There is a Ramah shabbaton happening this weekend in Jerusalem. The Ramah directors are all here, and they came to the Yeshiva the other day to talk to us. Rabbi Resnick was here… it was weird to see him again. It was 15 years ago that I was at Ramah Berkshires. He looks exactly the same as he did then… he doesn’t seem to have aged. I asked a question about how the educational program is set up, about the curricula etc. and was told about things that I have no recollection of from when I was there. So I asked if that was the way it had always been set up, since I didn’t remember it being like that. The fellow speaking asked when I’d been there and I said ‘93. He said “That’s way before my time.” I said “Rabbi Resnick was there…” he was sitting in the back. “‘93??” he said, “that was a looong time ago.”

There are a lot of people here who went to Ramah. One of my best friends, Alex, is a rosh eidah at Wisconsin. He started Ramah when he was 12 and never left. He talks all the time about Ramah and about how wonderful it is, how it cements a kid’s Jewish identity and reinforces what they get in day school, but in a fun social community context that teaches the kid to love Judaism and Jewish community.

I didn’t have that experience at camp. I hated Ramah. I didn’t get along with anyone there, I had no friends, everyone made fun of me. I had a counselor that I liked who got fired a couple of weeks into camp. No one was interested in the things that I was interested in, no one cared about learning. The boys were cruel. The girls were crueler. I didn’t learn to daven, I didn’t learn z’mirot, I didn’t learn to love Judaism or Jewish people. If anything the experience pushed me away from Jews, Judaism, Jewish community. I had no community in this place, the clear message I got was that I do not fit.

I have no desire to bash Ramah in general. I think it is a great concept, and that it works so well for so many of the people who go attests to its effectiveness… but it is strange to hear everyone talk about Ramah in such glowing terms when I had such an awful experience there. I mean, it was a really bad, even scarring experience. It was my transition year between elementary and junior high school, and it pretty much set the tone of my entire junior high school experience. People say how wonderful Ramah is for Jewish kids. I mention that I didn’t have a good experience and the response is, completely reasonably, “well, nothing works for everyone.” And it is absolutely true… but since I’m one of the ones for whom it didn’t work, because I know what that is like, what that experience is, of being lonely and homesick and isolated with no one seemingly willing to help, I have to think about that segment, that 1% or 2% or 5% or 7%, whatever it is, for whom Ramah is a horrible experience. I went into Ramah excited. All of my uncles and cousins had gone to Ramah and loved it. My sister went to Ramah and as far as I could tell she’d loved it. It was expected that we were all going to go to Ramah and that it would be a wonderful Judaism affirming socially fulfilling experience. I was looking forward to it… to being at camp, to sleeping in a cabin with other Jewish kids my age, to writing and receiving letters, complaining about the food, singing songs, hiking, learning to row and canoe, making bizarre crafts to bring home… everything that I’d learned that camp Ramah was about. I was prepared to have a wonderful time at camp. And I didn’t, despite my best efforts. And this experience contributed not insignificantly to a not insignificant amount of pain and isolation in my life.

So when people say about Ramah and the people for whom Ramah doesn’t work that “nothing works for eveyone,” I have to think precisely about those people who are so often dismissed as the insignificant minority that we can’t kill ourselves worrying about. That is me slipping through the cracks. That is me slipping away from shul and from USY and from Judaism. That is me getting lost. And I think that one of the biggest problems that people like me have to face is, davka, that there are not enough people in charge to think “that is me.” It’s always an experience of “that is an Other whom I do not understand or relate to” and so they have little or no incentive or inclination or ability to be there for that person, to help them though the experience, to figure out how to MAKE IT WORK for them.

So I think what this means is that I have to work at Ramah. If I can be that person to one camper, if I can be that “this is me” for one young Jewish kid lost in the crowd, then that will be a significant and worthwhile thing. For every kid that we don’t dismiss, that we can catch as they start to fall through a crack in the system, is as though we have saved Judaism in its entirety.

Wednesday we went on a field trip to a museum on the border between East and West Jerusalem, formerly the border between Israel and Jordan. It is called Museum on the Seam in English, מוזיאון על התפר in Hebrew. It calls itself a socio-political art museum. We haven’t had a whole lot of discussion about how we all felt about it. It’s kind of difficult to describe on the whole, but the current exhibition is called Bare Life. From the website:

Bare Life is the third in a series of exhibitions on themes of human rights that we are presenting at the Museum. This exhibition aims to touch upon the increasingly unraveling seam between deviant states and normative states, and to point resolutely at the place where the temporary emergency situation turns into a legitimized ongoing situation that in the end leads to a paranoia of suspicion and to the use of violence to re-establish public order.

A couple of people have talked to me about liking or not liking the museum, liking or not liking the art, liking or not liking the message. I found myself unable or unwilling to express or admit to, even to myself, a solid opinion on the content. I was very aware, as I wandered though the exhibits, of an analytical aloofness that completely overtook me. I found myself not judging the art or its message, but merely decoding, dissecting, pulling out from each image the message that the artist and/or curator seemed to be putting forth and… doing nothing with it. I thought a great deal about the manipulative nature of art, and the resultant roles of responsibility of the artist and viewer. Art by its nature, tends to elicit emotional reactions in people. It is visceral. Political art seeks to bypass reason and go for the jugular, to reach the opinionated part of the mind without the messiness of the critical faculties getting in the way, slowing it up, blocking it out. I hate when people use the word “powerful” with regards to most things, but especially with art. In certain contexts at least, the “power” to which people refer is a combination of the artist’s skill at manipulation of the audience and the audience’s ability or willingness to be manipulated. It is the meeting place of the speaker’s strength and the receiver’s weakness.

There are times when I do not mind, or when I even like to be manipulated. There are certain media, certain contexts, in which I want a feeling to be elicited from me. But I resent it when it is overt, and moreso when it seeks to persuade in a context which should be subject to critical examination rather than emotional reactionism.