Ethan Schwartz Blog - What is Camp Ramah?: Part 7

Judaism's centrality to the Ramah experience is felt most powerfully in the weekly welcoming of Shabbat. Following Friday's lunch, camp undergoes an abrupt change of schedule as campers rush back to their cabins to clean with a thoroughness that the daily allotted clean-up time could never motivate. The floor gets swept, shelves organized, stray clothes picked up-all leading to a hilariously frantic rush to the showers as Shabbat draws ever nearer. Having cleansed themselves of a day spent outdoors, campers change into their nicest camp clothes; even those who are hardly conscious of what they throw on their bodies each morning spend that last hour before Shabbat considering all of their wardrobe, trying to look their best. The glee and bustle of the week are transformed into maturity and self-awareness; campers feel driven to purify themselves in preparation for the purity that is traditionally associated with Shabbat.

With less than an hour now until Shabbat begins, campers who have finished their personal preparation turn their thoughts to their friends. Walk across any cabin's porch and you will undoubtedly find campers in the process of writing "Shabbat-o-grams"-small personal notes, the exchange of which is a much-anticipated highlight of the Friday-night meal. Why write to people who are right there for you to hug? Because these little notes are strangely intimate. Shabbat-o-grams actually derive their meaning from their pointlessness-from the fact that the person to whom you are writing will read it just a few feet away from you. The words take on the heat of proximity; in every single one is a tacit but scintillating observation of the closeness of Ramah.

The sun is lowering, the shadows getting longer. Campers run to the dining hall, where they leave their Shabbat-o-grams as surprises on their friends' tables. This completes the preparation. With deep breaths of excitement, they walk to their aidah's designated pre-Shabbat meeting place. Here, the community begins to take shape as the aidah gathers together. Campers greet their friends with hugs and wishes for a good Shabbos; digital and disposal cameras flash away, everyone posing for group pictures while they all look their finest. With the aidah having fully congregated, we begin to see additional refractions of the significance of Ramah's coeducation. Being together with the opposite sex takes on added meaning in this refined state-particularly for the older aidot, who have mostly overcome the gender line. When campers of one gender see their friends of the other dressed up and polished, a healthy amount of tension is restored; young men and women, though friends, are reminded of their differences. It is a rare moment of self-consciousness, but an invigorating rather than debilitating one: reveling in the sudden adultness of their opposite-gendered friends, campers feel a sweeping desire to make known to them the changes that they have felt in themselves in their preparation for Shabbat. Males feel male and females, female-resulting in everyone's awareness of their own maturity and only positive effects on their relation to one another.

This process of preparation-revitalizing, not exhausting-culminates in the Kabbalat Shabbat service, for which the entire camp gathers on the lakefront. Here we witness this community's most moving level of organization: not into aidot or cabins or individuals, but into families. Everything is reshuffled as families come together on the lakefront; campers fan out from the groups of people with which they spent their week; counselors sit with campers, older kids with younger kids. Campers discover the myriad connections between their families and bring them together; friends realize that their siblings are also friends, and everyone achieves a new connection in the revelation. Families that sit together at synagogue maintain the tradition even in the absence of their parents, guarding over entire rows of benches in order to ensure that they have enough room. Those without family at camp are invited to join those of their friends; people are excited by the opportunity to welcome, and everyone feels included in something.

Camp Ramah is a community of families. Parents would be moved to tears if they could unobtrusively watch their children set their personal lives aside to sit together, Shabbat after Shabbat, with no motivation other than their desire to be with each other on this special day. Campers leave their families physically when they come to Ramah for the summer, but the parents that accept this parting make an unquantifiable investment in their home. Ramah campers learn what it is to be surrounded by love.