As a student at U.C. Santa Cruz, I took a natural history class that awarded 15 units for camping in California’s many bioregions. My friends accused me of “camping for credits.” When I took my current job as executive director of Camp Tawonga, a magical Jewish summer camp near Yosemite, my friends insisted I was “camping for cash.”
Maybe so, but 90 percent of the people I meet who discover I’m a camp director say with starry-eyed looks that the happiest times of their lives were summers spent at camp. What is it exactly about summer camp that makes the experience truly powerful?
Camp offers the gift of time, that incomprehensible, precious commodity. Time to be young, time to be together, time to be healthy and outdoors. After a few days at camp, we can see the stress of busy lives slip off our campers’ shoulders. Free to chat and wander around, they never need to make a phone call or get their parents to drive them to an appointment. Bronzed and warm, they gravitate to loving counselors and healthy challenges and risks. They never ask to watch television.
Since my days as a camper, some things have changed. The food is better and the menus more diverse. But there are also more eating disorders, kids on hyperactivity and antidepressant medications, more Child Protective Service reports to file and more alienated kids.
For three weeks at camp, kids not only don’t watch television, they don’t go to a mall or sit in front of computers. They are spared the bombardment of advertising that uses sex to sell, well, everything. Instead of soaking up movies marinated in guns and violence, kids are encouraged to talk about the hurt feelings of a fellow camper or their own reaction to a new environment. Kids love camp because it is a relief from their virtual lives.
It is real: real hiking, real swimming, real friendships, real sit-down-together-and-talk-meals, real frustrations and real caring attention. Furthermore, study after study has shown that Jewish summer camps, such as Camp Tawonga, successfully build Jewish self-esteem and future Jewish leaders. It’s the 24/7 of living in a positive Jewish world where prayers before and after meals are joyfully sung and the Jewish educators are tanned and strong lifeguards, arts and crafts instructors and counselors. Who wouldn’t want to be like them? And in these economic times, there are even real scholarship dollars available to send children from poor and middle-class families to camp.
Every summer we, who camp for cash, bring children across the country into a world that makes sense. I wouldn’t spend a summer any other way.
Deborah Newbrun is the executive director of Camp Tawonga. For more information about Tawonga, go to www.tawonga.org.