By Brian Mitchell, Senior Assistant Director
After camp ends each summer, I always wonder how I will be able to get through Friday nights without being surrounded by a wonderful camp community worshiping together in the Outdoor Sanctuary under a beautiful sunset. No Friday night Shabbat worship experience can ever compare to those that we all have at camp. Under cloudless skies, with a light breeze, singing fun and beautiful songs and prayers, surrounded by our closest friends – these special moments cannot be duplicated.
Fortunately, during this year’s offseason, I had the pleasure to have wonderful Shabbat experiences around the globe. Between October and April, I was lucky enough to pray with friends, colleagues, strangers, campers, youth groupers, NFTY Participants, and many more groups at temples in Israel, India, New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Dallas, URJ Camp Coleman in Georgia, URJ Camp Harlam in Pennsylvania, URJ Eisner Camp in Great Barrington, and I am sure many more that I am forgetting. Although different from my summer home at URJ Crane Lake Camp, these services gave me a sense of what worship is like in other Jewish communities – and how much we all have in common.
Sitting in The Judah Hyam Hall, a Sephardic Shul in New Dehli, India in December during Hanukkah, it was very eye opening and incredible to see how Jews from a foreign country came together to worship with many familiar melodies, but many new ones as well. Praying on the rooftop of a hotel in Tel Aviv with 40 North American young adults on a Birthright trip to Israel gave new meaning to the word “community.” And, sitting amongst nearly 800 teenagers in a banquet hall in a Dallas hotel for NFTY convention in February, singing and praying loudly together as one, was just as moving as if I were at camp. All of these experiences reinforced my sense of what it is to be Jewish and connected to K’lal Yisrael, the greater Jewish population of the world.
As a member of the full-time URJ Eisner and Crane Lake Camp staff, I had the opportunity to travel, learn, grow, and see other forms of Jewish worship experiences near and far from the “bubble” of camp. I can only hope that as the next summer ends, instead of dreading the upcoming offseason Friday nights, I will be able to look forward to experiencing even more incredible services in some even more far-away places. But as amazing as they will surely be, they will always be a distant second to Friday nights at Crane Lake Camp!