Secrets Are No Fun.

Why do we keep secrets at camp and why is Maccabiah the biggest secret of them all?

Maccabiah breakout is one of the most highly anticipated events at camp, not just because everyone craves a good, honest Color War, but largely because of the heap of secrets that becomes public knowledge just minutes after break out. The team songs are revealed, the cheers are taught, the rekah and tekes are distributed, and the mascots are proudly presented. However, pre-breakout, Maccabiah is a mass of secrets, namely: 1) when breakout will occur and 2) the team names. In fact, for a fakeout in 2000,[1] Kerem threw out packets containing the real team names because Maalot of that year had snuck into their bunk and looked at Kerem’s Maccabiah folders. Kerem wanted to trick Maalot into thinking that they had only seen the fake teams. The element of secrecy drove Kerem 2000 to cover up a crisis, if only for their peace of mind that the great Maccabiah secret was still intact. Here are two more stories to highlight this point.

1) In 2009, my campers Daniel Neuberg and Michael Schumeister were in the main office when they saw the names for that year in the copy machine. When I overheard a member of Kerem ‘09 clearly upset that this secret had been leaked, I took these two campers to the backstairs of the office and told them sternly that if they told anyone what they had learned, their bunk would lose plaque privileges.[2] They kept the secret to themselves, and we laughed about it afterward, but at the time the threat of losing the plaque convinced them of the gravity of the situation.

2) This past summer ‘Joe’ was a camper in older Kfirim. During Mifkad on the night that Maccabiah was going to break, I overheard a conversation with two of my campers that Joe in Kfirim had seen the sketches of one team’s shelet, and had learned that team’s name. To make matters worse, he spread this information to other members of Kfirim. Kerem was livid because the purity of the surprise had been ruined. My position as Rosh Kerem meant, to me, that I needed to do something. With Toby Kuperwaser’s[3] permission, I pulled Joe outside and reprimanded him. I told him that he should be ashamed of himself for how irresponsible he was, that Kerem was extremely mad, and that when he eventually got to Kerem, he would realize how wrong it was to share a Maccabiah secret.  This scolding was intended to guilt trip him, to really make him reflect on his actions.

But the moment the conversation ended, I knew I had completely overstepped my bounds, and had blown the situation out of proportion. I spoke to Joe like he was one of my sixteen-year-old campers, not like the harmless Kfirim camper that he was. He had stumbled upon one of the greatest treasures in camp and shared it with his friends as normal 12-year-old would do. In hindsight, I realize I should not have confronted him at all and I regret making Joe feel so badly about his actions.  

In both of these situations, why did I react with such severity? Why did I feel the need to threaten my Maalot kids with losing a prized possession and unjustifiably yell at a Kfirim kid about a silly issue of ‘leaking the secret?’ These questions hit on issues that are far broader than just Maccabiah, that demonstrate the way that Yavneh, and I would postulate other camps, function. Why do people feel the need to withhold information about programmatic aspects of camp? Every staff member – and by the end of the summer, Kerem – will recognize the following conversations, which will repeat multiple times a day: “What is our peulat erev tonight? “I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.” “What song for Zimriyah are you doing?” “I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.” Where are we going for trip day? “I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.” And the crème de la crème of camp secrets concerns Maccabiah. When is breakout, and what are the team names?

This past summer as Rosh Kerem, for no other reason than to avoid the constant influx of questions[4] that I received as a Rosh (any and all past Roshei aydah can empathize with me) I instituted a “no secrets” policy when it came to programmatic aspects of my aydah’s schedule. The Kerem staff would never say, “I can’t tell you, it’s a secret,” and were discouraged from saying “I don’t know” if they did in fact know the answer. How did this improve our aydah? And what did we lose by willingly spilling our ‘secrets’?

We gained two things, something I anticipated and something that came as a surprise. The reason that I instituted this “no secrets” policy in the first place was to avoid the never-ending questions my campers, and all campers, have - and it worked. Often forgotten is what I’ll call the trickle down phenomenon: when the right person in the aydah learns new information, 95% of the aydah will know what I told him/her within a few hours. If I told someone something at a meal, the word would spread almost instantaneously. This phenomenon helped mitigate the problem of repeating myself 51 times. I consciously relied on this effect to spread the word about something.

However, the staff of Kerem 2010 got something else out of this policy as well. We gained our campers’ trust. They knew that we would never use the “it’s a secret” excuse to trick them into doing something they didn’t want to do. Campers hate doing things they are forced to do, and if you don’t tell them about a boring peulah when they ask, they despise it 10 times more than if you tell them in the first place. My campers were happy and relieved to know what to expect each day, and when we told them directly, good news or not, they trusted us and knew we were on their side. This is an incredibly important aspect of maintaining a happy Kerem.

What did we lose? We lost the overrated pleasure of experiencing a good surprise. Everyone imagines that perfect day when someone knocks on our door with a large check and says, “Surprise, you just won a million dollars.” So why not make everything an unexpected surprise and foster that excitement? The problem is, unless we have that million dollar check to hand over, the uncertainty about the future, and usually the disappointing realization of what the surprise actually is, overpowers the sense of exhilaration that comes with a surprise. From a programming perspective, I propose that camp needs less secrets. Roshes need to talk to counselors more, and counselors need to talk to their campers more to remove that factor of uncertainty from the day, and thus the constant questioning about what to expect. This will lead to fewer questions, happier counselors, and more trustworthy campers.

When it comes to Maccabiah, I think the intensity needs to be scaled down significantly. However, the general notion of preserving the element of surprise until the moment of breakout should remain intact. After all, how cool would breakout be if everyone knew the secrets of Maccabiah in the first place? Pretty lackluster, unless, of course, that lousy surprise was accompanied by an unanticipated million dollar check. 

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[1] This was actually one of the best fakeouts I have ever seen at camp. I will describe it later when I go through the past 13 years of breakouts.

[2]   In Maalot and Kerem, the bunk plaque is a huge deal, one that I will explore in later posts.

[3] Rosh Kfirim ’10.

[4] This is something that campers from Gurim to Kerem have in common. I am baffled by how many Kerem kids ask me what time Mifkad is. Really? How long have you been going to this camp?