Everything I needed to know I learned on summer break

Experience: Rotating counselor

Classroom setting: Camp Kol Torah in Wickliffe, Ohio

What I Learned: How to make lemons into lemonade

Something special occurred each year in camp on the first day of the season. Rabbi Moshe Weinberger, the head counselor of Camp Kol Torah in Wickliffe, Ohio, would announce, “When I snap my fingers, the time will change. The clock will move back one hour, and we will switch to camp time.”

The idea was to make the schedules work better — so Maariv wouldn’t feel so late and Shacharis wouldn’t be at the lazy man’s hour of 9 a.m. — but there was always something magical about the idea of altering reality because we were in camp. We were in our own time zone, living our own separate existence from the rest of the world. And it was true: The weeks in camp were unlike any others. There was a flavor and a spirit that made them decidedly different.

Camp Kol Torah has been based on the Telshe Yeshiva campus for decades, but when the loudspeakers were hung in the dining room after the zeman just before camp started, it became an entirely new location, even to people like me, the bochurim who called Telshe home year-round.