There is a cold bite to the air in the Northeast US that’s very much at odds with the blooming cherry trees and forsythia bushes. The wind has been whipping around my New Jersey house at night with an un-springlike vehemence. And maybe that seasonal incongruity is partially why it is so hard to believe that my kids will be going away to camp just about two months from today.
The cold makes it seem odd to commence all the “behind the scenes” parent prep work for camp: scheduling the physical checkups at the doctor’s office, sending all the forms in (if we count “mommy and me,” 4 of my 5 kids are going to camp this summer—that’s a lot of forms, people), getting everyone bathing suits and summer clothes in their new sizes…the list goes on and on.
But it’s time to start getting ready—and starting getting ready on the physical level can serve as a prompt for the equal necessity of emotional getting ready. Judaism’s calendar is very savvy about getting ready for momentous events. In the month before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Elul, we are supposed to take the time to devote ourselves to preparing for the new year. We do so through introspection and taking stock of ourselves, gauging how far we have come in the year about to end, and where we want to go in the year to come. And similarly, we are now in the Omer, the time between Passover and Shavuot, where we prepare ourselves for the holiday commemorating receiving the Torah from God. We anticipate the gift of the Torah, and take each day to demonstrate how much we want to take Torah into our own lives.
We need to not only start finding our Sharpies, but to start evaluating what we will be packing and what we will be missing as we start the countdown to summer. As parents, we need to take this time to talk to our children about camp. If they have concerns, we need to help our children to address them. Just as we wouldn’t send a kid to camp without underwear, we shouldn’t send him without the security that even if he will miss home, he can still have a wonderful experience away from it. And as parents, we need to look at ourselves and to evaluate how to counterbalance missing our children with encouraging them to take their first steps, however small, away from us.
Use this time to find web resources like Packing for Jewish Camp: 10 Tips and Packing Tips, Tricks, and Things that Aren’t on the List. Ask your camp for veteran parents in order to figure out what is the best way to pack and to communicate with your child – maybe you can even arrange a pre-camp playdate or two so your child will see familiar faces on that bus.
Camp may seem far away, but it really is just around the corner. The question is what we do with this time until it begins, and how we use it to best prepare our children and ourselves.
Rosh Hashanah
Pronounced: roshe hah-SHAH-nah, also roshe ha-shah-NAH, Origin: Hebrew, the Jewish new year.
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
