Talk about summer camp — specifically, their own years in summer camp — and you can see the little boy

The poet George Oppen once said this about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy!”

It’s the sort of line that means nothing to those in their twenties and thirties, but starts to resonate when you’re in your forties. As one ages, b’ezras Hashem, I imagine it takes on real meaning.

One of the great confirmations of this statement is what happens when you talk to middle-aged men about their years in camp. Yes, men with lined faces and gray hair and bifocals and a bit of a boich that is visible on summer Fridays when their wives succeed in persuading them to go down to the pool (as if sitting by the pool-jets for ten minutes, then doing a lap and a half, and then going back to lean against the jets and talking about whether people will move from New York if that guy wins — say chas v’shalom! — will whip them into shape) talk about summer camp — specifically, their own years in summer camp — and you can see the little boy.

The strength and vigor of the American olam haTorah is very much rooted in the intuitive understanding of the first generation of great builders, people like Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and Rav Hutner, Rabbi Newhouse and Mike Tress, the sense that camp could supplement and even reinforce that which young men and women had worked to build over the previous ten months.

They had no budgets, and it must have sounded like an outlandish proposition to donors, but they forged ahead and created a phenomenon, the investment of time, energy, and money they made paying off over the years. It is a predictable storyline, to readers of this magazine or others, how almost inevitably the subject of a glowing feature — superstar mechanech, accomplished askan, gifted musician — will point to the moment at which they chapped that they could do stuff: more times than not, that moment happened in Liberty or Ferndale or Kiamesha.

Regular readers of this column (the second-most presumptuous thing a writer can do is use that expression; the first is opening a piece with a quote from a highbrow poet no reader has heard of) know that we have been subtly pushing this agenda for years: Why bring it up again?

’Cause now I have a ra’ayah.

We know. Bochurim have a long, hard zeman and they are heroes. If road-tripping across states that are located “I think near the Grand Canyon” is the break that they feel they need and that their rebbeim approve of, then it too is holy.

But there is something that young men can only get in camp, and it’s not available to them anywhere else.

The word for it is “emotion.”

Sure, boys have emotions — they can get happy or sad, angry or surprised, but that’s not the same thing as emotional.

A bochur is in yeshivah all year. He is learning sugyas, toiling over the most sublime expression of Hashem’s word. If you watch (not too closely, and do it with an extra dose of generosity), you can see how he’s changing. You can see his outside — but how can you gauge his inside?

The highlight of camp is color war, in which boys compete against each other, same as every day. Why is it so special? Because it forces boys to contend using other tools — art, music, drama — stuff they don’t get to access during the year. Each team is given a theme to work with, and using drops of paint, creative costumes and settings, or the right lyrics and tune, they are expected to convey the power of Shabbos versus Yom Tov, Yom versus Lailah, Yissachar versus Zevulun in a way that’s not just intellectually persuasive, but emotionally compelling.

When you create that challenge, wonderful things happen.

A case in point. Last summer, color war at Camp Agudah Midwest pitted Guf against Neshamah, the splendor of the soul versus the glory of the vehicle charged with housing it. (I never went to that camp, and I’m not beholden to it, and in fact, over the last three years, when I tried to help get kids in, I was turned down on each occasion — but the song is still fire!)

The theme song lyrics were written by a young man named Y.C. Schur, sung by bochurim with changey voices and desperately furrowed brows, conviction oozing out of their pores as they clutched photocopied papers and swayed.

Malachim, how can you comprehend,

What it means, to keep the Torah

You can’t imagine what it feels like

To fight the burning yetzer hara

Malachim, how can you comprehend

What it means, to have emunah

When threatened by hostile nations,

Who want nothing more than to see us gone…

It’s a clip you can rewatch fifty times, boys performing not for applause or even aware of other people — they are reaching inside themselves and expressing what they know to be true but can’t always articulate. It’s not polished or smooth, but it’s raw and real.

It’s the sort of song that can only come out of camp, ’cause otherwise it would be weird. Those lucky young men will carry the refrain in their hearts for years to come, and when they are confronted with nisayon, it will suddenly start to play and give them strength — we were not chosen to receive the Torah despite being human, but because of it!

Tishah B’Av has become a day of videos — well-crafted, powerful presentations all designed with a single goal: to get us to actually feel something, to pierce the hardened exterior formed by a couple of thousand of years in galus.

In the spirit of the day, they seek to remind us that we are, in fact, broken, lacking, despondent.

And it’s true, we are.

But there is another feeling too — not what we lack, but what we have. Songs like this one, the creation of boys who spent ten months internalizing the light that comes pouring out in these few stanzas, are also part of our story.

It reminds us that we are still proud, still glorious, and still strong. We’re still the people chosen over angels, and we still hold that Torah tight. Ein lanu shiyur, nothing remains from the bygone glory, rak haTorah hazos, but this Torah.

In yeshivah, our young men toil to make it a part of them, but they themselves might not realize it: In camp, they sing it out, showing that even while we wait for the great rebuilding, we’ve been doing some building of our own.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072)