Summertime

Sermon, Naso 5785, June 14, 2024

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

June is busting out all over these days, a season filled with heat and natural light.  It’s also filled with children, now freed from school and plopped into one of the many summer camp experiences that abound this time of year.  If your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren aren’t away at camp, either as campers or as counselors in training, or as counselors, they are probably in some kind of summer day camp activity. 

I was startled the other day driving through Tucson and noting the astonishing array of different day camp experiences available.  There are baseball camps, swimming camps, art camps, basketball camps, choir camps, history camps, natural history camps, cheerleading camps, Summer Bible Study camps, botany camps, science camps, robotics camps, probably even stamp camps, for all I know.  I wondered about their prevalence these days: as a kid I remember Jewish day camps, and generic sports day camps, but not this veritable profusion of camps, kids, and college-age counselors.  Are there more kids today?

That seems unlikely—after all, I am from the tail end of the original baby boom.  No, it’s simply that nowadays both parents work much more frequently, and when your child gets out of school you need something to keep them gainfully—or not so gainfully, but at least safely—occupied.  Growing up we played outside all summer, over-the-line and running bases—we called it pickle—and hide-and-go-seek.  We sold lemonade at our own stand, picked buckets of apricots from our tree for jam, or walked over to the park for basketball.  We painted on big pieces of butcher paper, or built forts out of scrap lumber, or went bike riding—usually to the 5 and 10 cent-store for a new rubber baseball, since the old one had gone into the sewer—or we played slip and slide and sprayed each other with hoses.  Once a week, for a treat, we went to the zoo or the local kiddie amusement park or, if we were really lucky, the beach or the stadium for a baseball game.  It was pretty unstructured.  I sound old, don’t I? 

So, this week, after seeing all of these camps running in a synchronized schedule of instruction and development, my own childhood summer memories seemed idyllic—and probably idealized.  Certainly, it was not all waterfights and barbecues.  I’m sure we were bored sometimes, and I know we failed to gain all the skills we might have.

And the times I was raised in were not without challenges and conflict: I grew up in smoggy Los Angeles in the 1960’s, when breathing the summer air was a dangerous adventure all by itself.  And there were even more serious concerns: the Watts Riots took place nearby when I was 4 years old.  The smoke from those fires darkened the sky for days, in our line of sight.  I also remember biking over to the corner when I was 7 years old, in 1968, to the Women Strike for Peace center to buy a button that read “Draft Beer, Not Students”—which I don’t think I understood at any level at that age.  I’m not sure kids today get much exposure to that kind of stuff, and that’s probably all to the good.

But even so there was something light and unstructured and sacred about those summer days, as I remember them, and that feeling of waking up to a day of wide-open possibility is something I still miss, even now.

I thought of that going biking the other day.  We live, of course, in the middle of the desert, a unique place to evaluate what it means to live in a place of infinite possibility.  Every religious tradition seems to have a wilderness element in its founding, from the oldest to the most recent—we Jews just have the greatest concentration of those stories and historical elements.  But other religions have them too: Buddha spend years wandering alone; Jesus went off into the Judean Wilderness for an extended period; Mohammed was exiled from Mecca and was, of course, a desert dweller all his life. 

For us, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—especially Jacob—spent extended time in desert journeys, and the book of the Torah we are reading over these early summer weeks is called Bamidbar, literally “in the Wilderness”, and covers 38 of our 40 years as a people wandering in the Sinai Desert. It’s as though we are closer to God in the Wilderness, as though we can only encounter God in places with little water and less civilization.  In fact, only after we have gone into this physical desert, lived in it, allowed the desert to become part of us, are we even ready to accept God’s rule and role in our lives.

Now most people think that the point of this wilderness experience is to make ourselves empty and spiritually open, and in a sense that’s right.  The physical openness of the desert, the wide starry skies and the open vistas contribute to a sense of the enormity of the universe, the overwhelming appreciation of God’s greatness.  It is difficult to be anything but humble in the wilderness, and the first step to finding God is discovering that we are not all that matters. The desert is a symbol for emptying out, a place without structure, away from the ordinary and the routine.  We enter into the midbar to change our lives, to break with the complexity of more civilized life, to find a way to God.  In the desert we must slow down, limit our obsession with self, come to know the pleasure in the pause of difference, the stopping that breaks routine and teaches us to be open to potential.

Kind of like summer, that way, and not just because of the heat.  We discover that there is another way to live, and we come to realize that we can slow down or speed up at will, that God is there either way, in the wonderful realm of the always possible.

You know, we did something else back on those long summer days of my youth.  Every week we had Shabbat at home, no matter how busy everyone was.  We lit candles together—usually, there was at least one additional neighborhood kid with us—and we chanted Kiddush, and we sang the motzi and we had a Sabbath meal together, in which we talked about everything.  And we always talked about something Jewish during that Shabbat meal.  It meant that whatever else filled our lives that week—waterplay, or the Dodgers, or the troubling news of the day, or new friends—for that meal, at least, Shabbat and Judaism reigned.  It was fun, and interesting, and different, and although we had Shabbat every week in the summer it somehow seemed more special: more relaxed, slower paced, more time to talk about the kinds of things that really matter in life. 

The essence of Shabbat is simply this: taking time to appreciate the blessings that we, each of us, all of us, have.  Learning to stop and become aware of all that we are given, being conscious of God in our world and in our lives.  Each week Shabbat can be a kind of summer, a break and a gift.  Each time we make it a point to breathe and to be, we open ourselves up to all that is best in our lives, and in this remarkable world so rich in goodness, blessing and possibility. 

May this be, for each of you, a Shabbat of true rest, of difference, of peace.  May it be, as well, a summer Shabbat that helps you feel God here in the world, and in your own life.