Culture is defined as the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, and arts. Treat your camp community and yourself with a tasty, artsy, Israeli specialty track that will spark some creativity and interest in your Israeli Culture sessions at camp. You will make ice cream inspired by Golda Meir, transform the graffiti art of Tel Aviv into a social action program, and investigate the heritage of Bagel vs. Pita!

Israel Opens Culture Shows for People with COVID

Desktop Artists During COVID

Our interconnected world is full of wonders big and small which we often pass by unnoticed. Cultivating awareness helps us deeply enjoy the moment, feel gratitude, and deal with difficult feelings. But Jewish mindfulness doesn’t stay in the mind – it connects us to each other, reminds us of our One-ness, and can even inspire justice. How can we harness the magic of camp to gift these powerful tools to our campers, and use them ourselves to enhance our programs and camp community? In this track we will make spiritual practice accessible to radically change our attitudes, enhance our empathy, and even heal the world. Let’s engage our senses, find our awe, and awaken our awareness to the awe-someness of now.

Do you like music? Yes, you do. Everyone does. Camp loves new songs and parody songs, and every song that was ever written was written by someone, like you! In this specialty track, we will learn techniques to unlock and reveal the hidden songs inside of us. This track is for everyone, not just “musicians.” If you have never written a melody and are open to changing your story, then this track is for you. We will record our songs and there will be lots of opportunities for collaboration.

There’s something spicy about Israel, and it’s not the falafel. With increasing political polarization and campaigns such as “you never told me,” it might feel like the Jewish State is becoming more of a divider than a unifier. In an effort to elevate Israel at camp, we’ll explore how to use values-based language so that the “spiciness” furthers the Israel conversation instead of shutting it down. This workshop is geared toward camps that want to develop a more nuanced approach to Israel programming, address some of the political elephants in the room, and explore multiple narratives in the Land of Israel.

Torah reading may be the stuff of b’nai mitzvah kids’ aspirations (or nightmares), or the thing adults snooze through in shul, but our weekly Torah reading began as a radical public performance. What can actors (and audiences) teach us about how to bring awe to the experience of retelling our Torah stories in its public reading (and hearing)? In this session, we’ll explore the innovative history of the weekly public Torah reading that’s a cornerstone (ahem) of our services. We’ll experience the tools actors use to make a deceptively simple story crackle with possibility and personal connection. You’ll never read (or hear) Torah the same way again. (Experience reading or hearing Torah not necessary.)

Love Greta Thunberg? Wonder how to do her work at camp? Jewish tradition offers us wisdom, tools, and spiritual resilience to take on this existential challenge. We will take a look at the reality of the climate crisis and build skills and ideas to take back to our work at camp and in the world. No matter where you are with climate change – whether you don’t want to face it or you’re already on board to fight it – this session is for you. We need every person to make – and be – this change, together.

The number seven shows up *everywhere* in Jewish tradition, representing a sense of wholeness, peace, and completion. Seven heavens, seven years in the sabbatical cycle, seven wedding blessings, seven patriarchs & matriarchs, and of course the seven days of Creation that becomes seven days of the week, just to name a few. In this session we’ll explore what is so special about this number and model several practices for experiencing the cycle of seven through embodied practice both during Shabbat and throughout the week. All bodies welcome!

Shabbat is often associated with ingrained behaviors, most of them “don’t”s. Don’t turn on lights, Don’t use your phone. Can we harness the power of habit and traditional imperative to create our own, personal, Shabbat “yes”es? We’ll explore the nature and science of habits, as well as the deeper goals inside some of the traditional Shabbat “don’t”s. Together, we’ll find some personal, positive habits we want to experiment with (privately) to enhance our sense of Shabbat and see if we can make a “yes” as reflexive as a “no.”

“Why do I have to go to Shabbat services?” We might have heard this question from a camper or counselor before. In this master class, we will examine the Why – WHY do we have prayer and Shabbat experiences at camp? From these discussions, we will develop a plan for how we’re relaying that message to our camp communities. This work will help us identify how we can create a sense of shared ownership over the soul of camp, and how we can create a brave space for exploring not just belief, but who each member of our camp community is as a person.

At the heart of text study is simply the practice of being in conversation with someone else’s creation. We get to explore and connect with another person’s mind and heart, and even better, we get to do that together. Judaism is rooted in parsing, arguing with, learning from, and reinterpreting the stories, laws and other texts that have formed our history and tradition. And what’s especially cool is that we can do all of that with whatever texts we want, from Octavia Butler to the Muppet Show to a Bernie Sanders meme. In this session, we’ll travel the limitless universe of text and the many wonderful conversations we can have across time and space.