Camp Avoda

I'm thinking of a Jewish camp for Ben this summer. In keeping with his atheist leanings, it's the last place he wants to go. I tell him it's reform, not so dissimilar from any nonaffiliated camp, with sports, woodworking, sailing, only with yarmulkas on Shabbat. And that's when he says no, that he'd rather be anywhere else for the summer, even back to the adult ed camp in our middle school which he's attended since he was six. "Aren't you tired of the pottery wheel?" I ask. "Even last summer you got bored there. How many eighth graders do you think will be going back?" We sit at the kitchen table and watch a sampling of camp videos online. I squirm at the highlight of the Friday night service, kids sitting in their crisp white shirts and khakis, arms wrapped around each other, swaying back and forth to Israeli guitar music. The camera zooms out to a clear, beautiful lake, then a closeup of the rustic Star of David made of boyscout-like sticks. It's a serene, organic Shabbat. Ben wants none of it. I tell him, it may be our only shot, considering these camps are giving a $1000.00 scholarship for any kid like himself, who goes to public school, who is Jewish and would rather be anything but. A self-hating Jewish tween. Ben is perfect. The camps all want him. We're actually being pursued.

Camp Avoda is one of the first to call. The director sounds sweet, tells me he went there as a kid, as does each and every camp director about their own camp, and that his entire family works there. They have sailing and woodworking with an actual industrial arts teacher on staff, where kids build chairs and tables, not a birdhouse kit in sight. It sounds kind of perfect. "I'll be visiting New Jersey on Saturday," he says. "I'd love to come by and meet Ben." I'm wondering which is the more looming disaster, the telling Ben of the visit, or the actual visit. Maybe this is just what Ben needs, to have this down to earth guy sit at our kitchen table and explain why this camp would be the perfect match. We set a date.

Later that night I get insecure. I'm all mixed up. I don't know what to do. I have friends who send their kids to Jewish camps, my friend Bonnie is one, but she's so, well, Jewish. Carol too, Jewish through and through. I'm looking for someone like me, an ambivalent Jew married to a non-jew, with an intransigent heathen child. A child who is too clever to just go along. Not that there isn't the blatant loophole of my own mixed marriage giving him carte blanche. But even so, how many of my friends have kids who are such skeptics. Who battle them till the entire family just falls asleep from exhaustion. I know if I honored all of Ben's requests, we'd back to square one, no Bar Mitzvah, no camp, heck why not just throw in that he'd simply hang out with his friends and play Black Ops all day on the computer. I do need to set some standards. Problem being, what are my standards?

In retrospect, years back I could have quietly slipped away from all things Jewish and joined up with the unitarian church in Montclair, NJ. Just me and other bohemian families, lesbian families, fellow lapsed Jews and Christians looking simply for a home, with a laid-back intellectual religious leader; someone who would recite a moving, thought-out sermon on a Friday night. Nothing kitsch like our temple's Rap with the Rabbi. A throwback to a kind of simpler 60s "Godspell" scene, sans Jesus, some acoustic folk music thrown in, a bit of Kumbaya. But the fact is, although I'm an ambivalent Jew, I'm a jew just the same. I feel most comfortable around Jews, and let's face it, my friends are mostly Jewish. In college it was Betsy (a socialist-leaning Jew, we'd play her mother's scratched albums of the Weavers and Pete Seeger till darkness filled our dorm room); in suburbia it's been Rona (grew up Orthodox only to turn her back and marry a non-jew from New Zealand); Richard, who got Bar Mitzvah'd but hasn't really been to temple since.

Not that living in one of the wealthiest Jewish suburbs in New Jersey has helped inject much spirituality into the mix. Maybe it would be different in, say, a quaint temple outside Seattle, or Albuquerque. But I'm here, in this spiritual wasteland, this is my home and time is running out. I really must put a stop to these vacillations. I'd better get my head around this Jewish identity crisis.