KA CC Archive Dec 2024

While in Israel a few weeks ago, I bought Rafi a dreidel.  It did not have the traditional four letters  found on dreidels in Israel - nun, gimel, hay, pay - standing for Nes Gadol Haya Po - “A Great Miracle Happened Here”.  Though I did purchase some plain wooden dreidels with those letters. Instead, this large dreidel had different characters from the video game Sonic the Hedgehog on each side.  The Sonic Dreidel packaging said in Hebrew “S’vivon”, the Hebrew word for dreidel and it also said it lit up and played a song in Hebrew.  

While dreidels are one of the main symbols of Chanukah, they didn’t actually come to be a part of the celebration until much after the time of the Maccabees when the historical event of Chanukah occurred and even far after the time of the Talmud, when the rabbis introduced the story of oil lasting for 8 nights.

The dreidel game is modeled after an English or Irish game called  totum or teetotum that is played during Christmas time.  The game we play is related to the German version of the game which was called “torrel” or “trundl,” and this was translated to Yiddush - a dreidel. According to the National Library of Israel, one theory suggests that Jews in Germany were forbidden to leave their homes on Christmas. With the synagogue off limits, more secular pursuits would occasionally replace Torah study during this time of the year.  Since Christmastime and Chanukah-time overlapped, it became tradition to play dreidel on Chanukkah.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that a group of rabbis, being asked why we play dreidel during Chanukah, that they came up with the story we tell: The dreidel was a game Jews used to play whenever a Greek person was nearby. The idea was to fool the Greek into thinking the Jews were playing a harmless game, while hiding the fact that they were actually engaged in the forbidden study of Torah.  After this story emerged, many more explanations came about.  When Hebrew was revived, the letters gained meaning, the letters related to gematria, and in the early 1920’s, Levin Kipnis, “The Father of Children’s Hebrew Literature” wrote “S’vivon Sov Sov Sov”.  The original “I have a little dreidel” song was written in Yiddush around the same time.

Sonic is a blue hedgehog that was born on another planet and has super speed (Rafi explains, “as his name implies”.) When evil people come to take him and harness his speed, his guardian sacrifices their life and he escapes to Earth using special Rings that allow him to teleport between planets.  On Earth, he is careful to hide his power and is constantly in hiding or running from those trying to capture him.  Sounds a lot like the story of the Jews, hiding who they really are, by playing a spinning top game.  Hiding from people who want to “take our power” (read: religion).  In hiding, we each use something that spins - Sonic his rings and us a dreidel - to send us to a place that is good, where miracles happen.  

I couldn’t wait until Chanukah to give Rafi the dreidel.  Last night I handed it to him rather unceremoniously and the moment he took it out of the shopping bag it had come in, I took the package to show him what it said.  He read “Sonic S’vivon!” and ripped open the package, spun the top and cheered as it danced across the floor, lid up with LED lights and singing “S’vivon Sov Sov Sov!” 

The fact that we play dreidel, whether we were hiding from Greek soldiers or anti semitic actions, isn’t important now.  Now, we don’t need to hide our Torah study anymore.  The fact that I can walk into a shop in Israel and dig through some buckets and find a spinning top with a popular video game character that sings a Jewish song in Hebrew is a miracle.  Now we play dreidel to celebrate the fact that we can have speedy LED lights, a large Chanukiyah in our parking lot and  bright candles in our window.  

Chanukah Sameach!