What BCI Taught Me About Belonging

By Halle Shumate

Before I ever set foot at Brandeis Camp Institute, I already knew it mattered.

I knew because everyone who had experienced BCI, American Jewish University’s 18-day immersion program for Jewish young adults, talked about it with a kind of reverence that is difficult to explain to someone on the outside. During my interview process, I heard stories that sounded almost mythic: lifelong friendships, transformative conversations, songs remembered decades later, lives redirected by just three weeks nestled in the Santa Susana Mountains in Simi Valley. I was joining BCI as associate director alongside Arthur Pinchev, whose own history with BCI and Camp Alonim—both owned and operated by AJU—stretched back more than half a century. I, on the other hand, had never attended BCI. I hadn’t grown up at Alonim. I arrived as one half of an intentional pairing: someone steeped in the legacy of the place, and someone seeing it for the very first time.

From the beginning, I felt the weight of that legacy.

It’s intimidating to step into a community that already means so much to so many people. You wonder whether you’ll understand what everyone else seems to instinctively know. You wonder whether the stories have become larger than life simply because they’ve been told for so long. You wonder, nervously, whether you’re missing whatever it is that everyone else seems to have found.

It turns out they hadn’t. No one had exaggerated. If anything, they had undersold it.

There was a moment sometime after the first Shabbat when I caught myself walking across campus thinking about absolutely nothing other than the way the pepper trees swayed in the dry summer air and the scent of eucalyptus drifting through the breeze. For a brief moment, I wasn’t planning, anticipating, or solving. I was simply paying attention.

There was no email I had forgotten to answer. No meeting I needed to prepare for. No grocery list or notification waiting on my phone. Just the sound of conversation drifting from the plaza, someone absentmindedly strumming a guitar in the distance, and the familiar path I had already walked dozens of times between workshops, meals, and Rad Hayom, the period of song and reflection that closes out each day.

It struck me because it felt so unusual in comparison to the hustle of my daily life.

The months leading up to BCI had been full of motion. I had moved to Los Angeles, stepped into a new role, and spent much of my time thinking about what needed to happen next. Somewhere during those three weeks, that constant forward motion slowed. I stopped measuring my days by what I had accomplished and started measuring them by where I had been present. I had become fully absorbed in the rhythm of the community without even realizing it.

That was the moment I understood what everyone had been trying, and failing, to explain.

BCI—founded in 1941 and gathering young adults in Simi Valley since 1947—isn’t defined by one unforgettable lecture or one extraordinary Shabbat. It isn’t something that can be summarized in an elevator pitch or captured in a brochure. Its meaning accumulates quietly. You see the same faces every morning at Boker Or morning gathering. You learn melodies that, after a week, feel as though you’ve known them forever. Conversations begun over breakfast continue after lunch and pick up again after Havdalah. Before long, the need for qualifiers disappears because everyone already knows one another’s stories.

Nothing about those moments feels extraordinary while they’re happening. Together, they become extraordinary.

Working in Jewish communal life, we often talk about “building community.” This summer reminded me that community isn’t something we build so much as something we make space for. We can create opportunities for people to gather, to learn, to sing, and to eat together. We can design thoughtful programming and beautiful rituals. What we cannot do is manufacture belonging.

What BCI has understood for 85 years is that belonging grows through repetition. Shared meals. Shared rituals. Shared learning. The same blessings spoken night after night. The same melodies sung until they become instinct. Ordinary moments, repeated often enough, become sacred.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. Judaism itself is built this way. We don’t become Jewish through one extraordinary moment; we return to the same rituals, the same texts, the same table, year after year, allowing them to shape us almost without our noticing. BCI mirrors that wisdom. Transformation doesn’t arrive all at once. It emerges slowly through shared time, shared purpose, and the simple decision to remain present.

Those traditions are the constants. They are what have drawn generations back to BCI long after the program itself has ended.

What felt new to me was experiencing those traditions not as someone inheriting nostalgia, but as someone discovering, firsthand, why that nostalgia exists in the first place.

I arrived believing my responsibility was to help create meaningful experiences for participants. I left realizing that the people who build communities are never entirely outside of them. If we’re fortunate, we’re changed by them too.

Only after experiencing BCI did I understand why so many people struggle to explain it. Some places are remembered because of what happened there. BCI is remembered because of who people became while they were there.