HaMirpeset Shelanu 19: Jacob Cytryn, Program Director

On Saturday night, Jewish communities around the world will dress up for Purim. By wearing costumes, in the spirit of "v'nahafoch hu" - everything is flipped, we will adopt new identities, if only for an evening. We will then fulfill the commandment of listening to the story that is found in Megilat Esther, a soap opera in ten chapters about lavish royal feasts, palace intrigue, and the challenge of accepting who we are. Mordechai, the hero of the story who is the first character in history to be described as "a Jew," knows who he is. Esther, an eventual heroine, struggles with the life she has earned as the chosen queen of an empire stretching from India to Ethiopia and the heritage to which she was born. Sound familiar? The story of Purim reminds me of own life story as an American Jew (or, if you prefer, a Jewish American) and the stories of many of my friends and family members. It is also a story which recalls echoes of conversations I had these last few weeks with our diverse staff.

Since the last time I wrote, I have visited with candidates for our staff in New York City at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in the Hillel buildings at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Indiana University (Bloomington), the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Washington University (St. Louis), and the University of Wisconsin (Madison). I have spoken to many more staff over the phone, as I narrowly escaped one massive snowstorm (in New York City two weeks ago) and heard stories of even larger ones (that impacted our veteran staff at the University of Maryland). I spoke, via the magic of Skype, to a staff member who was in Delhi, India, as part of a gap year program exploring social justice issues in the developing world, and e-mailed with one of our Roshei Eidah as she traveled from Laos to Vietnam on a semester-long trip, for credit, through Southeast Asia. I listened to one of our cabin counselors describe spending his winter break in Be'er Sheva in an Ulpan at Ben-Gurion University to improve his Hebrew before returning to Oberlin College in rural Ohio. I heard two different Junior Counselor candidates in St. Louis anticipate their starring roles in two performances of Sweeney Todd at two different public high schools, opening a week apart. Mostly, I saw American Jewish identity in play, and the role that Camp Ramah in Wisconsin plays, uniquely arming our alumni for their future.

Since the first Jewish students were admitted to the academies of higher learning in Europe and the United States, the Jewish community as a whole has been obsessed with the consequences of access on its young adults. The preeminent Jewish sociologist of the last fifty years, Marshall Sklare (z"l), wrote in 1976 of his fears for the fate of Judaism on college campus and, seemingly just to prove a point, cited the expression of similar fears from as far back as 1932. What I see today, however, is a different landscape, one where the challenges of developing identities on campus mostly have positive connotations, especially for the alumni of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin.

In the Hillels throughout the Midwest, each building has a different flavor, enhancing or contrasting with the majority culture on its campus. Beautiful new buildings are filled with undergraduates studying in a seemingly endless number of rooms. At one Hillel, the building seems to grow louder with every passing moment as I make my way towards the exit around eight o'clock; on another, things grow silent hours before. Our staff members are involved in local synagogues as teachers and youth advisers, adding immeasurably to the Jewish communities in Ann Arbor, St. Louis, Madison, and elsewhere. Different minyanim (prayer services) and sites for Shabbat meals are more- or less-popular in different places, as some staff members prefer the diversity of the Hillel programming and others see the disparate options as a form of moral relativism. Each evening on a different campus, I try to meet up with our alumni who are no longer returning to camp to say hi, catch up, and hear about their post-college plans. Memories of Ramah, enduring friendships, and diverse but lasting imprints of the Ramah experience are scattered liberally through our conversations.

Sociologist Steven Cohen has written about his sense that the American Jewish community has fractured into "A Tale of Two Jewries." For one sector of the community, apathy and disengagement are the norm. For the other, populated by the vast majority of Ramah alumni and all of our staff, Jewish life in America is more generative, more innovative, more exciting than at possibly any other point in the entirety of Jewish history. This is the tapestry I have seen charting the tremendous number of engaged Jewish young adults who would like to join us on staff this summer: splendid and diverse.

It is not necessarily easy to live as a Jew today in America. Nor was it easy for Mordechai and Esther living long ago in a far away land. The opportunities which we benefit from, those, indeed, which we help to create, allow us to dream in ways that nearly every generation of our ancestors could not. For us, if we can reflect on our luck and appreciate it, the tapestry of our Jewish lives is truly splendid and diverse. For Esther, I imagine, granted access to Achashverosh's palace hiding her identity, the tapestries hanging on the wall compelled her to hide her identity further. It took a crisis for Esther to realize the true person inside her. May we proclaim our inheritance and birthright - our communal tapestry - as an integral part of who we really are.