Ethan Schwartz Blog - What is Camp Ramah?: Part 1

Every year during the height of my adolescence, the transition from the brisk breezes of spring to the exhilarating air of summer triggered my subconscious preparation for returning to Camp Ramah. Yet even as I continued to enjoy myself in my day-to-day routine, my friends would begin to notice the slight distraction in my eyes and the occasional distance to my voice. With bewilderment, they sensed a quiet longing.
      "Are you really going back to Ramah again?" they inevitably asked. "Why?"

I was always a bit saddened by their skepticism. Their voices betrayed an irritation by my commitment to something hidden-to something concealed even deeper in me than in Wisconsin's Northwoods. They couldn't fathom what went on there. A summer camp that was proud of being wholly Jewish-and which conferred that same pride unto its campers-seemed irrevocably strange.

More than anything, I wanted to show them that Ramah was normal-a normal place with normal kids. How did they possibly imagine my camp friends? Why would they think they were less normal than I? It seemed contradictory that they could hold me as a friend while harboring such doubt about a place and people that had played an unparalleled part in the development of who I was. But that was just it: they had no way of knowing Ramah's role in making the friend standing before them. They had no conception of Ramah as a place for the development and growth of the individual. They had no idea that normal kids with whom they would certainly get along came to Ramah to have fun and discover the best person they could be.

Camp Ramah begins in the individual-in the sense of self it cultivates in every camper. In our modern world, we live very much outside ourselves. It would be neither melodramatic nor cynical to observe that we typically derive the sentiment of our existence from external opinion, faceless judges, and indiscriminant standards. We tie our life's meaning to peers who don't truly know us; we live in our work and in our cell phones, always turning up the volume in a desperate effort to drown out our own thought.

Ramah negates all of this. It focuses campers inward, stripping them of externalities that distract from the self. Every aspect of Ramah is a means of creating wholeness and eliminating fragmentation. It is a sanctuary for the development of the self.

The growth of the individual and the emergence of the self begin with Ramah's secluded location in Conover, Wisconsin. For a camper population that hails largely from urban areas, Ramah feels like it is on the shores of nowhere; it could not possibly be farther away from the world they know. In the sheer process of physically moving, there is an existential movement: a fresh, isolated environment helps to melt away those things that drag the camper outside of herself. Whoever she is at home or at school-however she is defined by her classmates or her grades or her older siblings-is left behind as a shadow the second the bus turns onto Buckatabon Road. In the movement to a new place, the camper feels the possibility of a new self. To the child worn from trying to fit herself into the gridlocked puzzle of society, the openness of the grass and the trees and the air grants exhilarating freedom. The space calls forth creation.

This sense of seclusion, however, would not be enough if there were no sense of stability in that seclusion. Camp Ramah brings campers to an open space and then presents them with an equally open amount of time: in the eight-week program is an implicit commitment to facilitating real growth. Camp may be just for the summer, but its length gives it a sense of permanence without which no place-no matter how remote-could induce a surrender of externalities and an investment of the self. In the excitement of coming to camp is the thrill of possibility that comes only with a significant allotment of time. Campers lay down their roots and allow themselves to grow; they relax, forgetting about doing and simply focusing on being. And being who? Themselves.

Camp Ramah is eight weeks bristling with possibility in a refreshing retreat from the world: a change of pace in a change of place. And each day for those eight weeks, this place will be an arena for self-discovery. Reveling in openness, campers think as they do not think during the school year: rather than thinking aggressively in pursuit of an end, they let thought be the end in itself. No longer stuck in the world that surrounds them, they become aware of it and take some of it into themselves in everything they do. Thinking and simply being become one continuous process.