Those who have been to camp will say that home is not a place, it is the people you are with. After 12 years of sleeping, eating, and praying outdoors; summer never arrived. Last summer I sat outside in a Beit T’Filah in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, surrounded by 90 campers who barely fit into their smiles. This summer I am sitting on a couch watching the three kids I nanny throw glitter and wear princess dresses. Last summer was 65 days, this summer was 170 days. I counted. This summer I drove up to camp for a day to walk around and breathe camps’ air. The gates were open and I was immediately hit by what I saw: overgrown yet empty, sticky and buggy because they hadn’t sprayed; wrong. It was wrong. No tents, no kids, no rabbis or counselors, no boats by the dock, not even a dock. The vastness was overwhelming and I was left with an unsettling vacancy inside myself.
I know I am not the only one with this abyss in my heart, one that can only try to be filled in with Zoom Shabbat Shiras and Saturday night folk nights or a glimpse of camp for a day. This absence as a counselor is devastating and I can’t even begin to imagine what this absence feels like for a camper. Jewish kids wait ten months just for two, and those two never came. It breaks my heart to think about all the Jewish children who will have altered experiences and maybe even miss out on some units. Camp gave me a place to discover who I am as a Jew and how to keep learning what that really means. It gave me survival tools that carried me in a canoe along a Wisconsin river and created connections between me and people from all over the world. Camp gave me my always-friends, my first loves, role models, and mosquito bites. I simply would not be who I am if I hadn’t gone to OSRUI. For that, I will always be grateful. Here’s to next year in person and good health.
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