by Meir Hoberman
I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first summer at URJ 6Points Creative Arts Academy. In my own childhood, I wasn’t the kind of kid who thrived at summer camp. I was a quiet, noncompetitive, artsy kid, still years away from discovering the language to articulate the complex intersections of Jewish, trans, and neurodivergent identities.
Within my first days at CAA, I knew this was going to be a different experience. CAA describes itself as “Jewish. Arts. Camp.” The idea is to keep each element in balance. Campers at CAA choose an arts major, one of a list of arts ranging from theater, dance, and multiple music disciplines—the “loud arts”—to the “quiet arts” such as creative writing, photography, and visual art. As the creative writing mentor, I would be helping campers who chose to major in writing to develop their voices, expand their repertoires, and produce a final, polished piece to print in each session’s chapbook and to read on the night of Showcase—the last night of each session when campers from every major display a taste of the skills they’ve been developing over the two week session.
In the leadup to Shabbat, though, the arts mentors guide the campers to create “offerings,” interpretive reimagining of Friday night prayers, and the campers are free to experiment with other majors, whether they have any skill or experience in that art form or not. It was the perfect antidote to color war, to being chosen last for kickball. The atmosphere was supportive and celebratory.
This isn’t by accident. The environment at CAA is carefully curated to support the campers who might feel the way I did at other camps. Quiet areas and regulating tools are available outside every activity. Camper care staff distribute earplugs at song sessions so that sound-sensitive campers can participate. Campers express relief at testing their first coming-out experiences in supportive, celebratory spaces. Even the necessary athletic activities are “kinesthetic arts” like yoga and dance games, not team-based projectile sports. Over and over, fellow staff and clergy faculty members said the same thing: “If only this kind of camp had been an option when I was younger.”
Finding this space as an adult was a gift to my child self. All those same attributes that made me an awkward, uncomfortable child were the tools that made me an accessible role model as an Arts Mentor. Creating Shabbat offerings presented opportunities to model centering Disabled access to Jewish leadership. A question about b’nai mitzvah and changing pronouns prompted a lively conversation about the spaces where Jewish and queer identities come together, and one quiet evening two campers pulled me aside for a quiet conversation about grief, healing, and poetry.
Throughout all of this, campers explored new skills and reworked old ones, and produced incredible pieces of art. Campers wrote heartfelt poems about mental health recovery or recent loss, humor pieces with unexpected emotional turns, fantasy scenes populated by searing phoenixes or sentient fungi, and slice-of-life scenes of friendship between sorcerers and werewolves. I gave prompts like “What is Shabbat like on your spaceship” and “Imagine an unusual place to host a bar/bat/bet mitzvah celebration.” I introduced poetic forms ranging from villanelles and sestinas to forms found in biblical poetry or in piyyutim (Jewish liturgical poems) and campers took off with enthusiasm. Showcase at the end of each session couldn’t have been more aptly named, as each camper showed the very different and beautiful pieces each of them had created.
