Camp Mill, once again

my neighborhood cited

[First, completely off topic. Willie Mays, the baseball great who died the other day, shared my birthday. The Giants were in St. Louis when I turned 12, and I was at the game. The whole stadium sang happy birthday to me.

When I was a boy, there were two things that every kid wanted to imitate, and that every coach knew was a bad idea: Stan Musial’s batting stance, and Willie Mays’ basket catch.

It is hard to appreciate how much Mays dominated baseball, because the Giants rarely made it to the World Series. Instead, they had a remarkable streak of finishing close to, but not at, the top of the league. From 1965 through 1968, the Giants finished in 2nd place, out of ten teams in the National League, every single year. From 1961-1964, their lowest finish was 4th place, and that was in 1964 when they won 90 games and were only 3 games out of first. (The Cards, Reds, and Phils almost wound up in a 3-way tie for the pennant.) The Cardinals and the Dodgers won the pennants from 1963-1968, but they also were second-division teams in their off years. With Mays, the Giants were truly the team of that decade.]

Zack Rausch writes,

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building.

In Brink Lindsey’s interview with Tim Carney, it was mis-spelled “Camp Mill,” which in a way seems appropriate.

My wife and I are not Orthodox. We are not really embedded in that community. When we moved to the Kemp Mill neighborhood just over 40 years ago, there were not as many observant Jews living here. But there were enough to make an impression on us.

Years later, when two of our daughters became more religiously observant than we are, we were taken by surprise. We had not sent them to religious schools, unless you count Sandy Spring Friends School, where one of them went to high school.

But it seems that they wanted to take part in a community like Kemp Mill. One of them wound up in Newton, Massachusetts, and the other will soon by in Riverdale, New York.

Probably the most important commandment that Orthodox Jews observe is not to drive on the Sabbath. To attend synagogue, they must walk. Because of that, they do not live spread out.

In contrast, Jews in the Conservative and Reform denominations drive on the Sabbath. There are Conservative rabbis who will tell you that allowing driving was the worst decision the Conservative movement ever made, because it led to the breakup of communities.

On a Saturday afternoon, Kemp Mill is overrun by street gangs. Groups of 5 to 10 teenagers can be found walking together, shouting and laughing, often right in the middle of the road. It may be one of the few places where a gang of teenagers does not seem scary.

When I taught from 2001-2016 at a high school for Modern Orthodox families, many of the students came from Kemp Mill. Regardless of the neighborhood they came from, they behaved better in class and toward one another than students at other schools nowadays. In the rare occasions where I was unhappy with a student’s behavior, a call to his parents sufficed to get the problem corrected.

Students would recognize me on the street walking around the neighborhood, and call out to say hello. As my oldest and youngest daughter became connected with Modern Orthodox students in college, they kept running into my former students.

I do not think that the students avoided the changes of the smart phone era. I noticed in my last few years teaching that they had lost interest in getting a driver’s license. In general, they seemed more timid and less brash, which made the classroom less fun.

Rausch goes on to write,

Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

Rausch sees in the population at large a drop in religious affiliation, which in turn is associated with a decline in mental health among young people. He and his mentor, Jonathan Haidt, view smart phones as contributing to this decline in mental health, with religiosity being protective.

I’m not calling for everyone to fully abandon the digital world or decide to become religious and conservative. But I am saying that secular families and liberal parents may need to work harder and be more intentional about providing their children with tight-knit, real-world communities that can combat the ill effects of the immersive and addictive virtual world. 

I think that you need a critical mass of young children in order for adult neighbors to want to get to know one another and do things together. When our daughters were growing up, they had three girls of the same ages living next door. The family a couple of doors further away had four children just a bit younger. Most of the families on our cul de sac had two or more kids.

Going back further, the neighborhood where I grew up had families that were close to one another. It was by no means a religious neighborhood. But it was during the Baby Boom, and people had lots of kids. I really see shrinking family size and loss of a sense of community as going together. My guess is that causality runs in both directions.

substacks referenced above:

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Tim Carney on America's "Family Unfriendly" Culture

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The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood