Jewish Musings Sunday 12/18

[hollygail]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Angelika
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

[hollygail]

I just read the coolest article! Here's a copy.

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www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-origin-of-the-dreidel/

The Surprising Origin of the Dreidel
The well-known Hanukkah symbol has Christmastime roots.
By Rabbi David Golinkin

The dreidel or sevivon is perhaps the most famous custom associated with Hanukkah. Indeed, various rabbis have tried to find an integral connection between the dreidel and the Hanukkah story; the standard explanation is that the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin, which appear on the dreidel in the Diaspora, stand for nes gadol haya sham — “a great miracle happened there,” while in Israel the dreidel says nun, gimmel, hey, pey, which means “a great miracle happened here.”

One 19th-century rabbi maintained that Jews played with the dreidel in order to fool the Greeks if they were caught studying Torah, which had been outlawed. Others figured out elaborate gematriot [numerological explanations based on the fact that every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent] and word plays for the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin. For example, nun, gimmel, hey, shin in gematria equals 358, which is also the numerical equivalent of mashiach or Messiah!

Finally, the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin are supposed to represent the four kingdoms that tried to destroy us [in ancient times]: N = Nebuchadnetzar = Babylon; H = Haman = Persia = Madai; G = Gog = Greece; and S = Seir = Rome.

As a matter of fact, all of these elaborate explanations were invented after the fact.

The dreidel game originally had nothing to do with Hanukkah; it has been played by various people in various languages for many centuries.

In England and Ireland there is a game called totum or teetotum that is especially popular at Christmastime. In English, this game is first mentioned as “totum” ca. 1500–1520. The name comes from the Latin “totum,” which means “all.” By 1720, the game was called T- totum or teetotum, and by 1801 the four letters already represented four words in English: T = Take all; H = Half; P = Put down; and N = Nothing.

Our Eastern European game of dreidel (including the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin) is directly based on the German equivalent of the totum game: N = Nichts = nothing; G = Ganz = all; H = Halb = half; and S = Stell ein = put in. In German, the spinning top was called a “torrel” or “trundl,” and in Yiddish it was called a “dreidel,” a “fargl,” a “varfl” [= something thrown], “shtel ein” [= put in], and “gor, gorin” [= all].

When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, the dreidel was called, among other names, a sevivon, which is the one that caught on.

Thus the dreidel game represents an irony of Jewish history. In order to celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah, which celebrates our victory over cultural assimilation, we play the dreidel game, which is an excellent example of cultural assimilation! Of course, there is a world of difference between imitating non-Jewish games and worshiping idols, but the irony remains nonetheless.

Rabbi David Golinkin, Ph.D., is president and rector of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where he teaches Talmud and Jewish law, and he heads the Va'ad Halakhah (committee on Jewish law) of the Masorti, or Conservative, movement's Rabbinical Assembly in Israel.
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I was thrown for a loop! (As a child, I was taught the Yiddish words for the directions for the four letters, so reading the German brought that memory back.)

What's your take on all this?!?!?!?!

[gazelle18]

As a child, I got the message that there was "acceptable" assimilation, and "unacceptable" assimilation. Acceptable would be going to a neighbor's Christmas party. Unacceptable would be to have a Christmas tree in our own house. Acceptable would be to drive around looking at Christmas lights. Unacceptable would be to put up Christmas lights at our place. My guess is that someone in history decided that an adpatation of a game was acceptable.

It's hard to know where to draw the line, especially when you live in a predominantly Christian community, as I do.

[peachymom1]

I like Lynne's comment. I think it's the nature of being human to adopt the customs of surrounding cultures to one's own. The question is, what do you do with it, what meaning do you attach or derive from it, and how do you move forward in building your own identity?

Playing the dreidl game at Chanukah is universally recognized as a Jewish activity, and the fact that we've gone to such lengths to explain it Jewishly shows, at least to me, that playing a fun game that gets children involved in Jewish celebration is important to our continuity. Even very young children can play dreidl, and they can all learn more about the meaning of the holiday as they get older, by which time they've (hopefully) had years of eating latkes, playing dreidl, singing songs and enjoying time together with family and friends.

It may be ironic to play a game that epitomizes assimilation, but I'd say it's a further irony that we consider it "ours." Nes gadol haya sham (or "po"), indeed!

[louise]

All very interesting - While I have heard some of these explanations before, this was a very comprehensive presentation! I agree with Holly about the irony but the whole winter celebration thing is also filled with universal themes - especially that of light or lights. I also agree with Lynne about different kinds of assimilation and like Peachy's thought about the game as a teaching tool. Sometimes it seems like there's nothing new under the sun - I don't mean that in a jaded way but rather that as much as the various peoples of the world differ, they are also the same.

btw - we had Rabbi Golinkin at our synagogue for a scholar-in-residence weekend not that long ago!

[happysavta]

It's not surprising that dreidel is adopted from other cultures, though I never heard this before. I'm sure we could find many other examples of Jews adopting something from the local culture without assimilating into that culture. That's quite a skill, you know. My guess is you'd find the greatest number of adoptions in the field of cooking and music.