Helen Betya Rubinstein
For fear of extinction
In the summer of 1997, the director of my Southern Jewish sleepaway camp, Macy B. Hart, strolled around in a T-shirt printed with a twenty-year-old photo of himself pulling his daughter in a wagon. Above the photo were the words CHANGE IS NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD. And on the back, CHANGE IS JUST CHANGE.
Nobody knew where the saying came from, but that summer we repeated it like a proverb, like wisdom passed down through the ages. After lunchtime announcements, before dismissing us to rest hour and canteen, Macy would stand on the wooden block in the center of the dining hall (“Can y’all hear me?” he’d ask, switching off the mic) and call out, “Change is neither good nor bad . . .”
To which the whole camp would respond, “CHANGE IS JUST CHANGE.” In chorus, we pronounced just the way Macy did, juuuust—in mockery or because so many campers shared his accent, I was never sure. Like the saying about change, any of us could recite the region Jacobs Camp represented (Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee), and when we sang “Proud Mary” at dinnertime song session, the dining hall was evenly divided between those who screamed after “Memphis” and those who screamed after “New Orleans.”
I belonged in the latter group, but only because my parents had moved there from New York when I was four. I’d been twelve—old already, in camp terms—the first time I sat in the outdoor shelter called the Oolam to hear Macy’s annual welcome-to-camp speech, which began, always, with a state-by-state roll call: “Who’s from Louisiana? I can’t hear you”—and so on. “Now, I want y’all to take a good look at who’s sitting next to you, and behind you, and in front of you. You might not know them now, but this summer, that stranger sitting beside you could become your best friend. You’re going to get to know that person in a way you don’t get to know your friends from home. Why? Because Henry S. Jacobs Camp isn’t like any other place in the world. There’s something here you can’t find anywhere else. Who can tell me what it’s called?”
“Jacobs magic,” a nine- or ten-year-old veteran would call out.
“Jacobs magic,” Macy repeated. “I feel it already. And I don’t just mean you’ll find your best friend for the next four weeks, or the next year, or even the next ten years. I mean your best friend for life. Every year, campers at this camp, sitting right here in this Oolam in Utica, Mississippi, meet people they stay friends with for the rest of their lives. They meet people who will understand them in ways no one else will, because the people in this Oolam are all Jews from the South, just like you. In fact, you might be sitting beside your future wife or husband right now.” Here some of the younger kids would giggle, while through the bank of counselors standing in the back, all of whom were former campers and most of whom were either dating each other or wanting to, there spread a special hush. “That’s not a joke,” Macy said. “We’ve had plenty of people meet at this camp and get married. Raise your hand if one of your parents went to Jacobs Camp. I want you to notice how many hands are up in this room. Now raise your hand if two of your parents went to Jacobs. See that? . . . Jillian, where’s your hand? Matthew . . . ? Pay attention, look around. This summer, I want you to get to know everyone you can, because you never know who that lifelong best friend will be. All right? Now, let’s see . . . Did I forget anything?”
A few kids would shout, and Macy gave his cue: “What?”
“DON’T WASTE A MINUTE!” the scream resounded. This was the gospel to be invoked throughout the session—not too often, but whenever table-wiping or song session got a little sloppy.
“What’s that?”
And so the summer kicked off.
I hadn’t felt immediately a part of things, that first year—I hardly ever said y’all, didn’t yet know what a Puckeroo Pop, a redbug, or Tzofim was; had not yet memorized the camp zip code or the pattern of postcard and letter days. By 1997, though, I believed in Jacobs magic the way I believed in God. In fact, I believed they were one and the same. I could trace my spiritual epiphany to a single evening program, a lesson on the civil rights movement that had culminated in eighty middle-school-aged campers roller-skating around the hot, yellow-lit gym. Bob Dylan was playing—this also happened to be the first time I was ever conscious of listening to Bob Dylan—and we all wore tie-dyed T-shirts we’d borrowed or brought from home. Two counselors stood beside the water fountains (to count seven Mississippis during our water breaks so that nobody drank too little or too much), and two beside the giant fan (to make sure no one hogged the roaring wind for its voice-distorting or shorts-inflating properties). Nothing exactly happened, that night, to make me believe, suddenly, forcefully, in Jacobs magic and in God. But I remember laughing along with everyone else at the line “Everybody must get stoned” without quite knowing why—a kind of surrender—and then, somewhere in the usual haze of sun-and-chlorine-bred exhaustion, realizing: this was Jacobs magic. And: this must be God.
Like most of my friends, I was faithful to the nebulous spirituality we’d absorbed. Spirit, or ruach, was not only for all-camp prayer services, but also for song sessions and Frisbee games; it included leaving enough birthday cake for the fifteenth girl whenever a single slice got passed round the table, and listening respectfully even to the least-liked girls at “cabin prayers” (which were not prayers at all, but a chance for every camper to tell about her day in turn). Our ruach was rooted in the conviction that even the littlest things—like the way you’d smile knowingly at your cabinmates during the line of the Birkat that sounds like I swear I lost my bra—had been around forever. To us, then, Macy’s new T-shirt barely contained its ominous note. If change was JUST CHANGE, why did we need slogans and shouting about it? The camp’s last remaining “old cabins” had been torn down before the summer began—we hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye—and there were rumors that because of its Christian overtones we’d no longer be permitted to sing “Tin Soldier” (it referred to “Judgment Day”). Soon, people said, we wouldn’t even be allowed to play Machanaim, the huge, dangerous game of so-called “Israeli dodgeball” that took place every Friday on the basketball court. Threatened with extinction, these became the objects of our heightened devotion. Once, campers had complained about the heat in the old cabins; now, we theorized that the lack of swamp coolers meant cliques were less likely to form, since roughing it through another hundred-degree naked rest hour brought cabinmates together. Once, we’d complained about the monotony of tossing red Machanaim balls back and forth; now, we ignored the heat of the blacktop at noon in Mississippi, and played until our vision blurred.
1997 was also the summer of my first real boyfriend—real because, unlike the sweaty-palmed relationships of previous summers, orchestrated by friends who paired boys and girls with their social equals, J.P. and I were actually a bit in love. In letters to my parents I extolled his intelligence, his sense of humor, his musicality, and, most of all, his opinions. J.P. (short for John Paul; his father was non-Jewish and an alcoholic and had long ago left J.P. to be man of the house) was impassioned about everything, even the idea of opinions (You had to have them! Otherwise, what use were you to the world?). He loved the Blues Brothers, Miles Davis, the Chicago Cubs, and Jacobs Camp; he cared about politics and history, was protective of his two younger siblings, and sometimes worried about his mom. Because he was small, he was a bit of a mascot to the other boys, who might noogie him or lift him off the ground without warning, but he was a sport. We rarely made overtures to our relationship—every time I saw him anew I felt a squeezing shyness; every time we began to talk it was halting and unsteady—but once, when I was about to throw away a rainbow-colored doodle from some evening program, J.P. asked to keep the crumpled thing; another boy told me later that he had taped it next to his bunk. We claimed seats at the same table for Shabbat dinner, held hands in the giant circle of campers as we sang the mournful Hebrew songs that followed, and sat beside each other at Saturday morning services. Just being beside him could elevate my most private, prayerful thoughts.
It was after one of those services that J.P. suggested we protest the banning of “Tin Soldier,” refusing to stand for song session until it was sung. Maybe the t’filot had inspired us, maybe that’s why we all agreed. Shabbat services were held in the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, the only air-conditioned building we’d go inside all month, where we’d pray facing a window-framed view of the lake. Ours wasn’t your typical camp lake—it was too muddy to swim in and rumored to be full of water moccasins besides—but that only gave us more reason to love it. On the walls of the museum were huge black-and-white photos of families many of us knew from camp or home, lighting Shabbat candles or chanukiahs their ancestors had packed in the wagons they rode into Mississippi in the 1800s. Some of the kids in the pictures had become the counselors standing behind us, and some were still current campers; the youngest among us were not allowed to linger before the photos for fear the familiar faces would induce homesickness. The display was meant to emphasize our uniqueness as Southerners, I think, but it also contributed to a sense of our mortality as Southern Jews, alerting us to the fact that our community was already, and perpetually, on the brink of extinction. That summer of 1997, the idea made me pray extra hard.
Our counselors loved the idea of a sit-down demonstration for “Tin Soldier”; they were only a couple of years older than us and concerned about camp’s changes, too. But on the chosen night, as soon as Macy began walking toward us, rubbing a palm against the shiny bald peak of his head and frowning, they motioned urgently for us to get up: it was over. Over at the boys’ tables, only J.P. still sat, and I watched his counselor squat to talk with him until at last he stood too, but in silence, arms crossed. Later he’d insist that if everybody had just stuck it out, Macy’s disapproval wouldn’t have mattered. He couldn’t have punished the entire group, J.P. said. That was the whole point of a protest. One for all, and all for one.
We got a talking-to the next day anyway. As the camp’s oldest campers, Macy said, we set an example, whether we wanted to or not. If we didn’t stand for song session, neither would the twelve-year-olds, and then neither would the nine-year-olds, and then nobody would learn to sing Hebrew songs with ruach, and then where would the future of Southern Judaism be? He paused, making eye contact with each of us to emphasize his seriousness. With his thick mustache, bony legs, and perpetual tan, Macy could pass as anyone’s dad, though his own kids were too old to be campers anymore. As usual, he was wearing the CHANGE shirt. We’d recently discovered that the saying came not from Talmud or some long-ago presidential campaign (Eisenhower?), but had been invented by Macy himself.
“How come we never get to sing ‘Tin Soldier’ anymore?” some brave person ventured.
To our surprise, Macy answered that he didn’t know, and promised to talk to the song leader about it. But another week passed, then two, and the song didn’t reappear. We didn’t get to hear its familiar opening chords until the very last night of camp, after all the older cabins had conspired in ranking it at the top of our request lists. That night, the mere calling out of its page number in our songbooks was met with wild, roaring glee. It was as if the Beatles had just walked into the dining hall: we shrieked and threw our arms around each other, practically tearful with joy.
So go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend.
CHEAT A FRIEND!
Do it in the name of Heaven, you can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing, come the Judgment Day.
But on the bloody morning after… one tin soldier rides away!
It would be the last time we mimed the tin soldier’s fateful horseback ride. In the summer of 1998, our songbooks were replaced by new binders that lacked fingerprints or stains: the same songbooks, we were told, that the rest of the country’s Union of Reform Judaism camps used. Above the transliterations, there were computer-printed Hebrew letters, and “Rainbow Connection” and “Circle Game” were missing from inside. And then, in the year 2000, we were greeted at camp with this news: Macy had retired.
* * *
We were seventeen then and counselors-in-training in a program called Avodah, meaning work. Participating in the staff orientation had already brought its own set of unpleasant revelations: that the all-camp circle at Shabbat song session was orchestrated by counselors (I’d always thought it formed on its own, an uncertain miracle); that cabin prayers were a means of boosting campers’ self-esteem and served the purely practical function of letting counselors check in on their brood. But Macy’s news was a shock to everyone. He’d not wanted to alarm campers or parents before the summer began, he explained to the staff; hadn’t wanted to lose enrollment because things might be any different. The idea would seem egomaniacal if it hadn’t been true—there’d have been defectors for sure; my friends and I left that meeting bemoaning our indentureship to the pale, pudgy, lispy stranger who was to be the new director. He’d supposedly been a camper and counselor at Jacobs himself, but none of us had ever heard of him.
Though Macy had been the one to do this to us, and there were rumors he’d done worse, still we defended his superiority by reminiscing fondly about how he would personally grill four hundred hamburgers for the entire camp on Sundays, when the women who cooked our meals were off; the expert way he’d play the spoons at least once each session, awing even the littlest kids into silence; how he knew every single camper’s name and would stop you to say hi and ask after your parents with a heavy pat on the head. Every day, it seemed, someone attempted to reenact his annual lecture about how to properly flush the commode, but no one could land on that word the way he did—we all tried. Macy was the only director the camp had ever had.
That summer, the spelling of Oolam would be changed from the original campy and American spelling (with its exotic Native American feel) to a more standard and boring Hebrew transliteration, Ulam, which we were urged to pronounce u-LAM. There would no longer be camp-wide programming for Tisha B’Av if the holiday happened to fall during second session—no carefully orchestrated recitation of Jewish slaughter stories; no paper version of the Western Wall in front of which we squatted to scribble prayers that the summer’s Israeli Scouts promised to carry back and squeeze into the actual Wall; no huge seated spiral in darkness, windows papered over, the hushed remembrance interrupted only by stray hiccups and sobs, then followed by a somber, guitar-led rendition of a Debbie Friedman song or prayer.
The new director found this whole tradition too maudlin. “This is summer camp!” he pronounced; mention of Tisha B’Av was to be avoided. He introduced corn dogs on wooden sticks to the lunch rotation and stopped purchasing tomatoes from a neighboring farm—Macy had always urged us to enjoy their Mississippi-bred deliciousness, and I’d eaten those tomatoes with particular relish, each summer, until the crevices of my mouth were lined with canker sores. Under the new director, the camp’s tomatoes came in on the Sysco delivery, via a truck that could be spotted, once a week, parked gigantically next to the dining hall.
Worst of all, this new director had hired a total outsider—some kind of specialist from the Jewish Federation—to lead our group of Avodahniks. Eager to be liked, earnest, and a teensy bit dumb, Francie quickly became the object of our discontent. I’d never seen any of my camp friends behaving cruelly before, but it was hard not to roll your eyes or laugh behind Francie’s back at her soft voice, her midwestern diction (she was from Kansas and called soda pop), and the cautious way she’d tasted the Nilla-wafer-studded banana pudding. She herself had zero sense of humor. On the first day of camp, Alex and Danny had switched their nametags—just a joke, totally harmless—but when Francie found out, she’d called an emergency meeting about the need for honesty and respect. As the summer wore on, (tall, blond) Eli would sometimes claim to be (tall, blond) Steven when called on—“Who, me? That’s Eli”—and every once in a while Alex and Danny would claim she’d gotten them confused again, even when she hadn’t, so that she was never quite sure who was who. “Everyone told me you guys were such a great group,” she kept saying. “I just don’t understand.”
J.P. wasn’t in Avodah with us—his mom couldn’t pay for him to come to camp only to wash dishes and belay kids up the brand-new Tower. Instead, he’d come to work on staff, doing maintenance jobs and speeding around in a golf cart distributing mail with the two young black guys we all thought had grown up in a shed on the premises. (That wasn’t true, J.P. explained: just as “Macy’s house” within the camp gates was not really his year-round house though we’d long believed it to be, “Jonny’s shed” was not actually his home except when he was in a fight with his wife.) J.P. hung out with us as much as he could, but his position gave him freedom: he didn’t have to attend onerous meetings with Francie and could leave camp at will, driving the pale blue hooptie-mobile he’d bought with money from an after-school job, its bumper stickered with PHISH insignia and ERACISM flags. We called the car his Whale.
J.P. and I weren’t together anymore—I’d broken up with him that winter, for an older and much less subversive guy counselor—but we’d stayed friends and were closer than ever. I knew his real feelings by the way he’d stop mid-conversation, some nights, and announce he was exhausted, then walk away, like he’d only just remembered how things stood. I got mad at him for it once, but in response to all the “Are you mad at me?”s I could launch, he gave me the silent treatment. “He just wants you to stop asking him that,” someone told me, so I did, and things pretty much went back to how they’d been.
When he was hired, J.P. had promised that he’d not jeopardize the sensitive half-camper-half-counselor position his Avodahnik friends were in, and he made an admirable effort: for weeks, he refused to let us visit his air-conditioned staff cabin, and stayed silent when we groaned about how, whenever we encountered the new director on the road, he’d bustle past without making eye contact, too busy studying his clipboard to say hello. But when the all-staff singing of “Sabbath Prayer” to the campers before Friday night Kiddush was forbidden—“It’s a Broadway show tune,” the new director harrumphed, “not a prayer!”—J.P. could no longer remain so stoic. “I can see where he’s coming from,” he mused, shaking his head sadly, “but it’s a lot more than a Broadway show tune to us. And it’s not like it’s going to hurt anyone. It’s just a song!”
Soon, he began bringing alcohol back to the Avodah boys’ cabin, where they’d lock the doors and drink until they threw up. He introduced the guys to the Eighty Acres, the unused field where they could use someone’s SUV to drive donuts in the mud. And, on the night we got so incensed about something or other that we simply sped away, it was J.P.’s car that I rode in, with him at the wheel, propelling us down the curving country roads to I-55 in the angry dead of night. The boys were smoking pot, and I was sitting between them, seatbelted into the sixth seat, the one in the middle of the front, trying not to get too high from the unventilated smoke. We were giddy with the relief and transgression of being gone—thirteen of us had fled, in two cars—and the giddiness translated, in my case, to a hand on the thigh of each boy I sat beside: J.P. on my left, Danny on my right. Someone, probably me, had come up with the half-joking idea of my giving them both hand jobs at once, and now we were speculating about which one of them would come first and whether Danny (because I was right-handed) would have an advantage. We considered this, pausing to laugh uncontrollably, for a long time. One hundred five! J.P. called out every once in a while. One hundred ten! He was trying to hit 120.
I think it’s fair to say that we felt the fever of revolution—in fact, whenever I encounter that sort of revolutionary camaraderie now, my enthusiasm is tempered by the memory of our failure. I can’t remember exactly what triggered that evening’s fury, but this might have been the time Eli was scolded too harshly for sleeping through canteen duty; I do remember walking into the boys’ cabin and seeing him—Eli, who was from tiny Aberdeen, Mississippi, and got to be with other Jews only once a year; Eli, whose older brother had died two years back and whose non-Jewish mother was supposedly a MILF; Elah, with his football arms and his tin of dip and his sometimes-unintelligible drawl—I remember seeing him lying flat on his stomach with his face in his pillow, ears bright red, too upset about how he’d been treated to speak. Maybe this was the same day, I don’t know. But I remember that, back in the Avodah “village,” I’d used a Sharpie to write out a manifesto on a legal pad, people shouting out ideas around me. I remember handing off the finished document to J.P. who, drunk and inspired, stood precariously on a pile of spare plastic mattresses and read from the yellow paper in his best speech-giving voice. When he finished, he threw the pages to the ground and leapt off the mattresses, just barely landing on his feet. “We don’t have to take this!” he shouted, and we’d agreed, Alex motioning for everyone to join in: “WE DON’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS!”
“This camp can’t function without us!” we yelled.
Who else would belay the kids at Tower? Who else would open up canteen? Who else trudge to the office at 4:30 a.m. to run the wake-up show? Who else would keep in touch forever, sing with ruach, talk kindly even to dorks, uphold social justice in Confederate-flag-flying states? The whole camp would sleep through breakfast if we were gone! They needed us!
So we left. J.P. insisted he was fine to drive; he’d taken a cold shower once we’d all decided to go, plus he had the pot—certainly, he announced as I grabbed the wheel so he could light the pipe, the marijuana would balance out the alcohol: he was good. And I did my best not to worry—if anyone could be trusted, it was him. Outside the Whale, the pines of Mississippi beat their shadowy rhythm; we raced past eighteen-wheelers, pumping our fists to get a honk, then skimming back along the rumble line. Inside the Whale, with the windows now open and gusting a tire-and-gasoline scent, Sketches of Spain was playing; every once in a while, Danny or J.P. would murmur in appreciation of some riff, and from the backseat, Alex would reciprocate with another unbearably lewd remark. What would it be like to fuck Francie, he wondered. How she’d jiggle. How she’d moan. J.P. turned up the music, turned on the brights. One hundred five, one hundred ten, one fifteen. Mississippi whizzed flatly by.
In the fictional version of this story, we’d have driven off the highway that night, gone careening into a bank of trees; Jacobs Camp would have lost a dozen of its lovingly-raised young Southern Jews in a single July evening. In a way, I think, that’s what we wanted—to really stick it to them, Look what you did. As we hurtled down the road, potential headlines flitted through the darkest, least conscious parts of our imaginations: FURIOUS ABOUT CHANGE IN LEADERSHIP, YOUTH FLEE JEWISH CAMP; ESCAPE ENDS IN DEADLY CRASH.
Instead, we drove all the way to Memphis and ate at a Denny’s. “I fucking hate that place,” we announced to each other in the restaurant’s blinding light, over eggs and French toast far less appetizing than the breakfast soon to be served in our own chadar ochel. “I’m never going back.” No one had brought a wallet except for J.P., we realized, but as the working man among us he pulled out his debit card and gallantly offered to treat. “I’m never going back,” someone said again as we fumbled through the parking lot to the car—the statement was such a shock, it bore repeating until it felt true. “I’m never going back as a counselor or anything.” It would be true. But change doesn’t happen overnight, and when I woke up that morning, we were bumping into the Eighty Acres, pavement turning to dirt under the wheels. My head was on J.P.’s shoulder, the music had been turned down, and he was humming. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You’re not tired?” We’d left Denny’s three hours earlier. The sky was that eerie blue that precedes dawn, and in the backseat, at least one person was snoring loudly.
“I’m great,” J.P. said. He shut off the Whale’s headlights and shifted into neutral to coast as quietly as possible past the house where the new director was asleep with his wife. Each summer when we were campers, one evening program had ended there as a surprise, and Macy would make milkshakes for everyone to drink as we sat smushed together on the couches and the floor. Once every last camper had a straw in her mouth and was contentedly sucking away at vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate, he’d start talking about the history of Jacobs Camp—how he’d helped to found it in 1969, when isolated Southern Jews were in danger of losing touch with their heritage; how, of all the Jewish institutions in the region, this was the most important: the one where children could become a part of their community and learn to love the culture that would be an integral part of their future.
We might have been only ten or twelve years old at the time, but we understood it then, just as we understood it that evening in 2000, when defecting from a changing camp seemed the only way to maintain the integrity of our ties to each other. Later we’d hear rumors that Macy’s retirement had itself been a kind of defection, a refusal to comply with the demands of the national Union of Reform Jews. Later, Macy’s betrayal would bleed into smaller, more private betrayals—our failure to return to camp would weaken our friendships and make us lose touch with one another. But if you’d asked me then whether J.P. and I would still be friends ten or fifteen years down the line, I’d have sworn the answer was yes—the prospect of not knowing him would have seemed so ridiculous. That morning, he and I were the only ones awake in the car, and I still remember how he gestured at the familiar little body of water before us, smoky and pale in the morning haze; how he told me to look at that lake, and pronounced it beautiful.
Helen Betya Rubinstein’s essays and fiction have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere, and her opinions in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jewish Currents, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times.