A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A few months ago, on a busy Friday evening, I was moving a little too quickly. Dinner was coming together, the week had been long, and like many families we were trying to move from the rush of the workweek into Shabbat. In the middle of it all, my son stopped me.

“Are we doing Shabbat dinner?”

He asks this almost every week, and the honest answer is that I do not always want to go through the whole routine. After a long week, tired and behind, I could let the evening pass like any other. But my son would not let that happen. He wants the candles, the prayers, the singing, and the challah. He wants Friday night to feel different, and I appreciate every time he holds firm.

Not long ago, I was the one teaching him these rituals. Now there are moments when he reminds me.

That reversal did not happen overnight. But looking back, I can trace much of it to one place: Jewish camp.

Like most parents, I am excited to send my children to camp this summer for all the usual reasons. They will spend time outdoors, make friends, gain confidence, and enjoy a break from the screens that increasingly dominate childhood. They will come home exhausted and happy.

But this year I find myself thinking less about recreation and more about formation.

For years, I thought about Jewish camp the way many parents do. It was a place where children could have fun while strengthening their Jewish identity. That seemed important enough. What I did not fully appreciate was camp’s ability to transform Jewish life from something a child knows into something a child loves.

I have watched that transformation unfold in my son.

Before camp, he knew he was Jewish and went to synagogue. He knew the holidays, the stories, and many of the prayers. He knew that family members lived in Israel. He understood the basics of Jewish life in the way many Jewish children do.

What camp changed was not what he knew. It changed what he loved.

The first signs were small. He came home singing – sometimes a camp song, sometimes Israeli music. Before long, songs by Omer Adam, Idan Raichel, and Yehoram Gaon had become part of the soundtrack of our home. He showed me the Israeli dances he had learned and taught me gaga, the game his camp played. Hebrew phrases appeared naturally in conversation. References that once required explanation suddenly did not.

Then came the questions. Was this food kosher for Passover? Why did we do certain things on Shabbat and not others? When were we finally going to visit Israel? These were not assignments. Nobody was testing him or asking him to demonstrate what he had learned. The questions emerged from genuine curiosity and growing attachment.

Then something else happened. He wanted to lead.

If it was Friday night, he wanted to make Kiddush and recite the blessing over the challah. He noticed when we reached for a shorter version of a prayer instead of the full one. He caught me when I hurried through a blessing or skipped a verse, and he was not shy about correcting me. At the Passover Seder and at holiday meals, he became the one explaining the food – what each symbol on the Seder plate meant, why we dip apples in honey at the new year, why some meals turn to dairy.

What stopped me was not any single moment, but what all of them revealed.

He was no longer participating because adults were directing him. He wanted it for himself. No parent can manufacture that feeling.

The change in him is everywhere now. My son proudly displays a large Star of David on his backpack – a choice he made himself. He talks openly about Jewish holidays with classmates. During Passover, he brought kosher-for-Passover food to school and eagerly explained why. He dreams aloud about Israel – meeting his cousins in Tel Aviv, eating the food along the coast, hiking Masada, swimming, standing at the Western Wall. He speaks about Jewish life not with hesitation or self-consciousness, but with confidence.

That confidence matters now in a way it would not have a decade ago. He attends a secular school, and like most American Jewish children he moves through a world in which Jewish identity is one identity among many. Yet camp has helped make that identity something he embraces openly rather than privately.

As a professor, I spend much of my life thinking about education. We often focus on information: facts, concepts, theories, and ideas. Those things certainly matter. But education is also about formation: the shaping of habits, attachments, commitments, and ways of seeing the world.

Watching my son return from camp has reminded me of that distinction. Camp did not simply teach him more about Judaism. It helped form him as a Jew.

That formation happened through participation rather than instruction. Through songs and prayers. Through friendships and routines. Through living in a community where Jewish life was not an occasional activity but an everyday reality.

That, I increasingly believe, is what Jewish camp does so well. For a few weeks, Jewish life is not something children study. It is the culture itself. Shabbat is not a lesson; it is simply what everyone does. Hebrew is not an academic subject; it is part of daily life. Jewish traditions are not explained from a distance. They are lived.

And here is what I find most striking. His camp, Camp Yomi, is a day camp. My son came home every evening. There was no isolated campus and no complete immersion away from family life.

Yet camp still reshaped how he thought about Jewish life.

The lessons did not stay at camp. They came home with him – in the songs he sang, the Hebrew phrases he used, the questions he asked, and eventually in the way he approached Shabbat itself.

In recent years, much of Jewish communal life has been shadowed by fear. Parents worry about what their children will encounter in schools, on campuses, in workplaces, and across a culture that can feel newly hostile. Those fears are not imagined, and we cannot wish them away.

But a people does not endure because it understands what threatens it. A people endures because it understands what it loves.

Since October 7, much of Jewish life has understandably focused on defense. Yet defense alone cannot sustain a community. We can teach children about antisemitism. We can prepare them for hostility. We can explain the challenges they may face.

But we must also give them something they want to defend. A child who is only warned about antisemitism learns vigilance. A child who is given Shabbat, Hebrew, Israel, friendship, music, and community learns attachment. And attachment is what endures. That is harder to cultivate than vigilance. Yet I have watched camp accomplish it.

Like many parents, I expected camp to foster independence and confidence. I expected stories about games, friends, and adventures. I did not expect my son to come home talking about Shabbat. I certainly did not expect him to become the person reminding me.

Yet there are moments now when I look across the table and realize that something remarkable has happened. My son is no longer simply receiving the tradition. He is beginning to carry it.

As I prepare to send my children back to camp this summer – and as they move from Camp Yomi to overnight camps in the years ahead – I find myself grateful for institutions that still know how to nurture that kind of belonging.

My son knew Judaism before camp. Camp helped turn that knowledge into attachment. And for a people that worries so much about its future, that is no small gift.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.