Making the effort to meet people where they are doesn’t mean you aren’t being true to yourself 

Experience: Camper in Camp Bais Yaakov

Classroom setting: Ferndale, New York

What I learned: Fitting in even when you don’t

I must have been six years old when I got my first lesson on learning how to fit in.

It was springtime, and we had just finished our daytime Shabbos seudah and were all bentshing together aloud. I had a mini temper tantrum over the fact that bentshing was different at home, where we used an Ashkenazi havarah, than it was at the Modern Orthodox school I went to, where Hebrew was spoken with the Sephardi pronunciation. Unwilling to indulge the dramatic outburst of a first grader, my father told me in no uncertain terms that differences like this were part of life, and it was something I was going to have to get used to.

Fast forward three years, when my older sister and I were headed to Camp Bais Yaakov, a place where I vaguely knew only one other girl (who didn’t end up in my bunk). Before packing us up, my mother had called the camp director, Rabbi Shimon Newhouse a”h, to find out if we had to wear skirts or if we could wear shorts in camp.

“They can wear shorts if they want to,” said Rabbi Newhouse. “But I’m not sure how comfortable they will feel here in shorts.”

Thankfully, the shorts didn’t come with us to camp, but we were still very much out of our element in CBY, a place where well over 90 percent of the campers came from either Boro Park or Williamsburg. Some of the girls had never left Brooklyn other than to go to the Catskills. As one of just a handful of Queens campers, I found myself facing questions like, “Is Queens a long-distance phone call from Brooklyn?” and “Do you have paved roads where you live, or just dirt paths?”

Getting through the mandatory hour of singing that took place at every Shabbos meal was challenging the first few weeks. Not knowing any of the lyrics was beyond embarrassing, so I pretended to sing along, hoping no one would notice. Making friends was agonizingly difficult, and with my short sleeves — in a camp where some girls wore navy blue tights all summer long — it was painfully obvious that I was an outsider.

But a funny thing happened to me in CBY. While I never got the hang of competitive jump rope (yes, that’s a thing), I learned the lingo, got into Shabbos choir (also very competitive), and most importantly, cultivated a genuinely nice bunch of friends. Sure, our lives were different in some ways, but they were similar in so many others, and in retrospect, finding those commonalities allowed us to forge friendships that lasted years.

Of course, there was the occasional reminder that not everyone was willing to accept me. One day when I was a CIT, my counselor, who didn’t really like me, came back from a day off. She told us she had been in the supermarket, and after accidentally swapping carts with another customer, she had inadvertently bought nonkosher soup. Pulling out the can of Campbell’s finest, she turned to me and said, “Here, do you want it?”

Another time, a girl was pressuring one of my friends about a particular situation that was already difficult for her, and I told her to stop bothering my friend about it.

“It was bashert,” I said. “Just leave her alone.”

“Bashert?” she said to me incredulously. “What do you know about bashert?”

But despite those moments, I have the fondest memories of my seven years at Camp Bais Yaakov, where aside from learning how to dive, flip a circuit breaker when too many blow dryers are running simultaneously, and make a six-braid challah, I also learned how to blend in. It wasn’t about not being myself or pretending to be something that I wasn’t, but rather using common ground to create positive interactions with my bunkmates.

Ironically, even as I was learning how to fit in in camp, I had to start doing the same thing in school as our family moved more to the right. By the time I graduated eighth grade, I was one of the few girls in my class who didn’t wear short sleeves, and I finagled my way through my part as an Englishman in a high school play by wearing a just-below-the-knee robe over a pair of pants, convincing the directors that the dressing gown vibe was oh so British.

Not being part of the mainstream, both in school and in camp, wasn’t always enjoyable, but it helped me cultivate skills I still use today in my writing career. I take the time to figure out how to build a rapport with everyone I meet so they feel at ease talking to me, and when I write, I tailor the verbiage and tone to resonate with every reader, be they from the chassidishe velt, the yeshivishe oilem, a Modern Orthodox community, or aren’t even Jewish at all.

Making the effort to meet people where they are doesn’t mean you aren’t being true to yourself — it’s about realizing that our similarities are so much greater than our differences, and that taking the time to build those bridges is an investment that can pay off big-time.

Sandy Eller is a freelance writer whose works have appeared broadly in the Jewish media world. She lives in Spring Valley, New York.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1074)