Good Mo'ed

I am at Camp Isabella Freedman serving as Passover Rabbi for my seventh year. Over the last five years the new CEO has been tilting the Camp toward New Age. So now there are two yurts, one greenhouse, two farms and lots of twenty and thirty something free spirits. Also there's one mashgiach, about 150 traditional senior citizens, and me. The one constant here are the infinite acres of forests, leaves, branches, earth.

A few months ago Freedman merged with a Jewish Renewal camp called Eilat Chayim. EC moved onto the camp grounds and brought new administrators, new staff, and had new residential homes built, as well as a bookstore. The room that I've stayed in, in the building that they're always saying needs to be torn to the ground, has been inhabited full time by a young man named Ben who's here full time. Ben was kind enough to relocate and give me my old room for the holiday (even though he told me he was given no choice in the matter) (but I had no knowledge of that before I was brought up and shown to the old room with two walls of windows). In the photo above you see Ben loading some tables for the alternative seder that the twenty or so interns and workers attended while I ran the traditional seder for the dining room flled with 150 sweet and hungry seniors and their families.

I haven't yet taken the time to walk around the lake or around the neighborhood. Still, it's impossible to be here and not take in the beauty. (I love the word still, the way it means nevertheless and also means not moving, so that when I use it to mean the former there's the impicit poetry of the latter).

It's been rainy since I arrived on Sunday night. Today it snowed pretty hard for about an hour. It was during that time that a young man approached me with regards from my father (HSLABW) who he said he saw on Yom Tov. We stood in the heavy snow as this rugged fellow who does the landscaping camp told me that his grandmother is my colleague and friend Renee and that he had been in the Nevele with his family and my family (and about 1500 of his nearest and dearest). Ecosystems from different spheres overlap and interlock

in my universe on a regular basis.

A nice frum man taking a walk behind Brown House

a few moments before Y"T started.

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Besides taking in the scenery I've led the two sedarim, run all the minyanim, gieven hour and a half long classes on Passover in A New (Old) Light, Moses: Who Was He And Why Do I Care, The Wisdom of The Rabbis (Avot), and run a trivia competition. In an hour I'll be leading a workshop in acting and impov. There have been many comments and questions about ths class, but wonder who'll attend.

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I hope to do the counting game (in which everyone in the group has to count to 10 but when two people say a number at the same time the number must be repeated), maybe proverbs (in which everyone adds a word to come up with a proverb), maybe one word stories (everyone adds a word to the story), maybe Why Were You Late? (two people explain to their boss why they were late, but the two act as one and finish eachother's sentences when pointed to by the third person), maybe the object game (you have to keep assigning a new role to an ordinary object like a hat that sits in the middle of the circle), maybe the ABC game (a scene in which each character alternates saying a line starting with the next letter of the alphabet), maybe Ding (a scene in which you have to go back and change what you said every time the bell is hit), maybe freeze (scenes that are interupted and restarted - everytime someone yelles freeze they replace someone in the scene, assume their position and start a new scene), and basic scenes (give a setting and emotion and have people create a dialogue, movements, etc.), maybe a bit about the rosas and emotions (I think that's what they're called - assumeing a position and sttitude for the key human emotions as the basis for acting before there are words), maybe conducted story (each person pointed to by the conductor continues the story). Maybe a nap.

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Mo'adim LeSimcha/Good Mo'ed.