Summertime, and the camping is easy - for some

There’s no need to take your tefillin to the atheist summer camp. Just launched in the UK, Camp Quest UK, modelled on its North American counterpart, offers a "residential summer camp for the children of atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view."

No Zionist ideology here - rather campers will get lessons in rational scepticism and moral philosophy. The quest for Jewish identity will be replaced by the search for secular meaning. One thing is for sure: the atheist camp will be cheaper than any Jewish camp, and the girls will come with less luggage.

Now that the fasting of Tisha B'Av is over, the folly of summer camp begins. Talking about 'getting the kids ready for camp' is a favourite Shabbat lunch topic, while 'shopping for camp' is a specific activity that Hendon mothers (and yes, I generalise) undertake with a passion usually reserved for, well, things I'm too modest to mention.

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The Tehillim tipping point

In the latest attempt to resolve the 'shidduch crisis,' women across the religious globe have been scuttling to each other's homes to huddle and recite Tehillim (Psalms), entreating God's kindness for a good shidduch [match] for all the single people in their community. In London, one matchmaking organization, Made in Heaven, offers regular classes for women on Shmiras Ha Loshon (not speaking slander) as a means of mystically helping single people.

Women are the corrections of a community: when disasters strike, the rabbis often blame the women for gossiping or immodest dress (gossiping while dressed immodestly is a double whammy). As if women don't have enough to do, now they are responsible for the marital and spiritual well-being of a whole community and have been  instructed to say Tehillim to avert further disasters. What was the Tehillim tipping point? How did these verses come to substitute serious learning and empowerment for women? Isn't it strange that while women's voices are accorded tremendous power to change the divinely ordained course of events, they have virtually no voice in the decision-making process of a religious community?

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Promoting promiscuity?

The perils of public transport are too much to bear for some of the delicate flowers of northwest London.  Golders Green and Hendon have a seedy side and many anxious parents insist on driving their daughters to and from school to shield them from the sort of people they are likely to meet on the bus en route to one of the religious schools in the area.

I have a different approach - stick our kids on the bus and let them see how the other half lives: girls with skirts up to their pupik [belly button], with pallid skin and  multiple earlobe piercings, smoking nervously and looking pathetic hanging onto the shirttails of smelly, gangly and pimply boys. This has to be the most effective antidote to any frum girl's aspirations to be 'normal.'

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Netball and Jewish women

Recent news that the Israeli netball team found glory in Ireland brought a warm glow to my face that I almost confused with the beginnings of a hot flush.
 
A couple of years ago, I heard about a friendly Jewish netball game in London. As I started to explain that it had been many years since I last played and that I was not in the best shape, Jenny, the team organiser, gently interrupted me: "Don't worry," she said. "Everyone says the same thing. You'll be fine."

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Mothers and fathers

Sports day next week.  Followed by the end of year concert. Hot on the heels of graduation day. And they expect me to go to each event. Couldn't I just send a tired, badly dressed, breasts sagging, blow up life-sized doll that I could remotely contol to wave and cheer when one of my kids appear? It has to be a more effective  use of my time than actually being there. 

Fathers have it easy: they are not allowed to attend the concerts at my daugter's school due to the religious code of the school (to which we freely signed up, so I shan't moan). They cannot watch the mothers' race on sports day for fear of seeing real sagging breasts bobbing up and down across the 100 metre finishing line.

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