I’ll start with a piece of Torah trivia with you. In the second of this week’s double portion, Matot-Masei, one verb appears more than forty times. More than forty. It’s the verb lachanot — to camp.

Vayachanu b’Sukkot. They camped at Sukkot. Vayachanu b’Etham. They camped at Etham. Vayachanu bi-Rephidim. They camped at Rephidim. On and on, stop after stop, as the Torah closes out the book of Numbers by recounting every single place the Israelites pitched their tents on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land.

In other words, the final portion of the book of Numbers is essentially Moses reading a camp recap.

And I don’t think that’s an accident. The Torah is obsessed with camping. We became a people in a machaneh — a camp. Before we had a Temple, before we had a homeland, before we had a single permanent address, we had campsites. Forty years of them. If you want to understand who we are, look at where we camped.

So you’ll forgive me if I take this parashah a little literary and talk tonight about my own time at a machaneh in the Poconos — our Union for Reform Judaism’s Camp Harlam — where I spent two weeks this summer serving on faculty. And like the Torah, when I come home from camp, I want to recount the journey. This summer gave me three moments I can’t stop thinking about.

Here’s the first.

It was my second Shabbat at camp. The entire community — hundreds of campers and staff — was packed into the chadar ochel, the dining hall, for Shabbat dinner. The room was loud in the way only a camp dining hall can be loud. And then, all at once: darkness. The power went out across all of camp.

For a moment, it was scary. Hundreds of kids, a sudden blackout, that one long beat of silence before the murmuring starts. Then the emergency generator kicked on, the lights flickered back, and the staff made an announcement: the power company was working on it, but until the power came back — probably sometime in the middle of the night — there would be no running water anywhere on camp.

You could feel the worry ripple through that room. Every camper, every counselor, doing the same math: no sinks, no showers, no — well, you get the idea.

Thinking about that moment, in Divine coincidence, a verse from this very parashah comes to mind: Vayachanu bi-Rephidim, v’lo haya sham mayim la’am lishtot. “They camped at Rephidim, and there was no water there for the people to drink.” Three thousand years later, in the foothills of the Poconos, we were living the wilderness.

But here’s the thing about camp. Dinner ended, and on a Friday night at Harlam, when dinner ends, it’s time for song session. No one canceled it. No one even considered canceling it.

There were no microphones. There were no screens with the words. There were just two remarkable song leaders, Pria and Joella, standing up in that dimly lit room, and beginning to sing.

And the room changed.

Hundreds of voices, singing from memory, arms around shoulders, the worry of the last hour melting into harmony. The night everyone had feared became a night nobody will forget. I stood in the back of that dining hall and watched two young song leaders transform anxiety into celebration, armed with nothing but their voices and our people’s songs.

Here’s the second moment.

One afternoon I sat with our Gesher unit — the seventeen-year-olds in the counselor-in-training program. Gesher means bridge, and that’s exactly where these teens stand: on the bridge between being campers and becoming the leaders who will raise up the next generation.

We were talking about their lives back home, and the conversation turned to antisemitism. I asked how many of them had experienced it personally. Every hand went up. Every single one.

They told me about the comments on social media. The “jokes” in the school hallway. The things said to their faces by classmates, by teammates, sometimes by people they had considered friends. Seventeen years old, and every one of them already carries a story like that.

Our parashah speaks to this too. Among its final commandments, Masei instructs the Israelites to establish arei miklat — cities of refuge. Places of safety, built on purpose, built by design, because the Torah understood something profound: a community cannot leave the safety of its most vulnerable to chance. Refuge must be constructed. Deliberately. In advance.

That is what Jewish camp is. Camp Harlam did not become a safe haven for Jewish kids by accident. Generations of our movement built it, brick by brick and song by song, so that there would be one place — at least one place — where a Jewish teenager never has to brace for the comment, never has to explain, never has to shrink.

But here is what moved me most about those Gesher teens. They were candid about the hard stuff, and then, without missing a beat, they went right back to planning their next activity, to arguing about which unit has the best cheer, to talking about the campers they couldn’t wait to lead. They have every excuse to be weary of Jewish life. Instead, they chose to spend their entire summer immersed in it, training to pass it on.

A city of refuge, it turns out, has a purpose beyond hiding. It’s where you refuel.

Here’s the third moment.

Every summer, Camp Harlam welcomes a mishlachat — a delegation of young Israeli staff members who bring Israel to the Poconos. This summer I had the chance to sit with them and listen to their stories.

A young woman named Nitzan told us about the weeks after October 7th. She spent them in Eilat, working with families who had been evacuated from the Gaza envelope — from the kibbutzim and towns that bore the worst of that day. She spent her days with children who had lost their homes, and some who had lost far more than that. She sat with them, played with them, helped them feel like children again, in hotel lobbies that had become a wilderness encampment of their own.

And now? Now she spends her summer in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, teaching American Jewish kids Israeli dance and Hebrew songs. Having held so much grief, she chose to spend this chapter of her life creating joy.

I keep thinking about her name. Nitzan, in Hebrew, means a bud — a blossom. It comes from the biblical book,  Song of Songs: Hanitzanim niru va’aretz, et hazamir higia. “The blossoms have appeared in the land; the time of singing has come.”

A young woman named for the first sign that winter is ending — and that is precisely the work she does. In Eilat, and now at camp: appearing in the land after the coldest winter, announcing that the time of singing can come again.

So what ties these three moments together?

Those of you who have heard me preach about camp before know that everything at Harlam runs on seven middot — seven character traits, drawn from the Jewish spiritual practice of mussar, that teach campers how to become their best selves. There’s acharayut, thinking of others. Nitzachon, perseverance. Rachamim, compassion. Bitachon, confidence. Tiferet, finding inner beauty. Binah, seeking meaning. When a camper embodies one of these traits, a counselor might catch them in the act and award them a bracelet. I’ve stood on this bimah in years past and talked about these bracelets and some of these middot.

I just mentioned six of them. And the seventh — the very first one on camp’s list — is the one that every story I told you tonight has in common.

Simchah. Finding joy.

Pria and Joella, standing in a dark dining hall with no microphones, singing a worried camp into joy. The Gesher teens, who know exactly what the world can say to a Jewish kid, choosing a summer overflowing with Jewish life anyway. Nitzan, who carried the grief of the Gaza envelope in her arms, now teaching ten-year-olds to dance.

Some people hear “Jewish joy” and imagine something naive — a looking-away, a pretending. What I witnessed at camp this summer was the opposite of pretending. These young people know the darkness intimately. They lost the lights, literally and figuratively. And they sang anyway.

That is why simchah is a middah — a trait to be practiced, strengthened, built. Joy, in Jewish life, is a discipline. We construct it the way the Torah constructs cities of refuge: deliberately, in advance, because we know we will need it. 

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a man who knew profound personal darkness, taught: Mitzvah gedolah lihyot b’simchah tamid — it is a great mitzvah to be in joy, always. He didn’t teach that because life was easy. He taught it because life wasn’t.

Joy that survives a night without water is practice for joy that survives far worse. Our kids are getting that practice, every summer, at camp.

I want to leave you tonight with an important reminder. None of what I described happens by accident.

The song leaders, the middot bracelets, the safe haven where a Jewish teen can finally exhale, the Israeli counselor dancing with our kids — all of it exists because generations of Jews before us decided that camp was worth building, and worth sending their children to.

Now it’s our turn. So here is my ask:

If you have children — consider camp. I can tell you as a rabbi, and as a parent, there is no better investment in a joyful, confident Jewish identity than a summer in the machaneh.

If you have grandchildren or nieces and nephews — plant the seed. Gently. Mention it to their parents. A grandparent’s voice carries further than you know, and sometimes a grandparent’s generosity is what makes camp possible.

And to every single one of us: know that Rodeph Shalom has scholarship funds to help send our young people to camp. Cost should never be the reason a Jewish child misses this. Use those funds. Support those funds. Every dollar builds the refuge, and fills it with song.

The Torah ends the book of Numbers by lovingly recounting every place we ever camped, because our tradition has always known: the camping is where we became a people. It still is.

Shabbat Shalom.