What I learned at Camp #5 - Take a Leap of Faith

-
 Riding the Zip Line at Camp Newman


Number five: take a leap of faith
While at camp this year Isaac and I got to try the zip line. A zip line is a long suspended cable that runs downhill—you put on a harness, climb to the top of a tower, and get clipped on to the line with a D-ring and a roller. You slide to the bottom of the hill, suspended in the air by the cable, cruising along at about 40 miles per hour, soaring over the trees, and when you get to the tower on the other side, someone lowers you to the ground on your rope.
It was lots of fun, but to get started you literally have to take a leap of faith. From the top of the tower you stand on a little platform and you have to jump off. You just jump and let the rope do the work. When it was my turn to hide my nerves at being up that high I asked lots of questions: What if I could not slow down when braking? How should I hold my hands? How hard do I tap the cable to slow down? Finally Tal, the young and tattooed Israeli woman who runs the zip line, yelled up to me, “Stop thinking and just jump!” I did, and the ride was great. Sometimes we need to just let go—to make the leap and have faith that we will enjoy the ride and land safely. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keep, Toss, Repair: Yom Kippur as a Day of Spiritual Cleaning

-
Image
"Altar Smoke" by Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik   I have a confession: I am terrible at keeping my car clean. Every so often I pull the car out of the garage and give it a thorough cleaning. Like any good Californian, I keep an emergency kit in my car in case of earthquake or fire — but I am really bad about cleaning and updating it. During my most recent cleaning I discovered that my emergency kit still contained diapers and long-dried-out baby wipes — my children are now 15, 17 and 19 years old. It seems that the only emergency I was equipped for was one that included time travel. I enjoy having a clean car, but I am not a big fan of doing the actual cleaning.  "Altar Flame" by Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik However, cleaning is what today is all about. Yom Kippur does not actually mean “Day of Atonement.” We often translate it that way: “yom” as day and “ki-PUR” as atonement… or if we are trying to be clever as a “Day of At-One-Ment” — but that’s not really wha...
Read more

Unstuck – Rosh Hashanah 5779

-
Image
"The Thicket" by Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik In San Jose, California, there is a small museum set in a beautiful garden; the front of the building is guarded by an army of ram-headed lion sphinxes similar to those found in ancient Thebes. It is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, and inside there is a replica of an Egyptian tomb which you enter down a dimly-lit flight of faux rock stairs, designed to create the illusion that you are climbing down into an ancient pyramid, not a museum basement. Life after death was a paramount concern of the ancient Egyptians, and the tomb is a testament to all the measures they determined one could take to ensure a happy afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed that whatever you depicted in your tomb would come true after your death, so every luxury imaginable was either placed in the tomb or painted on the walls.  The main room of the tomb was painted with a mural of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and depicted what the afterlife of the...
Read more

Science, Creation and Paper Midrash at URJ Sci-Tech

-
Image
When Isaac stood up and ripped a page right out of the comic book, he was met with gasps and expressions of horror. But that was the plan — after all, we were explaining to the campers at URJ Six Points Sci Tech West how they were going to destroy comic books to create their own paper midrash. We spent several days last week with the campers at at the newest URJ Summer Camp - Sci Tech West, talking about Torah and midrash and creation, and teaching them how to use cut-up comic books to make new works of art. One of the first things we did with the campers was ask them who their favorite heroes were. We were met with answers ranging from “which universe, Marvel or DC?” to Einstein and Darwin — superheroes of science. We weren’t surprised, because it’s a science camp, after all. That’s one of the reasons we focused on the story of creation for our midrash workshop; it’s often a flashpoint in debates about teaching science in schools, and it was an opportunity to explore ho...
Read more