“Quick! Put away that holy book before they catch you studying! Grab one of these toys and pretend you’re gambling with it, or we’ll all be in big trouble!”
According to the common wisdom, with these words, or words to the same effect, the lowly dreydl was born. Or the dreidel. Or the draydle. This favorite Jewish winter holiday symbol has almost as many possible English transliterated spellings as the name of the holiday itself.
Some 22 centuries ago, when the Seleucid Empire ruled Jerusalem, King Antiochus Epiphanes forbade the study of the Torah and other Jewish religious practices. Therefore, Jews would need to create a harmless distraction and hide the sacred scrolls from enemy soldiers, says the usually told Chanukah story about the dreydl.
Alternately, the dreydl began as a teetotum. Mentioned in England as far back as the 1500s, it is a polygonal spinning dice-like top that shared its name with a 19th century London sports ground and a cricket team that played there.
From these humble beginnings, the traditional four-sided Chanukah top has gone on to become so much more: a precious family heirloom, a beautiful work of art, a valuable collector’s item, a religious symbol imbued with mystical significance, the focus of international tournaments, a tool for teaching kindergarteners at Jewish day schools reading readiness and probability, or a beloved part of many happy childhood memories.
As the custom of playing with a dreydl (or plural dreydlach) emerged among Ashkenazi Jews, we use a Yiddish name, (literally meaning “spinning object,” from %u202Bthe German verb drehen), and follow directions in Yiddish.
Wikipedia attributes its most common Hebrew name sevivon (from the verb root SBB, to turn) to Eliezer Ben Yehudah’s 5-year-old son, the first native Hebrew speaker in more than a thousand years.
Israeli sevivonim also differ in that instead of the standard letters nun, gimel, hey, and shin — initials for “nes gadol hayah sham” (“a great miracle happened there”) — they bear the letters nun, gimel, hey, and pey, initials for “nes gadol hayah poh” (“a great miracle happened here”).
That’s what dreydlach are. Whether handmade, purchased, inherited, or received as gifts, from the cheap plastic number mass produced in China to the 1,000-year-old jewel-encrusted sterling silver museum piece too delicate and precious for use, dreydlach can be seen almost anywhere.
Visitors to the Spinning Top and Yo-Yo Museum in Burlington, Wis., (call 262-763-3946 or go to TopMuseum.org for hours and admission charges) or the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago can see impressive collections of rare and valuable dreydls made of glass, metal, wood, plastic, paper and sterling silver.
Milwaukeean Sheri Levin has a huge dreydl collection. She said she has been collecting them for years and likes to buy them when she travels.
She shared some of her collection with the community at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s exhibit “Revealed: Private Collections from the Jewish Community” in 2012-13. (See December 2012 Chronicle.)
All right, you have a dreydl, already. Now what do you do with it?
According to the rules of the very simple game, all the players put an agreed-upon number of game pieces, such as gelt (real money or the foil-wrapped chocolate kind) nuts, poker chips, or other tokens, into a common pile in the middle.
Then they all take turns spinning the dreydl and, depending on how it lands when it stops spinning, put pieces in or take them out of the pile until all the players but one run out of pieces or everyone becomes too bored to continue the game.
If the letter on top is a gimel, the player takes everything in the pile, because gimel stands for gants (everything) and everybody antes up again.
If the letter on top is a hey, the player takes half the pile, rounding up to the nearest whole number, because hey stands for halb (half).
If the letter on top is a shin, the player adds to the pile, because shin stands for shtell (put).
A dreydl gives children too young to light candles a safe way to participate in the Chanukah fun. As a game of pure chance and no strategy, it allows a child only beginning to recognize letters the chance of beating the octogenarian Talmud scholar.
Thus, the spinning dreydl can not only help families determine how to randomly distribute little chocolates and help teach players four Yiddish and four Hebrew words.
It carries a heavier burden: persuading Jewish children that their winter holidays can be as entertaining and meaningful as their neighbors’ winter holidays, the ones with the decorations, strings of brightly colored lights, and mountains of brightly wrapped gifts. How do we convince them they aren’t missing all the fun?
Serious enthusiasts can compete in Major League Dreidel, which takes the game to new levels. (See the National Public Radio program “All Things Considered” story about this on its Dec. 22, 2008, edition, available online.)
You can “mix it up” at home and create new ways to play with a dreydl, one for each of the eight nights. There are as many possibilities as styles of dreydlach.
Perhaps your family can substitute it for dice to determine the number of spaces for players to move on a backgammon or Monopoly or Risk board. Let the children invent new games and write the rules.
Perhaps you can play a story-telling game or a quiz game, a la Jeopardy or Truth or Dare, using the dreydl to select from four categories at random, depending on your family’s interests.
For example, you might try national capitals, geometry, history and science; Nesbit, Gilbert, Hardy and Shakespeare; Nabokov, Ginsburg, Hemingway and Steinbeck; or Nevi’im (Prophets), Gemorah (Talmud), Haggadah, and Shemot (Exodus).
You might even want to tackle a game such as Botticelli (or vermicelli) where people have to guess the identity of a famous person (or food) beginning with one of the four letters on the dreydl.
As playing dreydl is only a custom and not a biblical or rabbinic commandment, one has no religious obligation to follow any particular set of rules.
Playing the traditional game for at least one night can be fun, but creating new family traditions, just for some variety, can be even more fun, especially for children who get the opportunity once a year to make rules for their parents to follow.
What matters most is enjoying quality time with those one loves, and eight fun family game nights in a row every year, especially if they involve hands-on games with moving parts. That can give children warm Chanukah memories that can last a lifetime.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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