When my parents came up to visit us at Camp Solelim, my dad looked around at the dead grass, dirt field, and tents and asked, “So What exactly do you do here? There are no ski boats? Where do you play tennis?”
“Dad,” we calmly explained, “we have really good discussions.”
“Discussions? I pay to have discussions?”
It was a simplified answer on our part, but if you’d like a longer list– we jumped up on our chairs after meals and sang songs in Hebrew really loud. We broke out into Israeli folk dances. We had canoe trips and five-hour hikes. Our Shabbats were the highlight of each week with prayers on the Rock or by the waterfront in our best blue jeans and white tee shirts. We’d come home exhausted, with hoarse voices and lives changed.
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If you were really good, you could be chosen to go into Sudbury’s closest laundromat and do the entire camp’s laundry. We cleaned our own bathrooms, served each other meals, and washed all dishes, cups and utensils by hand afterward. We loved every minute of it.
My friends at other camps asked the same thing as my dad, but in a different tone; “So what do you do there? Do you just pray? Why do you live in tents?” They would go on to describe all the luxuries of their decadent summer camps. They didn’t get Solelim and that was fine. It made me feel like I was in Meatballs, and really, it still feels kind of cool.
Let me tell you about these discussions.
One night we had an evening program where we were split up into groups and were sent to different stations of the camp. One station was the camper lounge. The lights were dim and one of the staff put on a song I had never heard before by Sting called They Dance Alone. A staff member explained that this was about the “Mothers of the Disappeared” in Chile, whose husbands, sons, brothers, were taken from them in the middle of the night by their own government, never to be seen again. When the song ended, they gave us pencils, paper and envelopes. We each wrote a letter personally to then-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and told him that we were in Canada, we knew what he was doing, and we demand these men be freed, unharmed and reunited with the Mothers of The Disappeared. Once we sealed and addressed our envelopes, we moved on to the next station. That was 26 years ago, and I still remember that discussion.
We were 14 and 15 years old, and Solelim gave you a good idea of what your responsibility was as a Jewish teen in your family, on your hockey team, in your band and in the world.
It took one non-Jewish boy’s camper application denied to a “Jewish camp for Jewish teens,” for a few former Young Judaeans to rally a petition for the camp to move forward as interfaith. They cried out “Segregation! Discrimination! Exclusivity!” Really?
Given the “discussions” my dad paid for, the Solelim I know would have rallied us to march side by side with people who experienced real segregation. Now it seems that everybody wants something to do with us, including the people from the other camps who just didn’t get it back then. Everyone is entitled to Camp Solelim because these people say so. This is an ironic parody of Jewish history, and we know how easy it is to do a battle cry against a small piece of land that a few faithful worked into a home.
Solelim is not anybody’s novelty-themed summer. My six-week summers were not so much Jewish education, but actually living Jewish life for real.
At Solelim’s 50th anniversary reunion a couple of weeks ago, I imagined what it must have been like for the first Solelim settlers to arrive at a dirt field with a dead lake in the middle of Nowhere, Ont. The vision it must have taken to think, “We’re just going to set up a few tents and make this our home. It’s not much, but it’s ours, and we are going to have some pretty awesome discussions here.”
Thank you Camp Solelim. Chazak V’amatz.
Jamie Greenspan still puts “Camp Solelim Leadrship Award Recipient 1989” on his resume. He collects vinyl records and still uses film camera. He sometimes goes by “James.” He lives in Toronto with his wife Mariana.
