Creased, Worn, and Covered in Bug Guts: My Sacred Texts

I don’t carry a bag in my everyday life. Everything I need, my phone and the occasional lip gloss, fits in my pocket. But when I go to summer camp, I need my fanny pack with me at all times. Whenever I’m separated from it, my worst fear is that a sudden downpour will soak and destroy everything inside—most importantly, the texts I’ve collected over the years from the camp’s social justice workshops. They’ve been used as fans when water wasn’t doing enough to fight the July heat; as scrap paper for drafting letters to my parents; and as weapons against the bugs no one is willing to kill with their bare hands. Those memories are what make the papers so sacred.

These texts aren’t just articles and statistics folded up; they represent the moments from our camp workshops: Our group circled up in the only air-conditioned building at camp (that also happens to smell like feet), when the silence after someone spoke was quiet enough to hear everyone’s gears turning. They remind me of the time I sat in the grass with friends, half of us doing handstands in the shade and half of us discussing another group’s Israel-Palestine workshop. I pulled out my fanny pack and announced I had a text about this. Having knowledge about issues I care about, quite literally ready to pull out of my pocket, brought me a sense of pride in this moment.

That sense of pride is something I've had to work hard to foster, as I grew up with the patriarchal narrative that, as a woman, I should keep quiet in discussions. Since starting high school, I’ve made a habit of saying “like” or “um” more often when answering a question in class. I don’t want to come across as a know-it-all, a nerd, or a try-hard. I’ve heard girls who speak formally, almost like they’re reading off an essay, be called “NPCs” and “real life ChatGPT,” as if simply by being smart, they’re boxed in as the nerdy side character in the school sitcom. In society, people, especially women, are given a label, and that becomes all they are. I’ve grown afraid of sounding too sure of myself, scared that I’ll be labeled as “smart” and be perceived as only that. As a feminist, I’ve tried hard to fight back against that idea. 

Camp workshops have helped me shed the habit of shrinking myself in conversation, building me up by giving me the tools to expand my perspective on different issues: paper after paper to add to my fanny pack. This process has been especially helpful with my ever-evolving understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

My journey with Israel-Palestine has been long and varied. At my Jewish school, where I had been learning all my life until high school, we spent years learning and internalizing that as Jews, we were supposed to support Israel; it was our duty. I can’t remember being exposed to any information or views that could sway me away from that. It was a huge struggle to get rid of my knee-jerk reaction of disregarding all pro-Palestine viewpoints. I wanted to stand by Israel no matter what, because that’s all I knew how to do. The turning point was a workshop last summer: my age group read "Gazan Youth Breaks Out: The Manifesto," published in December of 2010 by anonymous students in Gaza. When I read about the constant psychological and physical warfare that the Gazans were being subjected to by both Hamas and Israel for decades (not just since October 7 when “Hamas started it,” as I had previously thought), I knew I had to circle back and reevaluate my thinking and feelings with this new perspective. Immediately after finishing the text, I felt a visceral need to fold it up and tuck it safely away before anyone else could claim it for their own folder of camp papers. In a world overflowing with opinions, camp texts became my compass.

That specific piece still sits in my fanny pack, ready to be pulled out and unfolded whenever I need to send a picture of it to my camp group chat in our regular conversations about Israel-Palestine. Issues like it—political and regularly divisive—come up just as much as our math homework or homecoming dresses. Once taboo topics have become as common and as casual as small talk. Small talk is a collaborative effort, not a game to be won or lost. Likewise, our conversations have turned from competitive debates to cooperative dialogues. This is a result of camp workshops conditioning us to remember that not every discussion has to fall into a binary pattern of thinking: right and wrong, good and evil. Instead of going into conversations with the sole objective of persuading the other person, or even to simply roll my eyes and agree to disagree, the workshops encouraged me to dive into discussions with the goal of listening and being open to changing my mind.

That ability to remain fluid in your stance is central to feminism. By truly listening and putting aside your own beliefs for a moment, you begin to question what we’ve come to know as the norm. By questioning why things are happening the way they are. We begin to see the problems in society and sometimes even how to fix them. What I learned from the workshops is that being wrong and walking back my words is not a weakness. It doesn't mean I’m inconsistent: it means that I’m an open-minded person who is constantly reevaluating my views on the world.

This openness to change isn’t just feminist—it’s deeply Jewish. Reexamining ideas from new angles is a core part of Judaism; everything is meant to be interpreted again and again. Looking at the information you’re given and reinterpreting regularly is a huge piece of Jewish history and culture. For instance, rabbis, for the past two thousand years, have looked at Jewish texts to try to find new perspectives. All those famous commentators—Rashi, Maimonides, Judith Plaskow—are famous for taking something that they hold to be true and deciding what it means to them in the time they’re living in. Even the most central text in Judaism, which one might think should be perfect and unchanging, is meant to be interpreted and debated. That’s exactly why we reread the Torah every single year. How else are we meant to find new ways to look at it? Questioning is sacred. In the same way, I reinvent my opinions based on the new information I’m given, whether it be through a conversation, a school assignment, or, most commonly, a camp workshop with a new text to shape how I speak and think. 

When I unzip my fanny pack, I see the moments when I chose courage over complacency and curiosity over conviction. That fanny pack rests, idle in a corner of my room, ready to be put to use again next summer when I fill it with more memories, discussions, and texts covered in doodles, annotations, and squished bug guts.