that transformed a gangly kid from Memphis I met when I was ten years old into even more than a best friend, a brother. Neither JAR nor I had brothers growing up, and we both like to think we have found some sense of that experience in our relationship. I also reflected back to JAR one of the profound lessons of the one-man show that was his senior project at the Tisch School of the Arts and that so many members of the Ramah community have seen. At the end of Walking in Memphis: The Life of a Southern Jew, JAR meditates on the power of our minds to shape our memories and on the power of memories to shape our lives. If I have learned anything about Judaism over the years, it is that this interplay between the interpretive capacity of the human mind, shared communal stories, and the lives of any given generation is at the core of this way of life that serves for us as a religion, culture, nationality, and so much more.

Following JAR's lead, I have chosen to begin teaching a new interpretation that takes a piece of text that attempts to deny the connection between two human beings, even those who share a mother and father, and transforms it into a powerful statement about friendship, a statement I believe lies at the core of so many experiences around Ramah. In the early chapters of B'reishit (Genesis), God asks Cain where his brother Abel is, and Cain responds, brusquely: Hashomer achi anochi? Am I my brother's keeper? The intonation and context tell us that Cain is abdicating responsibility not only for the heinous act he has committed but also for any attachment to another human being, a choice echoed by his punishment to wander the earth without a home all the days of his life. How different the trajectory of the Torah's depictions of family units and siblings might have been; indeed, how different the trajectory of all of human history could be, had Cain answered the way each moral human wishes he had.

Cain's words, though with different emphasis and punctuation, were running through my mind as I walked down the aisle at JAR's wedding, acutely aware of the honor to bear witness at the union of my best friend with his beloved. They are the words I was whispering as we danced together later that night, reliving sixteen Zimriyot (song festivals), song sessions in the Chadar Ochel (dining hall), and so much more. But in the wake of his wedding, I knew that all we had experienced together in the artificial reality of Ramah had truly been practice for when it really mattered, as I had the pleasure of fulfilling the magnificent mitzvah (commandment) of m'sameach chatan and kallah (bringing joy to a bride and groom). In response to Cain's sarcasm, I affirm the value of human connection, the profound friendships I have made at Ramah and elsewhere, and the power of human beings to transcend time and space: JAR, Hashomer achi anochi. I am, proudly, my brother's keeper.