Disconnecting to Better Connect

When I was a camper at Camp Canadensis, I was a camp director’s nightmare. I refused to participate in cabin activities, constantly found reasons to go to the infirmary, and on multiple occasions threatened to run away. One time, I even wrote my parents and told them if they didn’t come and get me right away, I’d run away. They still remind me of this any time I get too full of myself. Oh, the grief I caused them. Camp Canadensis is a camp for Jewish kids in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. It’s an eight-week program, no matter your age, and my four summers there were probably the worst summers of my life, or so I thought then.

Because of the duration of the session, there was a visiting day halfway through the summer. During the rest of the summer, campers were allowed to make periodic collect phone calls home. Maybe once a week, though it might have only been once every two weeks. Those collect calls never came soon enough for me. One day, probably on my way back to the cabin from arts and crafts, I found the phone room, a pad-locked room near the main office building, miraculously unlocked. Looking around to see that no one was watching, I snuck into the dark phone room, picked up a phone, and dialed ‘zero’ to get an operator to connect me with my parents. I pleaded with them to come and pick me up. If I were a camper now, and that had been my experience, I would have loved to have had a cell phone at camp.

Fortunately, I did not have a cell phone at camp. And fortunately, my parents did not come and pick me up, no matter how much it pained them to see me suffering so much at camp. Earlier this week, Mitch Albom wrote a piece titled ‘Cell phones at summer camp? Just say click.’ In it, Albom details the highlights of his summer camp experience. He was, I imagine, a better camper than I was.

Summer camp, he writes, “meant disappearing into another world. It was a world of woods and fields and bunks, a world without Mom and Dad, without friends from the neighborhood, without TV, without movies, a world where you wrote letters to communicate with your ‘other’ life.” Unfortunately, this is not always the reality at summer camps today. Camps are struggling with cell phone policies. They know how disruptive a cell phone can be to creating community, but they also know that the kids who want them are the reason the camps exist. Some kids, Mitch Albom accurately notes, even opt out of summer camp if it means being without their cell phones and other technology. But it isn’t only the kids’ fault.

Many parents, perhaps more than the kids, want there to be cell phones at camp. They want to be able to be in constant contact with their children. They cannot bear the thought of not having their children at their fingertips. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand where the parents are coming from, even though I am not yet a parent. Parents want the best for their children. Parents worry about safety. They worry about loneliness. Mitch Albom points out that “we can’t live in constant fear.”

But more importantly, he gets what really makes technology at summer camp so problematic: We can’t enjoy life while filming it. Mitch Albom expresses his desire for a ban on all electronic devices at summer camps. He says this out of fear, too, but out of a different kind of fear. He fears that kids are losing the ability to exist. Albom writes, “When we went to camp, we were in the moment. We jumped in the pool; we didn’t film ourselves jumping in the pool … Kids who have to give up their smartphones or computers for summer camp – thereby losing touch with Facebook – worry about becoming invisible. But they are erasing themselves from the real world every minute they spend in the virtual one. Kids need to learn that memories are not the same as storage devices and feelings are not the same as postings … You can’t absorb the experience if you’re constantly sharing it.”

For us, as Jews, this shouldn’t be a foreign concept. From the beginning, Judaism has taught us the value of disconnecting with our every day experiences in order to have a richer existence. In his book The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches about the unique quality of Shabbat. Other religions, he teaches, speak of holiness in space and in nature – sacred spaces. But Judaism introduced the concept of holiness in time. Heschel writes, “The sense of holiness in time is expressed in the manner in which the Sabbath is celebrated. No ritual object is required for keeping the seventh day, unlike most festivals on which such objects are essential to their observance, as, for example, unleavened bread, Shofar, Lulab and Etrog or the Tabernacle. On that day the symbol of the Covenant, the phylacteries, displayed on all days of the week, is dispensed with. Symbols are superfluous: the Sabbath is itself the symbol” (Heschel, The Sabbath, p. 82).

Though I may not have known it then, my disconnecting from the world around me taught me to focus on the world in which I was living, the world of summer camp, with all of its activities and all its anxieties. I learned more about who I was as a person, even if some of that understanding took years to develop. It meant that when I was a staff member at a summer camp, I was more keenly aware of kids like me who need to be encouraged not to withdraw from the summer camp experience to survive it, but rather understand that disconnecting from the outside world would help me to connect better with the world of summer camp.Just as Shabbat needs no ritual objects to be a holy experience, summer camp needs none of the sacred objects of our everyday lives to create meaningful moments and memories. Shabbat teaches us to disconnect with the ordinary world so that we may better appreciate it. Summer camp provides our children with the opportunity and the incentive to disconnect with ordinary existence so that we can relish the world in which we live and the people with whom we interact during the rest of the year.


P.S. If you made it this far and you are reading this at summer camp, you've missed the whole point. Put away the technology and go enjoy the summer.