Rabbis Go Camping!

(Originally published in the Fall 2017 Rabbinical Assembly newsletter.)

In a recent letter addressed to “Friends of Camp Ramah,” Rabbi Mitch Cohen, National Director of the Ramah Commission, offered this suggestion: “Send Your Rabbi and Cantor to Camp Ramah and Watch Your Congregation Flourish.” He noted: “We often hear that at Camp Ramah, Conservative Judaism is at its best.”—and the list of 157 rabbis and several cantors who spent time this summer at one of the Ramah camps suggests there’s increasing interest in Ramah’s secret sauce. One of those 157 rabbis reports here on his summer vacation at Ramah Berkshires.

Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, Congregation Ansche Chesed, New York City

I was fortunate to spend another summer on staff at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires—my ninth in a row—having fun with my fellow educators and developing relationships with our wonderful hanikhim. I myself was never a camper as a child and never worked as a counselor. And truth be told, I only started working at Ramah as an adult to help pay my own kids’ tuitions. So I was a little late to the lesson that many of my colleagues grasped early: Ramah is a magical place, where kids can have great fun on basketball courts and hiking trails, while also making life-long Jewish friends, sharing Shabbat and tefilla and thoughtful discussions about what makes our heritage so ethically and spiritually rich.

Michelangelo reputedly said that his skill as a sculptor was because he “could see the angel within the marble, and then carve until [he] set the angel free.” Sometimes being a rabbi at Ramah is like that, as you help kids develop skills and capabilities that were always inside them, but they didn’t necessarily recognize in themselves. Here is one sweet example, from this past summer, of gratifying rabbinic work. And, with your permission, of parental nachas. Most of us have probably experienced that in our egalitarian davvening, we typically call up a magbi’a and a gollelet, a male to lift the Torah and a female to wrap it. OK, it’s not exactly sexist, since, yes, males tend to have greater upper body strength, and females often doubt their capability to lift.

Rabbis Jeremy Kalmanofsky and Eliot Malomet (Highland Park Conservative Temple, Highland Park, NJ) supervise “girl power” applied to the Sefer Torah at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires.

But I always tell our campers (and my congregants) that this is just a simple physics problem: if the Torah is not especially heavy, then it is just a matter of using the table as a lever, bending your knees to get beneath it, and standing up. Anyone can do it. But they rarely believe me. One morning in August, the counselors for the Machon girls (entering 10th grade) organized an exercise at tefillot. They played a “girl ¬power” video demonstrating young people’s assumptions when they describe someone as “running like a girl” or “throwing like a girl.” Girls themselves tend to take this to mean someone who moves in ungainly, ungraceful, weak ways. But, the video goes on to demonstrate, this is just a subtle way of denigrating females. (Who after all should be reminded that there are plenty of Venuses and Serenas out there, for whom playing sports “like a girl” is pretty impressive.) So, of course, they should feel empowered to run and throw “like a girl.” And why not “hagbaha like a girl?”

With their counselors’ help, each girl in the edah successfully hoisted and displayed the Torah. My friend and colleague Eliot Malomet and I were happy to assist and coach, as you see in the attached picture. Everyone did a great job. And I hope they go back to their home shuls and show how to “hagbaha like a girl.” Plus, big kudos to the counselors who organized this activity, Ella Cooperman and Hadas Kalmanofsky. I’ve known that latter young woman for all her 20 years. Lo and behold, thanks to her own years as a camper and counselor, she revealed the angel waiting in the marble, and became a Jewish educator herself.