By Rabbi Josh Gischner
Session 2 Visiting Faculty
Picture this: it’s Shabbat song session, right after services and Shabbat dinner. Campers are singing and dancing. Others are off to the side playing games, celebrating Shabbat their own way. And a group of three or four teenage boys are hanging out in the in-between.
I pulled out a small metal bar with six colored gems on either side, and taught them the colors in Hebrew before asking one camper to pick one. The moment he chose – every gem turned red. Before I could say a word, one of them called out אָדוֹם adom, the word I’d just taught them. The real magic wasn’t the gems. It was that he’d learned Hebrew without trying to. Those teens kept finding me for the rest of camp to check in.
I first learned to teach Jewish values and concepts through magic tricks thirteen years ago, as a counselor at URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy. Greg Kelner, Robbie Berg, Brett Lubarsky and the team had built something brilliant – teaching science and technology through Jewish values – and I remember thinking I could do the same with a magic chug (elective) that summer. This session, I ran a Shalechive (Shabbat-elective) on exactly that, and it gave me an excuse to teach campers about Harry Houdini.
Houdini was the son of Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, who led one of the country’s early Reform congregations in Appleton, Wisconsin. His wife and stage partner, Bess Rahner, was raised Catholic – a mixed marriage that was its own quiet act of defiance in the late 19th-century. Beyond his brilliant illusions and escape acts, what I love teaching most in Jewish settings are his ethics: Houdini spent much of his later career debunking Spiritualist mediums who preyed on grieving people’s hope of contacting the dead. He seems to have wanted it to be true himself – but the more he learned their methods, the more he saw the harm in the con. And the more he sought to mimic their performances and label them as an illusion. I believe that כָּבוֹד – kavod, respect for people – is exactly what he lived out, a Sci-Tech value before Sci-Tech ever called it that.
It’s all small moments: sitting with a camper through a rough night, a quiet “Shabbat Shalom” to a camper you’ve connected with, three minutes with teenagers in the in-between who leave knowing six words of Hebrew and the start of a relationship with one of their camp rabbis.
These are my favorite moments at camp – the small, magical ones. URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy runs incredible programming. But it’s these small moments that make camp magical.
Rabbi Josh earned his M.A. in Hebrew Literature from HUC-JIR in 2020, his M.A. in Religious Education in 2021, and was ordained a rabbi in 2021