Camp changed my life. Maybe that’s a little cliché, but for me it is entirely true. And I know the same is true for so many others who have attended or worked at summer camps throughout their lives. 

Camp is a place where we are able to lean on each other, on our community, while exploring the deepest parts of ourselves. 

As a kid, I went to many summer camps and experiences: the local Jewish Community Center day camp, a Jewish sleepaway camp in northern Arizona, Quaker family camp with my aunt and cousins, and Showchoir Camps of America, just to name a few. I loved all of my experiences but never felt like any of them was the perfect fit for me to come back summer after summer. 

The summer after my junior year of high school, I was planning to attend Showchoir camp again, until my cantor told me about a Jewish leadership camp in New York. She helped me apply and find scholarships to be able to attend the monthlong program at the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) Kutz Camp. That summer truly changed my life. 

For a month, I was able to learn about song leading, explore secular music through a Jewish lens, meet other teen leaders who were excited about creating Jewish experiences for their peers and meet many Jewish professionals who had made working for the Jewish people their life mission. I came back from that summer not only energized, but ready with the tools and skills needed to create community through song. 

The following summer, I landed a job as a song leader and counselor at URJ Camp Newman in Santa Rosa, Calif. I knew almost no one when I arrived and quickly found that the community there was not only loving and welcoming, but loved to sing, dance and pray together. 

It was at Camp Newman that I grew into myself and realized the power that I held in creating and strengthening community by singing together. I met and worked with rabbis, cantors, professional song leaders, artists and more, and I got to see firsthand how their amazing careers were able to bring them back to camp to reinvest in the next generation. I certainly am one who reaped the benefits and learned from so many who I still call mentors and friends. 

My favorite part of working at Camp Newman, though, was the two summers I got to work with Hagigah (our high school arts session). Each camper in the unit gets to pick a major for the month, during which they spend part of every day learning and working on new skills. Some of these majors include art, dance, acting and song leading. I was fortunate enough to be the song leading teacher, similar to the program I had attended at Kutz just a few summers earlier. 

I grew as a teacher during those summers, learning how to pass on the skills I had learned to my high school campers. To me, that is the power of camp: Those who have reaped the benefits of learning as a camper often come back to share what they have learned with the next generation. 

These days you can find me spending my summers as the music specialist at Camp Emeth, Congregation Shaare Emeth’s day camp for kindergarten through eighth-graders. After spending so much time at sleepaway camps, I worried that my experience at a day camp wouldn’t be as deep or as meaningful, but I am glad to say I was wrong. 

It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter whether you’re going to sleepaway camp for 12 weeks or day camp for one week, the message is always the same: Camp is about the community and the connections we are able to make with one another, the connections that will sustain us throughout the rest of the year and throughout our lives. It might even bring us back to camp someday to pass on what we learned to the next generation of campers.

Lucy Greenbaum is the Music & Youth Engagement Director at Congregation Shaare Emeth, where she leads worship services, teaches in the religious school, coordinates youth group events, and works with Camp Emeth in the summers.