The Price Of Growth

By: Yochanan Gordon

School is out, and the struggle to get our kids out of the house and on their way to sleepaway camp is very real. The good news is that by this point, the feeling is often mutual.

We received a letter to the editor the other day from a mother unloading about the pressure of balancing a full-time job while simultaneously entertaining her children during those nearly two weeks between the end of school and the start of camp, and then again at the end of the summer before school resumes.

While I have made my feelings on the scheduling known in the past, there is a certain ingenuity to the way it is structured. Parents begin the summer saying, “We hate to see you go.” By the time the buses finally pull away, however, the punctuation changes. The comma gets inserted after the word “you,” and before the word “go,” transforming the sentence into: “We hate to see you, go!”

Earlier today, I was visited by Rabbi Chaim Danziger, the Chabad shliach in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. He told me that the single most difficult aspect of raising a family on shlichus is not living through a war, nor enduring antisemitism. Rather, it is sending children away from home at the age of thirteen and, in many cases, not seeing them again for any significant length of time until they are walking them down to the chuppah.

Suddenly, those two weeks between school and camp—and again between camp and school—don’t seem quite so inconvenient.

One aspect of camp that I have not seen discussed nearly enough is visiting day. Specifically, the phenomenon of driving up a week or ten days later only to discover that your child somehow needs an entirely new supply of snacks despite the fact that there is absolutely no way they could have finished everything you sent with them just over a week earlier.

In all seriousness, however, the decision to send our children to sleepaway camp was a no-brainer for me. For my wife, it was not a decision that came quite so easily.

She spent only one summer in sleepaway camp. Most summers were spent traveling to Gibraltar to visit her paternal grandmother, with whom she would spend weeks at a time. Her brothers, who attended yeshiva, spent more summers in camp than she did, but nowhere near the extent that my brothers and I did—or that our own children do today.

Nowadays, in the Orthodox Jewish world, sleepaway camp is often viewed as a necessity, to the point that there are social service organizations that help subsidize camp tuition for families who simply cannot afford it.

One of the more remarkable marketing achievements of the past several decades has been the ability of what are ultimately for-profit businesses to convince school principals and educators to advocate for them with almost the same urgency as they advocate for yeshiva education itself.

Yet if we’re being honest, there is a great deal of truth behind the advocacy.

Sleepaway camp provides a safe and structured environment where children can expend energy, develop confidence, build friendships, and discover talents in ways that are often difficult under the constant watch of parents, siblings, and teachers.

Many children find their singing voices in camp. Others discover talents in acting, art, sports, leadership, or public speaking. There are children who struggle in the formal setting of a classroom but thrive in the more relaxed atmosphere of camp, where they finally find something that speaks to who they are.

In that sense, camp is not merely a break from school. It is a continuation of education by other means.

In some respects, camp is capable of accomplishing things that even yeshiva cannot.

I couldn’t go a full week after the Knicks won their first championship in 53 years without mentioning it at least once.

Following the championship run, Knicks’ captain Jalen Brunson was asked whether it was worth leaving $113 million on the table so that the front office would have the flexibility to build a championship-caliber team around him.

Without hesitation, he answered that it was.

For a Jew, winning an NBA championship is not the ultimate prize. Our championship is raising healthy and happy children who know who they are, who are emotionally and spiritually grounded, and who are positioned to one day build families of their own.

For many children, sleepaway camp represents their first meaningful experience away from the watchful eyes of their parents.

The Zohar compares man to the trees of the field. Just as a tree requires space to spread its roots and reach toward the heavens, children often discover strengths they never knew they possessed when given room to grow on their own.

That growth comes with a price tag.

And the true cost of camp is far greater than the tuition bill. There is the clothing, the luggage, the snacks, the tipping, the transportation, visiting day, and all the countless extras that somehow find their way onto the credit card statement.

Yet when viewed through the lens of what is actually being purchased, it becomes difficult to think of a better investment.

Because camp is not merely a summer experience.

It is a laboratory for growth, confidence, independence, resilience, and self-discovery.

And if a child returns home at the end of the summer a little more mature, a little more confident, a little more connected to who they are and who they can become, then every dollar spent was worth it.

That is the price of growth.

And it’s a bargain. 

Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.