Sometime in the 70s, when enrollment was growing too big for the space, Camp Harlam bought a little piece of farmland about a quarter mile down the road from the front gate and converted it into a little mini-camp, the Chavurah Village. This is where the fifteen-year-olds—rising tenth graders—spend their summers. I lived in the Village for seven out of my eighteen summers at Harlam: one as a camper, three as a counselor, and three as the Chavurah supervisor. I understand myself, and my relationship with the world, through the prism of those summers on that little parcel of land tucked into the foothills of northeastern Pennsylvania.
On the edge of the Village there’s an old barn leftover from when the place was a farm—aging rafters and old bunk plaques painted with the names and signatures of former campers, furnished with a few benches and chairs, a soda machine and a ping pong table. As a camper, I spent almost an entire month watching my two best friends play a ping pong match to one thousand in that barn. They would play after breakfast and lunch, during shower hour, in the evening before we had to go back to our bunks. Our conversations, like the ping pong, lasted all summer. It felt more like one long conversation that unfolded in fits and starts over four weeks. I felt like I would never know anyone better than I knew my friends, and that they knew me completely. We shared secrets and jokes and fears, took risks and broke rules and slid around in the mud when it rained. I looked up to my counselors, college kids who seemed impossibly cool and self-possessed.
I spent a few summers as a counselor in the Village in my early twenties, and it was my job to help my campers create a summer that could change their lives. They were fifteen and looked up to me like I was impossibly cool and self-possessed—even as I dropped out of college and spent the other three seasons of my year working retail and living in my childhood bedroom.
Back then, I worried there might be some deeply broken part of me that explained why I hadn’t been able to make it through college, and why I hadn’t been able to last more than a couple of years out in the “real world” before I moved back in with my parents. I was still working at Harlam, and I began to wonder if my attachment to camp was just a way to cling to a place where I felt comfortable—where I was useful and known and made a difference—in the face of a paralyzing fear of failure. Had that fear mutated into a self-fulfilling prophecy? I told myself that I was at camp to give back to something that had given me so much, but a quieter voice whispered that I was working retail three quarters of the year just so I would have my summers open to go back to camp.
A few years later I had a job at a synagogue, and an apartment with my friends, but still no college degree and very little idea of how I wanted to spend the rest of my life—or even the rest of my twenties. I was still working at camp, now as the Chavurah supervisor. I moved into the little one room cottage in the corner of the Village, the same cottage whose gutters I had cleaned as punishment for sneaking out at night when I was a camper. Many of the counselors on my staff were college kids who had been my campers when they were fifteen. Now they were the impossibly cool ones.
Sometimes I would have this out of body experience when I was addressing my campers. I would see myself looking around at them—clustered together on benches and patches of grass around our unlit firepit in the late afternoon, giggling and zoning out, draped across each other’s laps—and some other part of me could see myself on those benches with my friends in 2004, fifteen years old and in love with the world. In these moments, I’d hear myself talking about camp as a place brimming with possibility, where we imagine the world as it could be and draw courage from each other and learn to embrace our whole selves. I felt so much affection for my campers, and I meant every word; I wanted so much for them, believed so much that camp could open their hearts and transform them and fill them with an overwhelming sense of potential—for the world, and for themselves. And I’d ask myself, “Do I really believe this is true? And if I do, why don’t I act like it’s true for me?”
And I just couldn’t come up with a good answer. Because if it wasn’t true for me, then, in a way, it just wasn’t true at all—and I refused to accept that. You can’t work at camp for all those summers, watch all those campers burst into bloom under a summer sky that feels close enough to reach out and grab hold of with the tips of your outstretched fingers, without learning to believe in something. And those things I believe about camp live at the very center of my heart; to deny they were true for myself rendered them meaningless, entirely.
To affirm them meant pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. For too long, I’d been tailoring my ambitions to fit my fears. But camp taught me to see the world for its potential; besides, managing a semester of coursework seemed way less intimidating after spending eight weeks managing the hormonal ups and downs of a group of high schoolers. If I could be trusted with the responsibility of supervising their summers, surely I could handle the responsibilities of a college education.
A few years later I was working on my senior thesis on the day the URJ announced that camp wouldn’t run in 2020. Since then, I’ve been wiling away my summer between college and graduate school sporadically thinking about the Village as it is right now—empty, quiet, air thick with memory but not with laughter. In these moments I remind myself that someday soon—but not soon enough—it will once again be full of campers and staff and undiminished potential. And, should we choose to believe, all those old truths will be true again.
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