This past week Foundation for Jewish Camp ran an amazing conference in Atlanta. This year we hoped to have 600 camp people at Leaders Assembly. We had 900. Beyond the programming and all the coordination, it was just so good being with old friends and new ones in person. My colleague Briana Holtzman who brilliantly put the event together asked me in advance what blessing we should say on this occasion.
We learn in the Gemara in Berakhot, ” Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: One who sees his friend after thirty days have passed since they last saw each other recites: שהחיינו -Blessed…Who has given us life, sustained us and brought us to this moment. And one who sees his friend after twelve months recites: מחיה מתים Blessed…Who revives the dead. “(Berakhot 58b)
It had been some time. It was really great seeing all of these people in real life. It had been more than 30 days and more than 12 months. For many people there I had not seen them in real life for three years. But would one really think seeing each other constitutes revival of the dead?
The Gemara in Berakhot continues saying that Rav learns this from the notion we consider something that we lost 12 months ago,” like a lost vessel” we consider it abandoned (Psalms 31:13). (Berakhot 58b)
Martin Buber wrote, “Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again” In our lives we have Human “I-Thou” relationships and Transactional “I-It” relationships. Over the last few years we have allowed many of our “I-Thou” relationships to lapse into “I-It” relationships. Reconnecting with your lost friend creates the occasion to transform an I-It into an I- Thou relationship. Emerging from Covid we need to intentionally reconnect with people. Camp-friends are best-friends because at camp we can be totally present and most aligned to our I-Thou relationships. We all went to Atlanta to come together to escape Zoom and get revived. Moving forward we need to keep connecting. The last few years has made me realize that being together in real life is critical. Our presence is a blessing.
Note to Camp Director: I offer you this message which you might adopt/adapt/share with you staff this Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom. Welcome back to camp. I pause at this moment of our coming together in this place we love with the people we love at a time we love to give space to what some of us might be feeling at this moment.
For so many of us, camp is special because when we come here we get to explore our best selves. Here we try on new elements of who each of us might be or are becoming. Camp is not just a location, time of the year, or even a group of people. Camp is an educational philosophy. Camp is a way of thinking about how we might self actualize and, in the process, help our campers do the same. Camp is a home away from home. Camp is a bubble away from all of that stuff out there. For many of us camp is the Shabbat of our year.
I pause at this moment to recognize that many of us feel at risk. We find ourselves amidst the storm of COVID, political upheaval in Israel, rising racism and anti-Semitism, gun violence, war in Ukraine, and shifting of who makes laws about our bodies at home. Today, June 24th, the US Supreme Court overruled the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case. To many of us this ruling seems like a trespass of people’s personal and religious rights to have agency over their own bodies. This may feel scary. While this may or might not directly impact you or people you love, this ruling represents a challenge to our sacred Jewish obligation to prioritize the life and health of the pregnant person. What could our camp’s role be in supporting our community members who may feel existentially threatened? What role does our community play in helping people regain personal agency and their capacity to self-actualize?
I find some comfort in the words from the chorus to Yom Shabbaton – The Sabbath Day, a song traditionally sung on Shabbat. Written by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (1075–1141), this poem describes the complete rest and peace of Shabbat. As we sing:
Yonah matz’ah vo manoach v’sham yanuchu y’giei choach.
The dove does find her rest, and there rest those whose strength is spent.
The dove that rested on the Shabbat day is instantly identifiable as Noah’s dove. Sent from the ark to check if the flood had receded, the tired dove found rest on the dry land (Genesis 8:12). Hidden amidst the chaos of a world that is destructive and painful, Shabbat is a small island poking out from the vast and threatening sea. While the world stands shattered and torn, this small perch for the dove is the first glimmer of hope for all of us.
But it is hard to have hope, when we are feeling grief and loss. One quote that speaks to this feeling comes from Martin Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. He writes:
Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
Before we run ahead to meet the demands of the day — and we will — let’s reflect on this praise for what we may miss. We might miss ideas and ideals of our country’s “more perfect union”. We might be missing the feeling of autonomy and agency. We also might be missing the feeling we have of self-actualization. For many of us this is something that we discovered here at camp. In this moment of grief I want to take a moment to praise, honor, and love our camp community as a home.
In seeing how many people feel unsafe right now, I find hope right here right now with you. In our coming together to make Shabbat at our camp we can find respite from the storm out there. Together we need to make camp for ourselves, each other, and our campers. From that perch, our community will start to rebuild our broken world. In this way, Shabbat will provide us Shalom– peace. Welcome back home. Shabbat Shalom.
Note to Camp Director: Thank you for everything that you do for our community. If we can be helpful in anyway do not hesitate to be in touch avi@jewishcamp.org Also please share any resources that you might have so we can share it with the field. We are curating content for camps here.
If you or your staff need immediate mental health supports beyond your community’s capacity, for any reason, here are some resources to share:
Text “HOME” to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line
Text “START” to 678-678 for The Trevor Project LGBTQ support center
Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) for free, confidential 24/7 support
From the start of Elul through Shemini Atzeret, we recite Psalm 27.There we read, “One thing I ask of the Lord, only that I seek: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, to frequent God’s Temple” ( Psalm 27:4). On a simple level, when meditating on this we are beseeching God to allow us to return and stay in the Temple. Do any of us pretend to understand what it was like to be in the Temple? What are we really asking for?
Maybe we are seeking the feeling of home.
My name is Avi Orlow. Over 20 years ago, I was honored to start as a rabbinical student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) while its beit midrash, or study hall, was still nascent. There, I felt that sense of home described in Psalm 27. I came to YCT with a deep love for the Jewish people, and thanks to my education there, I left it years later with a profound appreciation for what Judaism has to offer humanity. I look back fondly at how after every class we would discuss how we might transmit the experience of YCT’s spiritual environment to the outside world.
Many of us yearn to create a sense of home in multiple areas of our lives. For me, I have attempted to replicate that feeling of comfort in both my professional and personal spheres. It is not surprising, then, that my professional growth has run parallel to that of my family. The same spring I was ordained by YCT in 2004, I became a new father. I was fortunate enough to have our son’s bris, and then his pidyon haben, at YCT. Soon after these events and my graduation, our growing family packed up our books, the BabyBjörn, and our life in New York as we prepared to take on the bigger world.
Along the way, my career has taken me all over the country. First, I spent four years as a Hillel rabbi at Washington University in St. Louis where we opened our home to students. While I loved working on campus, I moved on when given the chance to impact how thousands of young people every summer understand Jewish camp to be their home away from home. I have spent the last 13 years at Foundation for Jewish Camp where I have traveled the country learning from and with Jewish camps all over North America about how to spread joyous Judaism. During that time, my wife and I have been blessed with three more amazing children.
While I have helped build the home that is my family, I have never forgotten the home I knew at YCT. My connection to YCT has waxed and waned over time, but I have always stayed curious as to the successes and challenges of my fellow alumni in our efforts to bring the goodness of the YCT beit midrash to the world. Many of us started at YCT with little more than a vision for what Open Orthodoxy could mean. In some moments, I haven’t always been sure how much impact our small school has had on the world.
Recent events, however, have made me realize that the home we all built together at YCT is being realized in unforeseen ways across generations.
A few weeks ago, I was picking up some of my children at the Camp Stone bus stop in White Plains, New York, where I live. I was expecting to see the usual neighborhood YCT suspects: Rabbis Jack Nahmod (‘05), Seth Braunstein (‘06), and YCT faculty member Chaim Marder. Our children are all friends from the neighborhood and we send them to the same camp.
I was surprised, however, when I spotted Rabbi Seth Winberg (‘11), the executive director of Brandeis Hillel, at the stop. It was his daughter Hadas’s first summer at camp so she had flown there. She had assumed, however, that she would know people on the way home, so she came back on the White Plains bus. Rabbi Seth had come in from Boston to pick her up. As we chatted and caught up, the buses rolled up the street. Rabbi Seth found Hadas, and I found my daughter Emunah. I asked Emunah if she knew Hadas. She responded, “Of course I do, Abba! We just sat next to each other on the nine-hour ride home from camp.” What are the odds, I thought to myself!
When we got home, Emunah did not want to talk with us. We were not surprised. She just wanted to talk with her camp friends. She talked with her friend Amollia for over an hour. Later that night, she was having trouble falling asleep. It turns out that when you work in camping as I do, your kids do not get homesick at camp. Rather, they get campsick at home. To calm her down, I asked her to go through a list of her friends. I stopped her when she told me about Amolia Antine from Maryland. Her father, Rabbi Nissin Antine (‘06), from Potomac, was ordained two years after me at YCT. Truly, what a very small world! It was astonishing to me that, without any direction or interference from me, my child had just naturally gravitated toward the children of other YCT rabbis.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Emunah discovered these people on her own. She is her own person, and she is finding friends who share her interests and her values. It is amazing to see the emergence of the next generation of YCT as our children build their own community.
This time of year, when I get to L’David 27, I reflect on how the world is sometimes a very big and a very scary space. I cannot say that I want to hide from it in the Temple, but there is a part of me that yearns for the comfort and holiness of the beit midrash I knew as a rabbinical student. I know that the YCT rabbis are each doing what we can to share this experience of home from the beit midrash with the larger world. And while I might not be able to gaze upon the beauty of our children’s “house of tomorrow,” I find that even a glimpse is heartwarming, affirming, and worthy of meditation.
Many of us have been waiting for summer to start for a long time. But, when does summer start? Technically June 20th is the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but that does not seem to capture it. We look forward to the summer as time to congregate and mingle outdoors after being isolated all winter. However, we have been shut-in for a lot longer than one season, and thirst for a world of human connection post-pandemic. When will summer begin?
For some it was finishing that last test or final in school. With this, we get to close the books on that wacky zoomed-out academic year of 2020-2021. For others it is packing for camp. Ah- the joy of putting nametags on clothing that might never return home. Personally, for many years of my life, summer began when I saw the little red schoolhouse on the way up to camp. For many campers and staff members, summer does not really start until they get off that bus or get out of their car and find themselves running across a field to embrace that friend they have not seen in 11 (or in this case 22 or 23) months.
Still there is an argument that summer does not really start until that first Shabbat at camp. Everyone shows up as their best and cleanest self. We feel special and unique and lose ourselves in a sea of Shabbat whites. Amidst this calm, we take a moment to take a picture with people we love or pause to smell the fragrance of freshly cut grass. Or maybe it is Shabbat services by a lake or in the woods. And who can deny the inviting waft of chicken soup as we enter the dining hall.
Each of these moments are surely special, worthy of note, and are reasonable markers for the start of summer. And still, not the experience I have been yearning for. For me, this summer will start when the camp comes together after the first Shabbat dinner to sing Shir HaMaalot (Psalm 126) before Birkat HaMazon, grace after the meal. Weaving their voices together in devotion as one sacred community, blurring of time and space. In this, the community will step beyond the two dimensional world of zoom and into a joyful, uplifting celebration of multidimensional connection to one another, to Jewish tradition, to holiness.
Pausing to reflect on the words, we hear a spectacular expression of gratitude in Shir HaMaalot:
Hazorim B’dima Yiktzoru B’rinah- They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Though he goes along weeping, carrying the seed-bag, he shall come back with songs of joy, carrying his sheaves. (Psalm 126)
While our experiences of events have varied greatly, over the last 16 months we have all been dealing with a lot. We have had to contend with the health, safety, and social impact of this global pandemic. We have been confronted with the harsh realities of systemic racism and violence. We have been enmeshed in a painful domestic political process. Recently we had a war between Gaza and Israel. And we have endured a huge spike in antisemitism. What else did they pack with them in their bags?
Over the last 16 months, we have sowed many seeds in tears of sadness, disappointment, frustration, and anxiety. We have pushed off or canceled many social engagements. Can you imagine the joy of a group of young Jewish people safe, secure, and away from their parents’ homes singing together in community? 16 months of tears and 22 or 23 months of yearning transformed into unlimited joy. This moment will mark a transition from sorrow to joy, from scarcity to abundance, and from the long long winter of COVID to the summer of what will be next. We will reap joy from the fertile ground of our understanding of sadness. The things we took for granted now are a source of profound happiness. It will be a moment when we can bask in the simple pleasure of each other’s presence and the community can reflect on the power of being together IRL. It is not that after this moment we will no longer have any medical, natural, political, or social problems, but this will close one difficult season and open us to another. For me this experience of the communal singing of Shir HaMaalot will lift us up because it is that song of joy. This summer we will harvest the joy that we so desperately need.
And just like that, summer will begin.
For a window into the joy that this summer brings, follow your local camps and Foundation for Jewish Camp (@JewishCamp) on social media.
Here at Foundation for Jewish Camp we are excited and gearing up for Leaders Assembly 2018. We are thrilled to welcome close to 800 leaders in the camping community to Baltimore to see how we might move the field forward.
This week we start reading the book of Leviticus. It is fraught with information about sacrifices that can seem meaningless to the modern experience. In our Torah portion we read that when a leader sins, he brings a he-goat as a sacrifice (Leviticus 4:22-26). This is in contrast to a commoner who is charged to bring a she-goat or a lamb in the same circumstance (Leviticus 4:27-35). What is the purpose of the commoner and the leader bringing two different offerings? What is the reason that we allow the commoner to bring either a goat or a lamb?
To explain, I wanted to share with you a great custom I heard a couple of years ago quoted in the name of Danny Siegel. Synagogues put out two color cups for their Kiddush receptions after services. The Rabbi announces that all new comers are invited to partake of the blue cups, so that all of the people with the white cups know to whom they should introduce themselves. This custom allows the community to be welcoming without forcing the newcomers to feel like outsiders; you are always welcome to pass and take a white cup.
Similarly, in our week’s portion, we read that the commoners had the option of which sacrifice they wanted to bring. In either case, the priest would know they were outsiders, but that information need not be public. The outsiders could choose to pass and bring a goat.
All too often, when we make an effort to bring people in, it has the reverse effect of indicating them as outsiders. Camp is an amazing gateway for people to experience belonging to the Jewish community. I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones this week in Baltimore. I have no doubt that together we will find new ways to make people feel welcome in our community. Surely, there is no great sacrifice in making our community more inclusive.
Shabbat Shalom!
WE CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU IN BALTIMORE. #LEADERS2018
Our family has been doing a lot of driving over the last few days as we we went to visit my parents in Philadelphia. A number of times during our travels we heard the song Castle on the Hill by Ed Sheeran. The theme of the single surrounds Sheeran’s home town of Framlingham, and he reminisces his life as a teenager. He recounts the place that he grew up in, the cast of characters in this life, and where they are now. The line that stuck with me is “these people raised me and I can’t wait to go home”
As great at it was reminiscing about a home, I realize that this mythic home for me is actually camp. Camp is really my Castle on a Hill. I was recently interviewed for Michelle W. Malkin‘s podcast It’s Who You Know. In this podcast I shared some of my thoughts on the power of Jewish Camping. I encourage you to listen to it, I did not sound that stupid. And to all of these people who raised me, thank you.
We read in Tazria Metzoria, this week’s Torah portion, that when a person is afflicted with tzaraatthey must dwell alone outside of the camp until they are healed. Tzaraat is commonly translated at leprosy but was actually a scaly affection of the skin with some discoloration. It was not contagious, but rather is seems to have been a symptom of an inner spiritual disorder. Why is dwelling outside of the camp so transformative?
I was thinking about this recently when reading a paper that my Yishama had to write. His assignment was to explore a defining moment in his life to date. This is what he wrote and the drawing that accompanied it:
Before I went to sleep-away camp I wasn’t independent or responsible. I was not responsible because I didn’t ask for any responsibility. I wasn’t as productive at school because I didn’t have a sense of how important school was. I relied on my parents and au pair a lot because I didn’t have to be independent or responsible.
The summer I went to sleep-away camp changed my life. At sleep-away camp I was introduced to many kinds of people. The environment at camp was different because there were all kinds of people and different ways of living, which helped open me up to new foods and lifestyles. When I came home from camp my parents were surprised by how much I had changed and matured.
After I came home from sleep-away camp, I was more independent, responsible, and didn’t rely on other people as much. When I came home from camp my parents trusted me enough to let me do a lot of things I had not been allowed to do before I went to camp, such as staying home alone and making my own plans. When I came back from camp I was more productive in class because I knew the value of education. Meeting some of my new friends at camp showed me how much they valued education and they inspired me to keep learning more – just like they do. Going to sleep-away camp opened my eyes to the world around me and the person I aspire to be.
For Yishama leaving home and going to camp helped his grow in his confidence and sense of responsibility. Coming into contact with all kinds of people and different ways of living helped Yishama open up. When he returned from a summer at Camp Stone he was transformed spiritually. I can only assume leaving camp was as transformative to the ancient Israelites. And in both cases I assume when they came back they needed a really good shower.
As parents, we want to see our kids succeed in all facets of life – whether that is getting into a certain college, establishing themselves in a career of their choice, or empowering them to compete in the global marketplace. In many ways, our children’s success is the “promised land.”
In Shelach, this week’s Torah portion, the Israelites are waiting to enter the actual Promised Land. Before entering, God instructs them to send a representative from each of the twelve tribes to check it out. Two spies came back with glowing reports, but the other ten spies told stories of gloom and doom. What would cause the spies to experience the Promised Land so differently? They were given the same information before leaving, and they reported on the same land and people. We read:
‘The land, through which we have passed to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.’ (Numbers 13:31-33)
How we experience life is so often a result of how we see ourselves. It seems that the only difference between our spies was their self-image.
How do we help our children get to the “promised land” of success? We have to stop preparing the way for the child and do the hard work of preparing the child for the way. Instead of just helping the child build up a robust resume, we need to offer them the chance to develop and foster leadership, grit, collaboration, creativity, tenacity, resilience, and a strong self-image.
And, you know what? Summers at Jewish camp encourage the growth of all of these things. Away from our watchful eyes, our campers and staff increase their independence, friendship, confidence, responsibility, and teamwork, along with a sense of peoplehood, community, and heritage. At Jewish camp, they learn 21st century skills and become mensches with strong character.
Here the “promised land” is more than just academic and career-oriented success. It means nurturing social and emotional intelligences, critical-thinking, and problem-solving abilities. It means a new generation that not only “does well” but “does good.” The “promised land” of today is a generation that values self-awareness, self-actualization, and a strong self-image.
Inspired by the life skills that camp has nurtured in generations of campers, we’re highlighting 21st Century Skills for a summer blog series. We’ll be featuring personal stories from camp alumni and professionals across the field exemplifying how Jewish camp provided the ideal environment to become the best version of themselves.
Despite being erroneously attributed to Hegel, it was actually Johann Gottlieb Fichte, an 18th century German philosopher, who originated the idea of thesis–antithesis–synthesis. This idea takes an intellectual proposition, reacts to this by negating it, and then solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths and forming a new thesis, which in turn starts the process over. In its most elementary way, Fichte’s idea can be used to describe the story of Esther we will read on Purim.
In the Megillah it seems that the thesis is best described by Haman when he says to the king:
“There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; and their laws are diverse from those of every people; neither keep they the king’s laws; therefore it does not profit the king to suffer them.” (Esther 3:8)
As an orphaned child of these refugees, Esther is presented at the extreme margins of society. It seems that the pendulum swings to the other extreme for Esther when she ascends to the Persian throne. But is there a synthesis? Mordecai pleads for Esther to speak to the king to save her people from Haman’s plot. On a simple level he asks her if she will remain comfortable in the king’s house or risk death and approach the king. On another level Mordecai is asking her to synthesize her Persian and Jewish identities.
I was thinking about this process these last few days at the 2016 Foundation for Jewish Camp’s Leaders Assembly. At this conference we hosted 750 people committed to vibrant Jewish future through high quality, meaningful Jewish summer experiences. Together we celebrated the genuine maturation of the field of Jewish camp and 18 years of the FJC. It is interesting to think about the history of Jewish summer camp in North America in the context of Fichte/Esther’s process.
At the inception of Jewish summer camps in this country at the start of the 20th century, the goal was to bring inner-city children of Eastern European immigrants out to the country to “Americanize” them. This thesis to acculturate our children was met by the antithesis in the emergent trend to use camp to indoctrinate a generation intentionally in Jewish culture, education, and religious and Zionist ideologies (e.g. Cejwin Camps, and denominational camps). The most recent phase has emerged in the last decade of specialty camps. After listening to visionary camp owner and director Scott Brody at our Leaders Assembly, I realize that this specialization is actually part of a larger synthesis.
Scott is the former national vice president of the American Camp Association and currently serves on FJC’s board. He recently expanded his camp business into China, where affluent parents are looking to give their children an edge in a competitive economy. At our conference, he eloquently spoke about the movement to use camp to strengthen 21st century skills in the next generation (see recent article). Jewish parents, like their Chinese counterparts, are increasingly looking for experiences that give their children an advantage, add value, prepare them for college and position them to succeed in their careers. Last year, Brody said:
“When you look at the entrepreneurial and innovation skill set, a lot of what you need are the qualities that people get to practice at camp – creativity, communication, collaboration, and building your own sense of resilience … All of these themes are interwoven with the American dream. And the opportunity to practice these skills is the critical novelty of the camp environment.” (Yale Globalist)
At camp we foster leadership, grit, tenacity and resilience in the next generation. Away from our watchful eyes, our campers and staff increase their independence, friendship, confidence, responsibility, and teamwork. At a Jewish camp, the next generation have a profound feeling of connectedness to the Jewish people, gain a deeper understanding of Jewish values, and explore their heritage of wisdom and spirituality. We need to help the next generation synthesize their identities.
We understand how we all want to see “Esther” pursue her interests in all facets of life – whether that is getting into a certain college, establishing herself in her career of choice, and empowering her to compete in the global marketplace. Like Mordecai, we want Esther to do well and to do good and to be fully self-actualized. We need to better articulate how our Jewish engagement efforts help do all of these things and at the same time create mensches who make the world a better place. With Jewish camp, parents do not have to choose between their children’s future and our heritage. The right synthesis will ensure a bright future for all.
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of reading a very touching piece by Dr. Oliver Sacks z”l in the New York Times. In the piece, the world-renowned neurologist reflects on his youth growing up in a traditional Jewish house and having Shabbat with his family. He shares the heart-wrenching story of his leaving that world. Through a turn of events before the end of his life, he revisits Shabbat with family. About this rediscovery he writes:
The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived? (Sabbath- NYT August 14, 2015)
This depiction of the Sabbath brought me back to camp. Camp was really the first place that I truly connected to “a stopped world”.
Is there anything better than Shabbat at camp? What is there not to love? It is amazing, you get all cleaned up, get on your nicest clothes, partake in better food, have some less structured time with people you love in a place filled with beauty and memories. It is the gold standard of food, folks, and fun. I often hear from people, “I do not keep Shabbat at home, but for me Camp is the Shabbat of my year.” On one level, this is so beautiful. This sentiment expresses their love of camp and Shabbat. They have found holiness in their lives in these amazing immersive experiences. On another level, it makes me sad. Do Shabbat and camp need to be all or nothing? These peak experiences at camp two months a year might preempt other amazing experiences 10 months a year, or worse for years in their lives when they can no longer come to camp.
I pause to reflect on Shabbat in preparation for Yom Kippur a day described as “Shabbat Shabbaton” (Leviticus 16:31, 23:32). On a simple level, it means a day of complete cessation of work, but on a deeper level is a day to reboot our system. Yom Kippur is a day in which we spend time reflecting on how we can repair what is broken and return to a better version of ourselves. For me, that means going back to camp. It is a day we can give ourselves permission to take the best part of camp and Shabbat and bring them into our lives. What would it mean to take time every Shabbat to grab some unstructured time within a beautiful place and eat some yummy food with people you love? Yom Kippur asks us not to let perfection get in the way of success. We do not need to wait until the end of our lives to “wonder what if“.
Said to Myself 