The Sabbath World (11 page)

The camp had been founded in the 1940s, along with dozens of others like it and scores of Jewish schools, in response to rising anti-Semitism in Europe as well as in America. Once America entered World War II, echoes of the Nazi attack on Jews began to be audible at home. Charles Lindbergh, the pilot and hero and right-wing isolationist, blamed the Jews for pushing America into war; radio talk-show hosts such as Father Charles Coughlin claimed that the Jews started the war to profit from it. Zionism went from being the cause of a small clique of radical intellectuals to being hugely popular among American Jews. And Judaism as a religious practice, which had lost a great many adherents to the jazzy freedoms of secular Americanness, began to gather followers back unto itself. American Jews, the theologian and sociologist Mordecai Kaplan declared, were returning to Judaism “like prodigal sons.”

Parents began to fret about teaching their children how to be Jews. Jewish schools were an obvious answer. Jewish summer camps were a non-obvious one. We can all imagine why a school would appeal to a parent who wants to teach her child some specific body of knowledge, or inculcate a particular set of values, but what made camps so attractive requires a little more teasing out.

It is no coincidence that in the 1940s experimental social psychology, whose practitioners invent dramatic and intense situations to study how groups affect individuals and vice versa, began to take an interest in camps. Nor should it be a surprise that American social psychology entered its heyday when refugees from Nazism began to arrive. The social experiment that was Nazism, the astounding transformation of ordinary Germans from enlightened-sounding democrats to regimented bystanders to mass murder, made it clear to everyone who had lived through it that there was such a thing as a group psyche, that it could turn individual psyches inside out, and
that it could be manipulated. (And then, of course, there were those
other
camps.) Kurt Lewin, who did more than anyone else to convince psychologists that they ought to be studying the workings of power within and among groups rather than limiting themselves to individuals—he invented the term
group dynamics
—fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler came to power.

Muzafer Sherif was born in Turkey and studied at Harvard, but returned to teach in Turkey. Before he got there, though, he attended lectures at the University of Berlin, where Hitler was in his political ascendancy. Sherif wrote extensively about the dangers of Nazism, and when his books were published in Turkey, technically a neutral country for most of the war, he was thrown into jail. Influential friends from Harvard got him out, and by 1944 he was teaching at Yale.

Lewin’s preoccupation was socialization—how individuals reconcile themselves to the mores of the group. His best-known study was of a boys’ club, in which he showed how different styles of leadership—autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire—can reliably produce entirely different kinds of groups. Lewin saw that the value of camps for indoctrination lay in their isolation, in their being cultural islands, which allowed them to create alternate societies without interference from the dominant society. Isolation helped minimize resistance to new and different ideas.

Sherif was curious, among other things, about how groups develop norms; that is, values and standards of behavior, as well as a sense of who’s in and who’s out. He answered these questions by staging experiments in actual summer camps. In 1954, Sherif and his wife led one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, the Robbers’ Cave experiment, named after the state park in Oklahoma that surrounded the two-hundred-acre Boy Scouts of America camp the Sherifs borrowed for their “summer camp.” Anyone who has lived through a summer camp “color war” will recognize the Robbers’ Cave experiment as an only slightly exaggerated version of the same thing. It involved two busloads of twelve-year-olds, all well-adjusted boys from similar backgrounds: lower middle class, white, Protestant.
Over the course of three weeks, the boys were made to form groups to which they became passionately attached, developing distinctive rituals and coming up with emblems, such as flags and ways of tying knots. Then they were incited to compete, which they did with ferocity and personal bitterness. And, in the end, they were led to make up. This last part took a long time and happened only after they were made to work toward common goals of great importance to all of them (restoring the camp’s water supply, raising enough money to rent a movie).

The Sherifs may have intended to make a point about how we learn to love, hate, and get along, but they also provided robust evidence that the summer camp—a wholly controlled environment in which adolescents dwell far from parents, classmates, and the media for weeks, even months—is a remarkably efficient instrument of psychological manipulation. One of the most interesting features of the Robbers’ Cave experiment has been pointed out by two contemporary social psychologists: The campers “perceived the environment as natural and had no awareness of the study or the staff’s manipulations.” The setting may have been artificial, but the participants experienced it as real; in social-psychological terms, it had high “experimental realism.”

I have always wondered why summer camps aren’t viewed with greater suspicion. Even plain-vanilla secular summer camps have their ideological agendas. As Abigail Van Slyck points out in her history of American summer camps,
A Manufactured Wilderness
, from the beginning camps were designed to fight back against the moral and physical degradations of city life. Camping has always been about counterprogramming to correct for some unsalutary influence.

Unlike the Sherifs’ campers, I made my counterprogrammers work hard. I skulked around the bunk, complaining to anyone who would listen about being forced to participate. I was particularly scornful of the thrice-weekly Hebrew classes, where my ignorance was publicly exposed, and team sports, where I was every team’s last pick. I was horrified when I learned that on Friday afternoons we marched down to the showers in our robes and towels and scrubbed
ourselves especially clean, then dressed up in blouses and skirts for Friday-night dinner. This was regimentation of the most odious kind. Plus, the girls in my bunk fought one another for access to our few electrical outlets and comparatively scarce mirrors. They wanted to blow-dry their hair into just the right kind of flip and apply the modicum of makeup they were allowed to wear. Then they’d try on one another’s skirts, swapping them in a round-robin so that they could appear to have new outfits each week, rather than just the one or two they’d brought from home. Hypocrisy! I thought. Didn’t these Jews know that excessive self-regard is a sin?

As the weeks passed, I began to soften. I liked being clean once a week, and smelling everyone else’s sharp clean smell. I looked forward to the meal, which featured challah and roast chicken and potatoes and cake, rather than the usual mess-hall stews and spaghetti, and was served on plates and tablecloths rather than on trays and bare tables. I got to know the songs and prayers well enough to bang on the table at the appropriate moments, even if I didn’t have the nerve to look enthusiastic or sing. After dinner there was Israeli folk dancing, which was cheesy and dispelled the charm, though years later I still hum the tunes.

On Saturday mornings, though, there was no loudspeaker blasting Israeli pop songs to wake us up. We were relieved of the burden of a formal breakfast. In the afternoon, there were hours of respite from planned camp activities, time in which you couldn’t do anything to win points against the other bunks. You couldn’t clean up your bunk, or lengthen your lanyards, or work on your group’s theatrical productions, or even acquire your fellow bunkers’ savings by beating them at jacks, my one good sport. All you could do was alleviate your boredom. You lay around and chatted or, if no one wanted to talk to you, you wandered off for an hour or two by yourself to marvel that the sites of your daily striving—the waterfront, the softball fields, the study cabins—could seem so pastoral in the absence of counselors and whistles and scoreboards. The Sabbath of summer camp, because everyone around you observed it, too, felt much more real than any
Sabbath I’d ever experienced in the real world, where my mother and my siblings and I seemed to be the only ones who even noticed it.

Because I spent so much of it on my own, the Sabbath was also the only day of the week in which popularity and the lack thereof failed to dominate my consciousness, when I didn’t have to pretend to be indifferent to status rankings whose minute calculations I apprehended in their utmost complexity. I could just
be
indifferent, at which point, of course, being indifferent no longer seemed so necessary.

So that was what I took away from camp at the end of the summer: the relief of my weekly respite from it. That, and something like a friend. My bunk’s head counselor, Marjorie, who was headed to Brandeis that fall, began giving me books to carry off on my Saturday expeditions. These were mostly fairly standard college-freshman fare, which means there was a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. One Friday night, though, she handed me her copy of Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
.

This is not a story about how summer camp made me a Communist, because it didn’t, although later, inevitably, as a teenager experiencing adolescent rage before the fall of the Soviet empire, I would fling Marxist-Leninist jargon at my father and conflate my own alienation with that of the proletariat. What
The Communist Manifesto
inspired was a fascination with the idea of the community that sets its face against the world and defines reality for itself. I picked this up from Marx’s riff about “Critical-Utopian Socialism,” which had something to do with people named Owen and Fourier. Actually, though this went over my head at the time, Marx was ranting against these men, ridiculing their utopian dreams as small-minded, counterrevolutionary, doomed to failure. To me, though, the nineteenth-century idylls he mocked sounded, well, idyllic, with names like “Home Colonies,” “Little Icaria,” “New Jerusalem.” I was coming across this not long after the heyday of the hippie commune. I’d had no idea that the hippies hadn’t been the first to come up with the idea. The utopias Marx described were like lively line drawings accompanying a dry, dull text. They made the revolution imaginable
and since I couldn’t seem to be a member of the community I found myself in, I wanted to be a part of that one. These were the
real
summer camps, the Platonic ideals (not that I knew from Platonic ideals) of which my camp was but a wishful shadow. They were genuinely communal, genuinely remote, genuinely unfallen from grace. In them, one might, on a permanent basis, achieve the kind of Sabbath my camp leaders were always talking about, one freed from the evil machinery of exploitation, rather than the corrupted, fashioncentric, Zionist Sabbath of actually existing Jews.

On the other hand, if you had to live among actually existing Jews, the New Hampshire summer-camp Sabbath seemed preferable to the August in Puerto Rico Sabbath. That fall and winter, I wrote my camp counselor friendly letters, telling her what I’d been reading, and in the spring, when my mother asked me if I wanted to go back the following summer, I said yes.

W
HAT
IS
THE
S
ABBATH, ANYWAY
? Y
OU COULD CALL IT A
RELIGIOUS
institution—most people do—but its association with religion is in part an accident of history. The Sabbath is a relic of the days when most collective experiences were choreographed by professional clerics. You’d be safe if you called it a
social
institution, since society is a multiplication of the bonds that people weave among themselves, and the Sabbath helps tie such bonds, like a sort of sociological loom. You might characterize it as a
legal
entity, which is how the
yeshiva bocher
, the student of the Talmud, is taught to think of it. After all, for the Sabbath to exist at all there must be a set of rules that ensure that people don’t work, and that those who don’t work won’t suffer for it. You might deem the Sabbath a
cultural
institution. If you wanted to make Sabbatarians of people who are fond of music and art, you would do well to explain to them that by setting aside one day in seven for non-employment they erect a temporary cultural venue for themselves, a concert hall in time. Or you could call the Sabbath a
political
institution. It makes the radically egalitarian claim that everyone—men, women, children, strangers,
and
animals—has the right not to work. The Sabbath
asserts the fundamental dignity of the human being, beyond his or her productive function.

But the Sabbath has another definition. It’s also a
holy
day. Thomas Shepard, a seventeenth-century American Puritan minister, is very emphatic about this: “The word
Sabbath
properly signifies not common but
sacred
or
holy
rest.” God said it from the slopes of Mount Sinai: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

If it strikes us as strange that this commandment comes before “Honor thy father and thy mother,” that’s not just because the Sabbath seems less germane to life today than does our relationship with our parents. It’s because the words “keep it holy” no longer make sense to us. When people complain that they find praying to be an empty experience, that senselessness is what they’re talking about. It’s weird to fill your mouth with words that have been drained of meaning; it’s like wrapping your tongue around a fossil. To those of us who live in a disenchanted, Euclidean world, the category of the holy feels like a superfluity, a drawer into which you might toss odds and ends. Sacred things are relics. Sacred words are abracadabra (the word is a parody of an Aramaic sentence describing God’s act of creation:
avra ke’davra
, “I create as I speak”). Holy days, once meant to open up the heavens for a glimpse of time on a cosmic scale, are now “holidays,” meant for skiing trips or preschool parties.