Every summer, thousands of Jewish camp counselors do something extraordinary: Like Moses in the final days of his life, they devote themselves to preparing a generation whose greatest achievements they may never live to see.

I was reminded of that truth last week as I joined my fellow Foundation for Jewish Camp board members and our remarkable executive leadership team for our annual summer retreat in Waltham, Mass. As we do every year, we spent time reviewing strategy, meeting with leaders from Combined Jewish Philanthropies and the Boston Jewish community; then we did what every FJC board meeting ultimately leads us to do — we went to camp.

Courtesy/Foundation for Jewish Camp

Campers with a counselor at a Jewish summer camp.

Over the past decade, I have visited dozens of Jewish camps. This year, however, something felt different. As we walked through Camp YJ, Camp Tevya, and the Ramah Day Camp in Waltham, I suddenly realized that Jewish camp is the modern-day expression of one of the Torah’s oldest leadership lessons.

It is where we intentionally pass our values from one generation to the next.

That realization struck me because our retreat began with a discussion of Parshat Va’etchanan.

Most of us think of Moses as the leader who took the Israelites out of Egypt, but that isn’t how his story ends.

He never enters the Promised Land. Instead, after 40 years of sacrifice, Moses pleads with God one final time: “Let me cross over and see the good land…”

God says no.

It is one of the Torah’s most heartbreaking moments. Moses knows he will never experience the culmination of his life’s work. Yet he does not dwell on what he has lost.

He teaches. He reviews the people’s history. He renews the covenant. Most importantly, he prepares Joshua to lead.

Moses discovers what every great leader eventually learns: our highest calling is not to finish the work ourselves, but to prepare others to continue it.

That may be Moses’ greatest legacy. And every summer, thousands of Jewish camp counselors quietly follow in his footsteps.

As the calendar turns to August and another camp season comes to a close, counselors will say goodbye to campers whose futures they can barely imagine. They won’t know which camper will someday become a Hillel president, a Birthright participant, a Jewish educator, a synagogue president, a philanthropist or simply the kind of Jewish parent who creates a vibrant Jewish home.

They won’t witness every wedding beneath a chuppah, every baby naming, every b’nai mitzvah or every act of Jewish leadership their campers will one day inspire.

But they have laid the foundation.

They teach. They listen. They model resilience after conflict. They create communities where every camper discovers both a worthwhile voice and a responsibility to lift others up.

In doing so, they prepare young Jews to lead — even though they may never see where that leadership ultimately takes them.

That is why Jewish camp matters so profoundly.

We often measure camp by the joy it creates in the present, and we should, but perhaps its greatest contribution is one that is almost impossible to measure: that it develops the next generation of Jewish leaders.

The counselor helping campers navigate a disagreement over cleanup duty is teaching collaborative leadership. The song leader is creating memories that will someday become family traditions. The counselor who notices the lonely camper may be shaping the empathy of a future communal leader.

These moments don’t make headlines. They make Jews.

Pirkei Avot teaches, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Long before Rabbi Tarfon said those words, Moses lived them. He accepted that he would not witness the completion of the mission, yet he refused to stop preparing others to carry it forward.

That same quiet miracle happens every day at Jewish camps across North America. Our counselors are not simply supervising activities: They are transmitting values. They are cultivating confidence. They are preparing the next generation to lead. Like Moses, they are planting trees whose shade they may never sit beneath.

As philanthropists, we should take that lesson to heart. Most of us are long past the days when camp counselors shaped us every hour of every summer day. Yet we are not free from the responsibility to make those experiences possible for the next generation.

Our board left camp this week inspired by a vision of a future in which every Jewish family who wants the gift of Jewish camp can afford it, and every camp has the capacity to welcome them. We may never live to see the full realization of that dream; neither did Moses. But perhaps the measure of Jewish leadership has never been whether we reach the Promised Land ourselves. 

Perhaps it has always been whether we prepare the next generation to get there.

Jeffrey M. Solomon is the board chair of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, president of TD Cowen, vice chair of TD Securities and executive vice president of TD Bank Group