The Summer Camp Rules for a Fundamentalist Jewish Sect

There really is just one god.
But what about dancing, can we dance?

Some of these rules are over the top.  But think what they are tying to accomplish.  They are trying to keep the innocense of children and protect them.  Counelors of same gender to not seem that far off to me.  Your last comment has to do with having witnesses and accountability.  While I would not go as far as some of these rules go, they are creating a culture to prevent sin from happening. 

Hemant had it right.
Unless they’ve gone of the deep end, saving a life would override the cooties rules. On the other hand, they might have a twisted logic to prohibit boys and girls touching even then.

 Dancing is fine, but only with people of your same gender.

I’ve been to an orthodox (although non-Hasidic) wedding, and it’s amazing how crazy they get with the dancing.  Me on one side of the room and women on the other, with a partition between them.  It’s basically their one chance to cut loose, and they definitely take advantage of it!

21 is interesting, it’s approaching a sensible rule. The Boy Scouts, for all their flaws, do not allow any adult to be alone with any child, period. That’s a good rule. Technically the rule does not apply to say, a seventeen year old with an eleven year old, but it wouldn’t apply in this case as only an adult can serve as a driver for children on Boy Scout activities. In this case, a group of teenage boys with one girl sound like a horrendous idea.

Of course, they’re approaching this from a very different angle from the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts have the goal of preventing child abuse, these camps have the goal of preventing any kind of sexual temptation among campers, which is kind of absurd, meanwhile there’s no rule really similar to the Boy Scout rules to protect a young boy from an adult leader.

Fundamentalist Christians are exactly the same way about modesty. Check out Libby Anne’s blog. She frequently writes about their screwed up views about modesty. Other than not requiring veils, there is really no difference.

See this:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/06/worthwhile-reads-the-modesty-survey.html

Basically they are taught to sexualize everything about a women, so they are aroused by the most trivial things. But of course masturbation is forbidden too.

If yichud is similar in definition to kosher, then Hemant read it wrong.  With kosher you say that something is kosher if it falls within the kosher laws.  If saying something is yichud means it is forbidden, well even then it says “might not” with respect to multiple men with a single woman.  

From wikipedia: 
Seclusion is only prohibited when there is but a lone man present. Additionally, the presence of older children, the man’s close female relatives, his wife or a woman and her mother in law would negate the prohibition. In these instances, the presence of the other individuals would serve to provide a check on the man’s behavior. One additional, unrelated woman or any number of minors (under 13, unless they are of an age where they can speak, but do not understand the concept of sex) do not negate the yichud laws. 

The general theme of these rules seems to be that a man cannot be trusted alone with a woman.   But what is stated in rule 21 above does not necessarily state that in all cases multiple men can be trusted with one women.  It clearly states that only in some cases is that acceptable.  

One would hope, but it does state “If necessary or the boy is in need of help, a girl may touch a boy until boy is 9”.  

Certainly sounds to me like if a boy is over 9 and his life is in danger, a girl can’t help.  In fact it sounds as if that’s specifically prohibited.  Why else would it say “If necessary or the boy is in need of help”?  

These religious laws are what are used by men to claim that they can’t control their base desires, and thus blame whatever happens on the women.  It’s the same crap Muslims use.  And it’s the same thing with rapists who say “she was asking for it because of how she was dressed”.   Somehow it’s not the man’s fault.

They are not trying to prevent sin.  The men making these rules are trying to make sure it’s the woman’s fault when the man does something wrong. 

They all are basing their laws on the exact same thing.  Muslims, Christians and Jews share the Abrahamic origins.  Christians largely shed those old beliefs when Christ came along, except where it involves homosexuality and for some reason shoving the Ten Commandments (which originates in the same places as all those other stupid laws) into public places.  

 Actually, you can dance but you cannot touch.  I had a hasidic boy in my class, and during gym class we had a section on square dancing.  He was not allowed to touch girls hands, which makes it tough to square dance.  They eventually gave him plastic gloves so that he could participate without “touching.”  Of course, being the mature 7th graders we were, we females basically spent the entire time accidentally bumping into him in places besides his hands.  He got a little annoyed by it but also thought it was funny.  Perhaps if he were older, he would have gotten mad, but he didn’t mind.  He also told us that he lived with his mother in a tiny house and that his father had slept at his house exactly 6 times.  Guess how many kids there were in that family?

What’s listed above is vague.  Rule 21 says there are times it’s ok and times it’s not.  It doesn’t go into detail.  I highly doubt the loophole is there to allow a group of boys to be alone with a unrelated, single girl of a similar age.  It’s not completely clear what all cases they are trying to cover in their rules.

And again, the rule is void if necessary to save a life.  Judaism is practical like that.

Manichean influence on Christianity is large part of their obsession with sex.

Could she touch him with one of those grabber things for old people? Should we be issuing these out to all the people in orthodox summer camps?

The only way these rules would be acceptable is if they were to mandate that cross-gender contact be performed through piloting giant robots, with the giant robots doing the touching.

Because if there is one thing the world needs more than anything else, it’s more giant robots.

 Agreed. I was a counselor for a nature-based day camp and we had the same rule: a counselor can’t be alone with a camper. Whenever a kid needed a trip to the bathroom we’d have to ask “Does anyone else need to go?” and if no one did, we’d drag someone else anyway.
It was actually to both prevent abuse by the counselors and also to prevent false accusations from the campers. More witnesses present at all times.
Though my guess is that at this Hasidic camp, it has much more to do with messed up gender laws than anything else.

“1 guy, 1 girl in a car? Not ok. 3 guys, 1 girl in a car? What could possibly go wrong…?”

I really don’t like the implication here. Please try not to paint men as rapists by default. It’s really not very nice. Most men are not rapists, and it’s unfair to use the assumption that they are as a starting point for defining what standards of behaviour should be.

My church camp had the swimming rule and we weren’t allowed to be alone with a member of the opposite sex. Ever. 

I might mention that it was at this camp that I started doubting my faith. I was 9.

We in the US are not too far removed from this way of thinking with regards to the separation of genders in scouting. When I was a Boy Scout in the ’80s, I had the privilege of being an “exchange scout” for a week with a Dutch scouting troop and the experience was unforgettable. My initial shock was that the troop was co-ed/unisex! Oh my! Men and women scout leaders all camping out with boy and girl scouts. The only gender separation occurred in tent assignments, but all the tents were intermingled in the camp site. The adult leaders shared larger tents together. Of course I talked about this with them a great deal and asked lots of questions, but it really wasn’t a big deal for them. They thought it was extremely odd that US scouting was gender separated.

Bear in mind that an awful lot of religious laws, by their very nature of being alleged proclamations from god, have no actual logical derivation at all.  Trying to figure out what the original intent of such laws might have been (in order to obey the spirit where the letter is ambiguous) is a fool’s errand, because there often was none. 

I find it particularly irksome when apologists try to retroactively figure out a scientific reason for why a given religious law (that they’ve already cheerfully followed without any such reason) might be useful, because a) it often just plain *isn’t*, and b) even if it does turn out to be useful, it’s often due to underlying processes that the original authors could never have known about or understood, and so it may be valid, but it still doesn’t validate the thought-process that created it.

Wait, so if a 10 year old boy is drowning, and a woman finds him, she must go find a man to save him?

I don’t know, if someone comes up with a good explanation for a religious law in the past, that can help invalidate it.  For instance kosher food laws.  Many were made because people did not understand germ theory, bacteria, etc.,  and if you mishandle pork, shellfish and other foods you can get real sick.  So once tribal elders or what have you saw the pattern they decreed that scary man in the sky says not to eat those things.  Ignorant village folk are scared of the man in the sky, so they stop eating those, and everyone is healthier.  It’s an easy way to handle the problem.

That is in all likelihood how those rules came about, and when you apply logic to them, you quickly realize that it invalidates the idea of those rules having to come from god.  And when there’s other laws, like not wearing two types of cloth, that make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and no one can come up with a reason for it, well it makes it hard to justify that comes from god also. 

I have heard that sleep-away camp is a place where many tweens have their first sexual experience, probably younger than if they didn’t go to camp. These rules are religious and girl-blaming, but there’s only so much supervising that can go on over curious kids by supervisors who aren’t their parents unless they make it religious. 

I don’t really agree with the “innocence” of childhood as expected people to mature around 17 or 18 without once considering their hormones. I don’t even consider a person around the age of 3 to be necessary to “keep” innocent, no I’m not saying have sex with a toddler, but children are shielded from reality and that growing toward maturity is a process, not something that suddenly comes up around the age of 12 or 15 or 18. But parents send their young teens or pre-teens to camp not to have their sexual discoveries. The parents are equally innocent of what kids know and think about. Summer sleep-away camp is huge with Jews for some reason that’s not as much a deal with non-Jews. I think the parents want assurance their 8-14 year old, even if it is in religious policy, are not spending their time being exposed to or having opportunity to discover their sexuality. I sort of think it’s unreasonable of the parents to expect their kids to keep that bottled up, but they’re paying a camp to watch their kids and to hopefully not have that uncorked. Making policies where the potential for gay kids or pedophile counselors is just something they trust away, whereas the normal maturation of most kids would be to befriend someone of the opposite sex, to get a crush, to go hide somewhere and fumble around, which they are not ready for, which they pay the camp to make certain there is no time or place that can happen.

When I was 19, I was a day camp counselor at a camp owned by Jews, and most of the attendees were also Jews. It wasn’t orthodox, we didn’t have all these rules. But as I’ve come to understand, camp is very popular with Jews. I thought I would be placed with the youngest kids, only having baby-sitting experience, but I was placed with the oldest of the day camp visitors. They were 11-13. They did not have a lot of opportunity, if any, to be alone in any co-ed peer situations. My co-counselors were another woman who was a primary school teacher, and a man, whose girlfriend was assigned to another age group. I was intimidated by this age group. They were really nice, except when they were total bastards. We did have a situation with some of the boys’ attitudes toward the girls (total cootie-ville) for about 2 weeks, it was kind of rough, one 12-year-old girl who had her period every Tuesday so she could excuse herself from “lake day”, and one 11-year-old boy who could hold any object in his hand – a book, a stick, a shoe – and pretend it was a gun and shoot everyone with it (he was one of our only non-Jews). But these kids were day campers. I didn’t deal with the sleep-overs. From what I understand, after the sun goes down and the activity schedule is cleared, these kids have enough free time to discover their sexuality, even if they’re 12 or 13.

As fucked up and ignorant as these rules may be, young teens and pre-teens fondling each other is a more probable occurrence than a counselor committing pedophilia.

That’s one possibility.  Another is that the rules are simply a matter of arbitrary tribal identity – “if you want to prove you’re in our tribe, you must not eat pork” – and the ones who accidentally chose the stuff that happened to work were the ones that thrived and came to dominate the area.  Just look at the Mormons’ bizarre aversion to hot beverages – what possible benefit is there to that?  It certainly hasn’t given them an evolutionary edge over other social groups – but it might have done.  But it shows they’re pious, loyal members if they stick to it (and it works best when it’s a real sacrifice – pork and coffee are delicious).  These rules actually work better if there’s no apparent reason to follow them; it makes joining the tribe a show of faith as well as sacrifice.

This is the damn problem – they don’t show their working, so there’s no way to know what the hell they were really thinking, or if they were thinking at all.  You could be wrong, I could be wrong, or both of us could be wrong about how they actually came up with it.  This means that, even if they’ve been right so far, they are not in possession of a reliable truth-finding mechanism.

The implication that a woman in the company of 3 men is more likely to be in danger  than a man with 3 women?  Im not sure thats a big leap.

And really he’s just disagreeing with how women have been painted as the real problem and men less of a threat in these guidelines.  Its more about treating people equally than implicating men.

Of course, if that’s actually what they;re saying. Im confused about what yichud means. Good or bad?

Well this is complicated by the fact that my ex-boyfriend was at the time was a volatile unmedicated bipolar person, but he hated Jews because their orthodox dress was so offensive to him. Why can’t they just dress normally? While I am not necessarily accomodating to orthodox Jews, their dress poses the least of my problems. Yes, they wear black all the time, and hats, and the females cover their heads and wear dresses or skirts covering the knees, even in the winter when they cover their knees under the skirt with some other legging and play in the snow, even if they are 2-year-old girls. (I’m not a parent, but I still think there is a Jew store or they must alter the garments themselves, as a normal “dress” for a toddler ends innocently above the knees). But they wear a skirt or dress, “easy access”, non-functional even if they wear equivalent of pants underneath. They have to be ready to go if the man wants, and they have to be covered up as soon as they’re ready to give birth. Something I didn’t know before I lived here, dated that guy, and was exposed to a culture of orthodox Jews in my community, but they have as many kids as Catholics or quiverfuls.

This does show their piety, this does set them apart and make them easily identifiable to themselves and to others as belonging to an out-of-fashion tribe (ie. one who does not care more for fashion than for the laws of go). I like to be able to identify them by their dress code. If someone is going to think different thoughts than modern normal thoughts, I think that’s ok that they also dress differently. You wouldn’t want to wait to ask them to join you for cheeseburgers.  Dressing like you don’t belong to modern culture is a plus for those who also don’t, and for those who do. There is no reason to dress that way other than to set yourself apart, and I, for one, appreciate that they do, even if they don’t have to.

Yeah, you’re probably right. Mainly they want to keep girls and boys separated, but I’m not clear on what their idea of appropriate supervision is from this. Really they just want you to ask a Rav before you do anything that has anything to do with the opposite sex.

Random related story:
Suddenly the way I was treated by the Jewish summer camp councilors when I worked at an amusement park makes sense.  Part of my job was to test harnesses, seat belts, and help shorter kids into the seats and I remember a few times getting yelled at by councilors when I’d go to help a kid or test their safety gear.

As I said to most of them, “Safety comes first.  I either check this or you all can leave.”

I also refused to chase their yarmulkes when they didn’t secure them.  I even warned them up front that nobody from our staff would be risking their lives for a scrap of fabric, if it means so much to them, they need to secure them beyond 2 bobbie pins.  The ride went almost 60mph with loops, it was pure hat/head covering carnage.  A few of us actually kept a running tally of the yarmulkes lost because the camp councilors would, without fail, come barging over and demanding we go chase it.  My memory may be fuzzy, but I think my last summer there we hit 50-some in one season.  It was a record.

Not sure what the string thingies are (Google tells me they’re called eruv?), but they always used to get stuck in anything resembling machinery or gears.  Used to drive our mechanics ’round the bend.  Not to mention piss off the other park guests because rides had to be shut completely down to remove the obstructions.

Tzitzis

If you mean the string thingies sticking out of their shirts, they’re called ‘tzit-tzit’.

My wedding was ruined by this stuff. My (now ex) wife was converting to Judaism in the lead-up to the wedding. Her rabbi insisted as a condition of her conversion that he be given veto power over all aspects of our wedding. He proceeded to rearrange the whole thing. He wanted us to have completely separate receptions for the men and woman like he’d had at his wedding.

Eventually, we were able to contact the members of the Bet Din that were handling her conversion and they leaned on him to make some ‘concessions’. We had a wedding dance, but only after the grace after meals so that the rabbis present could leave (they begged us to leave too). But my sister was not allowed to sing, boys and girls were seated on opposite sides of the tables (with married couples at the meeting points between the two sides) and my parents-in-law were not allowed under the huppah. (To be fair, he must have had an attack of conscience, as he pulled them in to stand right next to the huppah at the last second.)

Interestingly enough, the rule as interpreted by religious Jews *does* assume that men are all rapists/unable to control themselves; the other men are there so that they can all keep each other in check.

No, Judaism places the highest value on saving a life, no matter what mitzvot must be broken in order to do so. There are only three laws considered “yehareg ve’al ya’avor” (be killed rather than transgress): murder, idolatry, and sexual immorality (which would be incest, adultery, etc., not immodesty)

Scouts Canada went mixed-gender about 20 years ago, though they still gave the option of boys-only groups. The Girl Guides are still single gender, though. The difference here is that Girl Guides had growing enrollment, and the Boy Scouts had dropping enrollment.

The argument for Girl Guides as a single gender entity is that every task was performed by a girl or woman. There was, and still is, concern that in mixed gender groups, you get the boys taking the heavy lifting tasks, or taking the stern paddle position in the canoes, and the girls doing more of the cooking. I’ve seen it a lot in mixed gender groups learning this kind of wilderness skills. It’s never, at least here, been about modesty, and indeed, some camping or volunteer events draw both Scouts and Guides here.

 Thank you.  My google-ing was lazy, I’ll admit.  🙂

I don’t think parents should be in a position to dictate when or where their preteen kids have their first sexual experience (which is separate from sexual abuse, and doesn’t necessarily have to include touching, some psychologists count a child’s first “crush” as their first sexual experience). Abuse is different, but sexual exploration (minor touching or looking at others) between kids of that age (from about 9-13) is actually quite common, and not considered abuse by most psychologists. This type of thing will probably happen whether or not you send them to summer camp, and these kinds of rules only serve to make the kids feel extra guilty about sex, which is unhealthy. Kids should not be made to feel guilty about their own sexual urges.

If necessary a girl can help a boy in distress until he reaches the age of 9!!!!!!!!

Wow. So no female nurses/doctors for boys over the age of 9?  Interesting.