Ethan Schwartz Blog - What is Camp Ramah?: Part 8

A beautiful and spirited Kabbalat Shabbat service finally marks the official beginning of the week's holiest day. When the service concludes, the community rises from its seats to exchange hugs and wishes for an enjoyable, restful Shabbat. Smiles abound. Everyone is overjoyed to be together and looking forward to a delicious Shabbat dinner, an evening of festive singing and dancing, and a day of unparalleled openness-a day in which the relaxed pace of camp will slow even further, and every single moment is time spent with friends.

Shabbat demonstrates Ramah's markedly Jewish character-how being Jewish continues to define and shape campers' experience even outside of a traditionally religious context. The definitive image of a Ramah Shabbat might indeed be the service by the lake, but this moment contains only a fraction of the day's meaning for the Ramah community. Shabbat is experienced in the frenzied cleaning that precedes it, in the personal purification and preparation, in Shabbat-o-grams, in the awe of feeling the maturity of oneself and one's friends, and in the togetherness of family. All of these small, seemingly secular moments are experienced with a focus that hides the Jewish whole of which they are all parts. The camper in each does not dwell on his Jewish identity, which is precisely why it is strengthened.

But for all its centrality and slow pace, Shabbat always feels like a fleeting privilege. Suddenly, the darkness of night begins to settle, and friends pause from their laughter to watch the sun creep finally beneath the horizon of the brilliantly colored evening sky. A cool breeze rustles the leaves and the people; alertness blows in. Waves roll across the surface of the lake and through the tone of the Ramah community as each aidah convenes for the Havdalah service, by which Shabbat is officially brought to a close. It is Ramah's most powerful moment; campers feel invigorated and enraptured by its intimacy as they stand together, arms slung over one another in a great circle of their friends. They cling to each other in a darkness that is penetrated only by the flicker of a braided candle at the circle's center, in the hands of the service's leader. A slow, sweeping tune ensues as the aidah sings the four blessings, and just a minute or two after the candle was first lit, this briefest of services has reached its conclusion. In an unmatched moment of spirit, the meaning of twenty-four hours of holiness and love sweeps through everyone; with the loudest voices they will muster all summer, the entire aidah cries out the final words of the final blessing: "Hamavdil bein kodesh l'chol: who separates the holy from the ordinary." Shabbat is over.
But being Jewish is not.

Freshly transitioned from the domain of holiness, campers fall back into a daily rhythm that feels no less special than Shabbat. The ritual sanctity may pass with Havdalah, but the mode to which camp returns is just as emergently Jewish. Camp Ramah surrounds American-Jewish teenagers with each other in an environment where their every movement, every breath, and every thought is a Jewish one by virtue of their being Jews. They are freed from the necessity to shield a part of themselves-their Jewish identity-from a world that constantly draws it into question. They are granted wholeness; they can be who they are.

What is Camp Ramah? It is the real-world manifestation of a wholly Jewish consciousness. For up to seven summers, campers turn themselves free in this environment where nothing is untouched by Jewishness, developing their Jewish identity in everything they learn about themselves. And when it comes time to leave in Nivonim-when their time as campers is over and they can no longer count on waiting for that first smell of summer to signal their return-campers don't simply grab their happy memories and run. Holding each other as they weep during those final hours, they together find the strength to stare the pain boldly in the face and absorb into themselves all that Ramah consummates-forever. They learn to live as they did at camp, making no Havdalah between the person and the Jew within themselves.

Camp Ramah begins in the individual-in the sense of self it cultivates in every camper-and it ends in the individual-in the definitively Jewish sense of self that campers take away from it and carry for the rest of their lives. We feel Ramah's meaning in its community, but that meaning is ultimately realized in the individuals who leave Ramah ready to shape community. In the faces of my camp friends, I see both the kids with whom I've grown up-with whom I stayed up all night, laughed at immature jokes, lost dozens of baseballs, and always had fun-and the leaders of an ever-nearing future who, by their identity and values, will shape the Jewry of our generation. For me, for them, and for the countless individuals who consider it a home, Camp Ramah is a living part of every day. It is a blessing that reverberates for a lifetime.