Are Rabbis Getting Trained In Entrepreneurship?

About a year ago, my teacher and friend Rabbi Hayim Herring asked me to submit a guest post for his blog about how well I think rabbinical school programs prepared us rabbis for the rabbinate and what was missing from that experience. I was honored he asked me to submit this essay, but too busy at the time to sit down and contemplate what was absent from my rabbinical school program.

Finally, I gave it some thought and realized that many of the "tasks" I perform today as a rabbi draw upon skills I honed during my years at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but others are what I attribute to having an entrepreneurial spirit. While I personally enjoyed a wonderful experience while a rabbinical student and feel indebted to my teachers for helping to shape me as a rabbi, I realized that entrepreneurship as a subject was not something I remember being part of the curriculum at the Seminary during my time there.

In fact, during my final year of rabbinical school at JTS (2003-2004) I served as president of the Rabbinical School Student Organization and found myself, together with faculty members, my peers, and the school's deans, on a committee to begin the process of reshaping the rabbinical school curriculum. My contribution to this process was in proposing to offer an option for rabbinical students to take a few classes at the business school down the street at Columbia University. The problem that we faced on that committee was that there were only so many courses to put into the rabbinical school curriculum along with the requisite fieldwork, rotations and internships. Further, the faculty members were all protective of their courses and their individual department's role within the curriculum.

Startup Entrepreneurship at Summer Camp in the Rocky Mountains

After finally making my way up the mountain in Golden, Colorado (just outside of Boulder) the other night, I pulled my rental car into the parking lot of Camp Inc., the world's first Jewish specialty summer camp with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. My interest was piqued half a year ago when I met with the leadership team of Camp Inc. and heard about their lofty plans for their inaugural summer. It all seemed like a great idea conceptually, but I didn't know quite what to expect when I arrived.

I stepped out of the car and walked into the "Ulam" (Hebrew for meeting hall) where the music was blaring and dozens of Jewish teenage boys and girls were dancing. I was greeted by Josh Pierce, the camp director, who yelled to me over the music, "Welcome to MJ's bat mitzvah party!" The campers and staff of Camp Inc. were holding a mock bat mitzvah party for one of the camp's counselors, complete with a bat mitzvah candle-lighting ceremony, a DJ playing the standard bar mitzvah music, and the hoisting of Jewish teens in a chair for the Hora dance. Meals at Camp Inc. start and end with Jewish blessings. Morning flagpole includes several Jewish prayers and Hebrew songs. Signs around camp are in both English and Hebrew. And a number of the counselors are Israeli, part of the Jewish Agency's Summer Shlichim (emissary) Program. I have been to countless Jewish overnight camps and, at first glance, Camp Inc. seemed no different from the rest. Until...

What I then saw was amazing. At the end of the evening's activity the campers begged their counselors to not make them go back to their bunks for "lights out." However, they didn't want to go on a night hike or stay up late playing card games in their cabin. Rather, these campers pleaded with the camp staff to let them stay up for another hour so they could work on their logos for their new startup companies. These Jewish campers, ranging in age from 12-17, morphed from your typical summer campers to CEO's, CFO's and Marketing Directors right in front of my eyes. They grabbed their black leather portfolios emblazoned with the Camp Inc. logo and fully charged notebook computers and headed to their workspace. There they met with their startup teams to put the finishing touches on their logos which will be printed on different colored t-shirts for them to wear at their pitches to business mentors and startup investors at the conclusion of the camp session.

Camp Inc. campers pitch DiabeTech at a practice pitch day in Boulder, Colorado

Jewish Camp for Teen Entrepreneurs Launches in Boulder

You know it's a good idea when parents lament that they wish there was something like this when they were teens. That seems to be the general consensus among adults when they hear about Camp Inc., the new Jewish summer camp in Colorado with a focus on grooming the next successful business entrepreneurs.

Many of today's startup founders grew up attending camp, but they didn't have an opportunity to hone their entrepreneurial skills or learn how to pitch a new business idea to venture capitalists at those overnight summer camps. All that will change this summer as the first cohort of young campers descend on a beautiful camp in Boulder, Colo., prepared to start their journey as entrepreneurs. At the recent Leaders Assembly, the Foundation for Jewish Camp's biennial conference in New Brunswick, New Jersey, three of the leaders of this new venture seemed excited about the promise of such an endeavor.

Camp Inc. seeks to provide 7th through 12th graders with a unique Jewish summer camp experience that will spur creativity and invention through entrepreneurship. The ultimate goal of this camp for budding business leaders is to promote confidence, independence, leadership and philanthropy, all the while encouraging Jewish values in a dynamic Jewish summer camp community.

Camp Inc. gears up for its first summer in search of the next Mark Zuckerberg