camp

The first time Michigan (not his real name) kissed me was of course after Kabbalat Shabbat services. On Friday nights everyone dressed up. In the girls bunk we swaped clothes. We fought over who took the first shower and blew our hair dry. Shared make-up. We were like orthodox women getting their homes ready for Shabbat but our projects were ourselves. Still, it felt holy, like we were preparing ourselves for something important. Like we were the Sabbath Queens. Sometimes our boyfriends would come to pick us up in our cabins but usually we walked down to the lake by ourselves.

On Friday nights we could sit wherever we wanted for services. Families who were separated by bunk sat together. You could sit with people from your hometown if you wanted to, and of course all of the couples sat together. I always sat with the other girls in my bunk who had neither boyfriends, nor family, nor hometown friends. There were always enough of us that while we felt the absence of what we didn't have our bond to each other felt tighter. Stronger than during the week. We faced the lake and someone, usually one of the older girls, chanted from Shir haShirim. As she read the great love story between supposedly god and the Jewish people we lost ourselves in our own private love stories. The air was warm, the sky was pink, a young girl was singing in Hebrew about sex, and most of us were hovering in our teens. No wonder everyone who has ever been to Ramah remembers Shabbat as the peak spiritual experience of their lives.

After services was kissing time. You kissed your friends and your counselors. "Shabbat Shalom". You were allowed to kiss the boys from your edah if they qualified as friends. I never initiated a kiss with a boy. When Michigan approached me that summer I was 14 I had never kissed a boy. Michigan had been helping me learn my Torah portion when I would chant sometimes on Mondays and Thursdays (this was a mating ritual at Ramah we were really good and finding ways to intertwine Torah with sex). We were both leads that summer in "Guys and Dolls" and he would sometimes talk to me at the end of peu'lat erev, before we had to go back to our bunk. All of this was the perfect prelude to us becoming a couple. All that was left was the Shabbat kiss.

It happened sort of at the end of the main kissing time. There was the main mulling around time after services and then everyone would start to separate and slowly head into the chadar ockhel for dinner. But one of the best things about Shabbat at Ramah is that kissing time really extended through the whole night. You could at any point all of Friday evening after services were over decide to kiss someone. Michigan kissed me just as I was headed in for dinner. It was an obvious sort of Shabbat kiss, two lips closer to the lips then the cheek. It was amazing how much it felt the same as kissing my girlfriends, my counslour, or even my parents. The same process for something that felt so big.

Michigan and I became a couple for about a week and a half which in Ramah terms was a long time. But I think a lot of who I became as Jew is maybe somewhat pathetically tied up into the magic of that first kiss. For me torah and Judaism that night became about getting the thing you most want out of life. A kiss from the boy that you like. Nothing is better for a 14 year old girl than that. At Ramah ordinary teenage life was all infused with Judaism. Everything we did was a Jewish activity. My first kiss was a Jewish kiss. No wonder it is such a big part of who I am. (By the way Michigan became a rabbi so maybe that kiss really was something special).