“Sh-she’s from, she’s from, uh, Rishon LeTziyon. You’ve probably never heard of it. Just south of Tel Aviv.”
Los Angeles, June 13 – Like many other progressive Jewish youngsters, I am coming to terms with all the simplistic falsehoods I encountered while under the educational auspices of major Jewish organizations, falsehoods that at the time I took at face value, but, with exposure to more facts, must unlearn those tropes and learn to confront the more complex, uncomfortable, reality regarding the Jewish State: it turns out that dorky Jake Katzman’s insistence that he had a significant other there was a total fabrication.
In retrospect, I should have known. After curfew, when all the guys in the cabin were boasting or bantering, it would have shown weakness to admit lack of prowess in the relations-with-the-opposite-sex department. But naïve young me, I hadn’t yet developed the critical thinking or the experience to realize that scrawny, bookish, uncoordinated, four-eyes Jake, all of barely thirteen years old, couldn’t have been anyone’s beau outside of VR. I was too enamored of his chess prowess to give it a second thought.
Imagine my chagrin, and shame, all these years later, upon realizing that was all a lie. But all the signs were there.
“You? A girlfriend? Ha!” guffawed Darren Landau, a cabin-mate who – and this was the epitome of an unfair world to barely-adolescent me – was already shaving almost every day, and could talk to girls by just… walking up to them and talking. “What’s her name?”
“Adi,” retorted Jake, a little too shakily, now that I think about it. I thought it was just nerves from being addressed in an aggressive manner by a jock. I was nervous for Jake, too. “Sh-she’s from, she’s from, uh, Rishon LeTziyon. You’ve probably never heard of it. Just south of Tel Aviv.”
The plausible specificity gave me vicarious sense of triumph – take that, you bully! – and appeared to satisfy Darren, whose henchmen Jeffrey Waldman and Brian Cinnamon therefore refrained from the anticipated pile-on mockery. The interrogations proceeded to the next unfortunate Camp Ramah denizen, or would have, anyway, if the counselors on patrol hadn’t heard the noise and threatened to revoke a week’s canteen privileges for the whole group if they heard another sound.
But just this year, post-high-school, I made a passing reference to Adi in a chat with Jake, and he had no idea what I was talking about. I felt betrayed. Lied to.
I don’t see anything about my camp experience the same way anymore. The disillusionment hurts, but in a way I’m also grateful to have had my eyes opened to the truth. As painful as it may be, it is the truth.
There never was an Adi. I was lied to at Jewish summer camp.
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