Speech Given by Jonathan Adam Ross at the UJC General Assembly, November 2002 

In the early spring of 1992, my best friend Robbie and I were told by our parents that for some reason, they had decided to give us what they called a “gift.”  Of course, Robbie and I spent the next few weeks trying to figure out why we were being punished.  To us, it was not a “gift” that we were going to have to leave home to go to some place in the middle of nowhere northern Wisconsin to pray every day.  And we went kicking and screaming on the plane to Chicago that would lead us to a 6-hour bus ride to dunh dunh dunh Camp Ramah in Wisconsin.  Four weeks later, we climbed aboard the bus back to Chicago kicking and screaming cause we didn’t want to leave.

In my years as a camper, I did all of the things one would expect from a Jewish summer camp.  I learned some Hebrew.  I made great Jewish friends from all over the country.  But most importantly, I was given the opportunity to grow up in an environment that gave me the chance to find out who I was as a person, and have fun in the process.  Yeah there were times when I got homesick, when I didn’t want to pray, there was even the time I got dumped by my girlfriend an hour and forty-seven minutes after she said “yes.”  I was twelve then, and I still hold a grudge.  But I gained a Jewish identity.  And I developed a relationship with Judaism that was solid enough for me to feel the freedom to keep exploring, trying new things, and occasionally veering from that which was taught as the “right” way to think about religion, prayer, and Jewish education.

Theater always played a role in camp for me, but I was in the minority.  Most campers went through 6 years of Ramah never even thinking about choosing to take the Drama Class.  Even though everyone had to be in the Hebrew musicals every summer (I don’t know if they had much of a sense of humor about it, but something about “Wilkkomen, Bienvenue, Shalom” seems funny to me), the extent of the drama department’s reach into Jewish education or even any relevance to Judaism was negligible if present at all in the goals of the program.  Having had Judaism, especially at camp, play such a large role in my life as a growing boy, I decided to spend the next phase of my life focusing on my other passion, theater.  I am an actor, and in all my wildest dreams, I could have never foreseen that I could do both theater and Judaism.  I mean, being in plays means acting on Friday nights, and in all my years of Hebrew school and camp, I never once was exposed to theater in a Jewish context that was anything but shticky retellings of the Purim story. 

But then some things happened that changed all that for me.  As I was about to finish my first year in acting school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I was given the opportunity to take over the Drama program at the camp that raised me.  I was a bit hesitant to be honest, because I felt that taking this job would mean that I was rejecting legitimate theater in my life, and that if the program was as ineffective as it had been for me as a camper there, then there really wasn’t much of a point to putting in the effort.  But I jumped in anyway, and nothing has been the same since.  Keeping the Hebrew musicals, for tradition’s sake, and also because they really are so much fun to do, the administration began to allow me leeway in changing how the drama activities were taught, in terms of curriculum and content.  And the program began to mature.  

I then was invited to become a Spielberg Fellow in Jewish Theater Education, a program by the Foundation for Jewish Camping.  The Righteous Persons Foundation, in their infinite wisdom, designated funds to the Foundation for Jewish Camping in order to create fellowships for Jewish Summer Camps to expand and enhance their Theater education programs.  And I was taken on an earth-shattering journey in my week-long Spielberg Training seminar by the incredible faculty who spent an entire week, from dawn till what seemed like a couple hours before dawn, each day, teaching twelve of us how to explore what is theater, what is Judaism, and what is the synthesis of the two.  And then helping us to learn how to take the kids on the same journeys of exploration (never answering those questions for them, but helping them to find their own answers).  The most amazing thing was that these twelve fellows, ranging in age from 20 to 43 comprised the most varied collection of Jews I’ve ever learned with, explored with, played with, or lived with.  Of the twelve, two were observant Orthodox Jews, two had never set foot in a synagogue before, and the rest were all through the spectrum in the middle.  But it didn’t matter where we came from because by the end of the week, we had realized that no matter our differences, we were all Jews, we were all teachers, we were all artists, and in fact, it became obvious that we were all family as well.  Everyone in that room, from the UAHC, to  the USCJ, to the Lubavitch, we were all family, and there was no better way to discover that than to learn together, to create together, to play together, and to grow together.

I was in shock after leaving the training week, because I had never before been told that theater could be used for Jewish education.  I felt so ignorant that I hadn’t seen the connection before.  But it makes complete sense.  You take a bunch of adolescent early teens, all of whom know politics from what they hear at the dinner table from their parents, ethics and morals from what they see their parents practice, and God for what their parents say about religion.  These kids have never really been given the opportunity to think for themselves, and then, all of a sudden, they’re lifted from their safe homes and thrust into an environment where for two months, there are no parents to dictate what they’re thinking, what they’re saying, what they’re praying.  They get to have boyfriends and girlfriends, they get to play pranks, they get to learn how to sail and make friends and most importantly, they get to discover who they are.  Free from the burdens of everyday family life, they get to explore themselves.  And what better way to spur self-discovery than through role-playing?  Through improvisation?  Through theater?  Only with theater can kids have a “pretend” conversation with God as if God were a fellow cowboy at the saloon, or the hairstylist at the salon.  Some people may call this sacrilege.  But I see it as the seeds towards developing a new generation of Jews who think for themselves, and have an even stronger relationship to God because they were given such an opportunity when they were young.  

Camps are so important for that reason, if nothing else.  There’s that old saying that kids are impressionable.  So while we have them, why don’t we give them the opportunity to impress themselves with their own discoveries?  Last summer, I started a program with the 14 year olds based on the Storahtelling premise created by Amichai Lau-Lavie.  Every Shabbat afternoon, a different group of 8 14 year olds would accompany the Torah reading each week by enacting a series of translations and modernizations of the text in order to make the story more coherent and more accessible to their peers.  We were doing the story of Pinchas early in the summer, and at the beginning of Pinchas, Pinchas skewers a Jewish man and his non-Jewish female partner, killing them because they are committing a sin of interfaith relations.  God praised Pinchas, and after the kids acted the story out they then led a discussion with the rest of the kids about intermarriage, and personal though it got, the kids were in shock that they were even allowed to talk about this stuff.  The discussion afterwards was fascinating as kids realized the modern relevance of the Torah and the parallels that can be made between our lives now and the lives of our ancestors.  That we might still be debating the same things makes the characters jump off the page of the scroll and seem more life-like to the kids.  They can now relate to the stories of old as their stories.  Not only that, but Pinchas being a portion that’s read during the summer every year, it’s a story that most kids never get exposed to during the year in their synagogue.  Storahtelling was just the beginning, and since then we have established a second series for the 15 year olds that takes place on Saturday evenings, and by next summer, we expect the 14, 15, and 16 year olds to all be writing new short pieces of Jewish theater every week to share with and teach each other.

Every summer, thousands upon thousands of Jewish kids go to camps all over the country.  And they’re not just there to enjoy some time in pretty scenery and nice weather.  They’re there because their parents believe that the camps do their kids good.  I am who I am because I went to camp.  I am who I am because I still go to camp.  As recently as last summer, Robbie and I still made the trek to that Jewish mecca in the dells, though this time we drove ourselves…opting out of the bus ride.  We weren’t the only ones.  Out of the 90 or so members of our edah (our age group - our tribe - who endured, over half have come back as counselors at some point over the last four years.  And many of us are still there.  I have just finished my studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Acting program, and just completed a premiere run of my self-written one-man show, Walking in Memphis: The Life of a Southern Jew.  But I didn’t just talk about where I’m from and my relationship to my hometown through my religion.  I talked about camp too.  I talked about the love I have for the way I was raised, and the people who raised me there.  I’m still growing and still learning, and I hope that all kids get the opportunities that I have had, to grow up in a Jewish camp, whether Beber or Habonim, Ramah or Greene Family Camp, summer camp makes lives.  Robbie’s and my parents were right…summer camp is a “gift.”