Shavuah Tov! – August 1st

As the moonlight glimmers brightly off Devils Lake, I sit in wonder at the beauty of not the natural world surrounding us up here, but the beauty in our Herzl community. 

I predicted this one on Thursday night, and fortunately, I was right. Friday night Song Session was exactly what I thought it would be. Tears!

There is something about the last Friday night Song Session of the summer that brings everything we’ve been doing here into focus. The song list was basically a greatest-hits album of Herzl Camp, the songs everybody knows, the favorites we’ve been singing forever, the Hebrew songs where we do all of our schticky stuff, the hand motions, the sayings, the yelling out of certain words at exactly the right moment for reasons that I am quite certain nobody actually knows anymore. Someone did it years ago, everyone else joined in, and now it is simply what we do. That’s camp tradition.

But Friday night, it was more than singing. It was embracing camp literally and figuratively.

Especially among our older campers, arms were around each other everywhere. They knew this was one of their last sacred moments together as campers this summer, and for our B’yachad campers, one of their last Friday nights together as campers, period.

The lights went up and just as I predicted, there were tears everywhere. They were tears of love, tears of joy, tears of gratitude that this happened and sadness that it’s ending.

And I don’t care if you’re the tough kid who doesn’t usually show much emotion, the ultra-competitive kid with a little machismo, the kid who’s normally pretty stoic, or the kid who wears every emotion right on their sleeve. Those distinctions didn’t matter Friday night. Because the shields were down. They’ve been down for weeks.

Maybe some of those tears come from knowing that when they leave here, some of those shields are going to go back up. They’re heading back into a world that asks different things of them. A world with phones and social media and pressures and expectations and all the things kids navigate every day. But here, they’ve had a place where they can just be…safe, welcomed, known, loved.

And maybe some of those tears, especially from our B’yachad campers, were the realization that this is their last time doing this as a camper. It was mostly B’yachad crying, but believe me, it worked its way all the way down through camp.

I was lucky enough to be sitting next to a group of five or six Amudim boys for all of this. And then we got to our last song, the song that closes out Friday night Song Session. If you’ve listened to the podcast, you know exactly which one I’m talking about. We all start singing “Amen” at the absolute top of our lungs. And just like Havdallah, the arms go around each other. We’re standing on the benches, swaying together, and shouting “Amen!” to the heavens.

There’s so much wrapped up in that moment that I don’t even know how to put it into words. These boys have been sucked in now. They get it. No, they didn’t end up in that pool of tears with the B’yachad campers, they’re not there yet (yet, some of them will well up when they walk from the closing circle and toward the buses Tuesday morning). But as I’m standing there with these 10- and 11-year-olds, arms around each other, screaming “Amen,” I know they’re only three or four years away from being those older campers standing in the Chadar after the meal, hugging each other through tears, wishing each other Shabbat Shalom and, without necessarily saying it out loud, thanking each other for the summer of their lives.

They don’t know that yet. Right now, it’s just pure, unadulterated joy.

And maybe that’s one of the most beautiful things about camp. You can stand in one room and see the whole journey happening at once. At one end are kids just beginning to understand how deeply this place can get inside of them. At the other are kids realizing that their time as campers is almost over. And somehow they’re all singing the same song, arms around each other, shouting the same word to the heavens…Amen.

And for our staff, watching that happen is one of our proudest moments. Because we get to see the work taking effect.

We get to see friendships that didn’t exist weeks ago now feel indispensable. We get to see kids who arrived uncertain standing with their arms around the people who became their people. We get to see a finish line that isn’t really a finish line at all, it just keeps moving forward until we get to do this together again next summer.

And our staff were every bit as joyful as the campers because they know they played a part in it. They helped create that safe place. They helped shape these kids summers and, in ways they probably won’t fully understand for years, they helped shape their lives. There is something holy about that.

There is one moment every Saturday night that gets me every single time. And this being the last Shabbat of the summer, this time it made this old camper’s eyes a little misty…I’m sorry, dewey.

We stand shoulder to shoulder, arms wrapped over each other’s shoulders in one enormous circle for Havdallah, and when the last line of the last prayer is sung, we don’t sing it, together we shout, “Ha-mavdil beyn kodesh l’chol!”

It translates to – God distinguishes between the holy and the ordinary. (please not the single – rather than the ChatGPT –…I made a promise)

I’ve heard those words hundreds of times in my life, but I don’t know that I’ve ever understood them quite the way I do standing in that circle at Herzl Camp.

Because what we’re experiencing here is genuinely holy. Not holy because it’s perfect. Camp is wonderfully imperfect. Kids forget towels, canoes tip over, someone always loses a sweatshirt, staff get tired, we have dewey days, scraped knees, bug bites, and every other little thing that comes with living together.

It’s holy because of what happens when hundreds of people choose to build a community together.

It’s the holiness of belonging.

It’s the holiness of friendship.

It’s the holiness of laughter echoing across camp.

It’s the holiness of a counselor putting an arm around a camper who needs it.

It’s the holiness of watching a shy camper find their confidence.

It’s the holiness of hearing Hebrew songs sung by kids who may not know every word but know exactly how they make them feel.

It’s the holiness of being proudly Jewish.

It’s the holiness of understanding why Israel matters to the Jewish people, not because someone lectured you about it, but because you’ve lived it alongside Israeli staff and campers who have become your family.

And maybe what strikes me most is that this kind of holiness can’t be found on a phone. It can’t be downloaded, scrolled to, it can’t be measured in likes or streaks or followers it can only be experienced by showing up for one another day after day, week after week, until strangers become cabinmates, cabinmates become friends, and friends begin to feel like family.

That’s what three weeks can do, six weeks can do, or eight weeks can do.

When we all shout, “Ha-mavdil beyn kodesh l’chol,” we’re doing more than ending Shabbat. We’re thanking God for giving us a place where holiness isn’t something we simply talk about, it’s something we live.

Then, almost instinctively, the circle breaks into handshakes, hugs, high-fives, and the familiar words “Shavuah Tov!” Have a good week.

But I think we’re saying something even bigger than that. We’re saying thank you for the week we just experienced. Thank you for the lessons we learned. Thank you for the friendships that grew a little deeper. Thank you for the moments that changed us in ways we may not even recognize yet.

And we’re expressing hope that whatever we discovered about ourselves this week comes with us into the next one.

As many of our campers prepare to head home over the next couple of days, I hope they carry more than duffel bags full of dirty laundry. I hope they take home greater independence.

More confidence.

More self-awareness.

A little more resilience.

A stronger Jewish identity.

A deeper connection to Israel.

An appreciation for community.

And the quiet knowledge that they belong to something much bigger than themselves.

That may be the greatest gift Herzl Camp gives.

Shavuah Tov, everyone.

Thank you for sending your kid to Herzl Camp.

All is well. Safely rest.

,לילה טוב

Tommy