I was just barely eight years old. My brother, three and a half years older, had been before me, but only the previous summer, when he was 10. And though I had been going to day camp for the prior three summers, I knew this was an entire world of difference. I had no idea what I was getting into, no testimony from my brother of what it was like to start at my age, no concept of what this was really going to be like. All I knew that it was a long time to be away from home, away from everything I had ever known at that point of my life. And I was absolutely terrified.
Even so, I went. I fought against my fears by trying, with all of my eight-year-old might, to trust, to have faith. I knew that my parents and aunts and uncles had spent so many summers away at camp and I knew how much they loved it. So I trusted that it would be good; I tried to have faith that this would be the right thing for me. But I was still terrified.
That was, until I met Daniel. Daniel’s bed was near mine, and we connected at perhaps the very instant when our parents left the cabin, as the reality of being away from home for 4 weeks came crashing down on us. We were both somewhat dorky-looking, with big hunky glasses weighing down our little faces, sitting with books and stuffed animals and whatever else our parents put in our cubbies. But the connection, the friendship was instant. And while I certainly had my moments of homesickness over those four weeks, I knew that summers would never be the same again; that a summer without going away to camp wasn’t really a summer at all.
But the summers were only just the beginning. Because when I look back on that moment, and the summer a few years later where I almost didn’t go back, it literally boggles my mind. To think about the growth, the connections, the relationships I formed at Camp Harlam in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, is to think about all of the best parts of my life today. Friends that I made that summer and beyond are many of my closest today, more than 20 years later. I met my wife Tali because we had both spent summers there and had friends in common. I’ve attended at least a dozen camp weddings, where the silly cheers and inside jokes come back like it was only yesterday. I even co-officiated the ceremony of one of our friends with another of our friends who’s also a rabbi!
And it all began with Daniel. It all began with trust, with faith that my journey into the great unknown would be rewarding and fulfilling. Camp is where I learned about myself—what fires me up, what’s important to me; what makes me laugh, what makes me cry; what skills and talents and interests were within me that I never knew about. It’s where I learned how to live with others, to appreciate the synergy of working on something, building something together. It’s where I felt most tangibly the power of prayer, the chills of the Presence of God around me, the warm blanket of singing and making music together. It’s where I learned to be an individual, and at the same time, where I learned that I was part of something so much larger than myself, so much greater than the sum of the individual parts. To say that my summers at camp made me the person I am today, standing before you, is 100% accurate. But somehow, with all of the impact camp continues to have on me, to this very moment, even that bold statement doesn’t quite do it justice.
In our Torah portion for this Shabbat, Abram is called upon by God, with the words: Lech l’cha, “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” There, the text says, God will bless him. Abram leaves behind all he’s ever known to go to a place he doesn’t know. Interpreted one way, the Hebrew lech l’cha means, literally, “Go to yourself.” Abram found his true self, his true calling in his trust in God, and in taking a leap of faith, one that changed Jewish history forever. More than anywhere else, camp can be that place for anyone of us: the place where we grow into and discover our truest selves, where you can lech l’cha, go to yourself, perhaps in ways you never thought possible.
AMEN.
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