Secret of the DREIDEL

[Music] it can definitely be argued that one approach to understanding the mysteries of the universe would be through understanding the dreidel so those of you who are fans of modern literature may know that Franz Kafka the great author uh from it was from Prague from a Bohemian Jewish Family and he wrote in German and many times he has Jewish themes hidden in his stories he wrote a short story in Germany always wrote in German called decreisel anyone speaks German the chrysal means the top very good excellent means the top and it's a very short story it's about a page long and it's about a philosopher who is the anti-hero of this short story who becomes obsessed with watching children playing with a top in a park and this philosopher becomes convinced that all he needs to do to understand the secrets of the entire universe is to grab the spinning top from the children and to watch it spin in his hand now of course this is a Fool's errand because it's impossible every time he grabs and he waits for the children to spin the top and then he comes swooping in and he grabs the top but every time he grabs the top obviously it stops spinning and he becomes very very frustrated with the fact that he can never grab it hold it and have it spin all at the same time like it's either one or the other and uh the end of the story the end of the very short story becomes disgusted with himself and he hobbles away like a spinning top yeah at any rate it's interesting I don't know if Kafka was making a Jewish reference I don't know if it was supposed to be a dreidel reference but um it can definitely be argued that one approach to understanding the mysteries of the universe would be through understanding the dreidel you believe me yeah okay so I guess I'll tell you like this is writes about the dreidel being symbolic of what we call the galgola means there's a world there's a a wheel that turns in the world and that's an expression from the gemara from uh Shabbos where it speaks about the cyclical nature of life it says even when you're on the top don't get too secure when you're on the bottom don't despair because there's an ebb and flow there's a cyclical nature of life but nachman explains it on an even deeper level he says that the nature of existence itself is a cyclical flow in what sense he says that the highest of the high end up being expressed in the lowest of the low and the lowest of the low end up being expressed in the highest of the high that Infinity and the finite the spiritual and the material end up connecting with each other in sort of a cyclical manner and he says where is this most manifest or where was this unfortunately no longer in a revealed form but historically where was this most manifest in the holy city of Jerusalem Jerusalem in the Holy Temple uh when the Holy Temple stood there you have the ultimate Paradox that on one hand like it says in uh say from Allah in the book of Kings heinous that the heavens and the heavens of the heaven cannot contain you meaning God and yet a physical house is going to be a home for God Almighty and that's the Paradox that the ultimate home for the infinite one is in the Physical Realm and not only in the Physical Realm but what is the expression of devotion which elicits Divine favor is the sacrifice of animals so you're talking about something that's very low something that's physical material you talk about animals which are a lower level being than a even than a human being and somehow this is going to elicit Divine favor so the menachment says that this is this is the secret of el yadum La mate that the spiritual that the spiritual comes down below and the material Rises up and that there's this strange sort of uh looping back this like a circle where the end becomes the beginning in the beginning becomes the end or like the safer yitziro says the book of formation kabbalistic book based on the teachings of Abraham notes that the ends are wedged in the beginnings and the beginnings are wedged in the ends so it's a funny thing how do you elicit the essence the very essence of spirituality not from something that happens in the heavens that the Angels do but something happens on earth a physical act that's performed by embodied Souls here in the physical plane actually performing acts of devotion with with animal sacrifices and that's the secret that's the mystery the cyclical nature of the world okay so what does that have to do with a dreidel well first of all the dreidel spins so it embodies that spinning that cycle but I'll tell you more the dreidel is a celebration of Hanukkah Hanukkah is the dedication or rededication as it were of what of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem so the Greeks came and they desecrated the Holy Temple and when we rededicated it we again had that Nexus point that spot in the physical Universe where we could touch the highest of the high while standing in the Physical Realm and I mean furthermore elaborates that the letters the letters everyone knows the letters on the dreidel right which spell out a phrase Naseem A great miracle happened there and we're going to talk about the pay Avi don't worry about it I'll get to I know that's what you're thinking I'm gonna get to that but uh sorry nachman says that the noon gimmel hey shin actually what does it stand for if you go in order from highest to lowest so hey is Huli Huli means primordial existence it's a pre-articulated state where everything sort of is neither chicken nor egg I guess is the way you could explain it philosophically it's the idea of that which is the quintessence it's not yet spiritual or material it's not finite or infinite it's sort of like the the building block of all existence maybe call it the God particle if you will so that's the Huli that's hey nivdal is known means separate or the Transcendent let's talk about the spiritual Realms like we're angels reside then there's galgo galgal means the orbit so that's talking about the celestial it's physical it's we're talking about constellations and planets it's physical but it's lofty and then you have Shuffle Shin is Shuffle Shuffle means the low Rel means the Physical Realm so the menachment says that the letters of the dreidels Huli nivedalgal Shuffle which describe the gradations of the orders of existence that which is completely Beyond being categorized as spiritual or material Julie and then you have the that which is entirely spiritual which is called nivedo then you have that which is material but it's the celestial realm so it's it's lofty that's the the galgal and then you have the physical the Earthly the Earthly plane the shuffle so he says when the dreidel spins it represents the cyclical nature that how do you get in touch with the deepest essence of spirituality from the Physical Realm now of course we don't have the basamikdish we don't have the Holy Temple anymore and we don't do the animal sacrifices in the Holy Temple because of that but we still very much live with this concept that what a soul in a body can accomplish by doing Mitzvahs by acting out the physical Commandments is incomparably greater than anything that a soul in heaven can accomplish so again that's that cyclical nature where we come full circle that by coming down to the Physical Realm we actually have this higher spiritual connection now there's another explanation of these letters the non-gimal hey shin and that's from the banaya saskar and I'm pronouncing it it's funny it's always hard for me to pronounce because we always say you sucker it's actually it's interesting that um there was one tamatora reading in 770. the first year after the Le babachira accepted the leadership of khabad and the balcota the the one who did the public reading pronounced he was partially and he pronounced the name of the son of of Jacob he pronounced it with two sins so the Reba actually said we pronounce it always as you sucker with one sin and the Reba said I learned this from my father that of his father was a makubal was a kabbalist I believe and he he said he taught me that because you know you saw her in zulin yasaka was the Torah scholar and zwoolen was the businessman who supported the silver study of his brother USA so Torah has negle and Mister it has a revealed aspect which is like the legalistic the halachic and then it has the mystical the hidden the esoteric Dimension like see this Kabbalah so in Torah you have a name which has a double letter a new soccer has two sins but one you pronounce the other one you don't pronounce because one represents the Torah that's revealed the more practical the legalistic or the exoteric and the uh the sin that you don't pronounce which is the spiritual teachings anyway but pronounced it and um remember my uh one of my teachers the uh great revered Rabbi Dr Rabbi Rabbi Dr Abraham jaitorski the once told me what is the punishment for someone who does not learning safer so he said what is the punishment for someone who does not learn the Malaysia you know what it is he doesn't learn the Medina that's the question well you need a worse punishment it's good stuff and now you missed out so that's your punishment like what's the punishment for not eating ice cream you didn't get to eat ice cream so uh the Manaya soska it's V Ali Malik medinov he has a whole thing about dreidel at length but let me just start with how he explains the letters the uh noon gimmel hey Shin so he points out that the first time in Tanakh the first time in in written scripture that we find those letters all together is in the word geishna geishna is a proper noun with a little bit of a funny uh suffix to it the real name of the place is geishen you ever go up to the Catskills you drive up north uh there's Goshen right right there's also a ghost in Florida okay Florida New York oh okay okay I'm gonna tell my wife I'm taking her to Florida so yeah I didn't know that so Goshen knew yeah but it's named after the biblical Goshen so Goshen uh depending your pronunciation but when you say you're going to a place there's a funny way of constructing it you could you could use the Hebrew letter lamid as a prefix to mean two so you could say Li Goshen or you could put a hey at the end of the word and you could say Geisha means to Goshen and so where does it say geishna to Goshen and what is Goshen I should explain it's a it's a province in Egypt outside of the settled area there was the Metropolis which was where the Pharaoh lived and then there was like sort of a rural area like uh like more of a low-key type place in Egypt and that's where when uh Joseph finally reunited with his brothers and his father Jacob also came down there so that's where they lived they lived in Goshen so the word geishna means to Goshen to that that place called Goshen that that area within Egypt um interestingly where in what Parsha which Parsha do we have this word the verse is that's not he meaning yankovino our forefather Jacob sent his son Judah ahead of him ahead of everyone else to go to settle in Goshen that is impartius which is always the week of Hanukkah a little coincidence there um what is going on there is that Jacob knows he's going into Egypt and essentially he's preparing for exile so the remedy the refuel that comes before the Maca the preventative medicine before the Jews go down into Egypt and go down into Exile which eventually turns into bitter slavery is he sends Yehuda first to geishen to do what says she explains to set up a house of teaching set up a Yeshiva a place where they learned Torah because if the Jews have a place where they can study Torah then even when they're in Exile they will remain spiritually connected and they will be able to survive and get through the Exile so what's what you see the connection here to Hanukkah that even when we're in Exile in the the Exile of Hanukkah is actually when we're in our land we weren't in a foreign land we were in the Holy Land but a foreign power was uh trying to subvert us they were fighting a culture War trying to assimilate us and uh how did we survive because even though we were under the authority of uh foreign power we had our connection to Toyota so you see the remedy that comes Jacob sending Judah geishna into Egypt to prep us that we're going to survive this Exile as long as we connect to torah's study well that's exactly the Hanukkah story that as long as we cling to the Torah we're going to survive and what did the little Jewish children do when the hellenists came looking for them when they outlawed the study of Torah we all know the story they would go and they would hide in the caves and they would study Torah and if the Greeks would come and try to flush them out what's going on here and they would say oh we're just spinning a top we're just playing a little game here they would hide their Scrolls and whip out their their dreidel and they were just playing a game by the way why did they choose the game of dreidel they could have chosen any other they could have said were playing kickball maybe it's smaller dreidel you could hide it in your pocket it's hard to hide a ball in your in your pocket okay they could have said uh you know they're playing anything we're playing uh tiddlywinks so is that a game yeah that's a game right yeah so it's interesting what did what did the Greeks want to do they wanted to remove our faith from us if we would have been willing to study Tara as a purely secular academic Pursuit they would have left it alone but we kept insisting that it was holy that it had sacred uh meaning to it and they didn't like that so they specifically played dreidel because it's a game of chance if it would have been a game of skill okay that's one thing a game of skill means May the best man win but a game of chance means you believe the world is random it's not governed by any higher power so that was like sort of part of the that was part of the whole masquerade to make the Greeks uh back off at any rate so the letters on the dreidel in the time of Hanukkah think about it these little kids are playing dreidel in the caves the miracle hadn't happened yet so it didn't means it was also why would it say sham there they were there it was here in their day what did the dreidel stand for geishna and it was a reminder to them that we've been through this before and we'll get through this again and the way we got through Egypt was maintaining our connection to Toyota even when foreign powers were trying to suppress us and so too today so that's what it stood for geisha now I'll go a little bit deeper a little bit deeper here this is also according to the banaya saska that uh I've mentioned now the Greek oppression and I also mentioned Egypt Egypt is the archetype of all exiles there are actually Four total Exiles that the Jewish people have suffered under and the magala mukes who is my ancestor I always mention that my ancestor through Lieber hagodo the founder of the town of radichev he explains that the words and in those many days he says of rhyming bubble yavan madai it's not in chronological order but I'll say it in chronological order um Babylonia also translated uh uh who destroyed the first temple media the Persian Empire which was uh after the the Babylonian exile or during the Babylonian Babylonian so they're the porn story basically the oven which is Greece the hellenizers and the last one really Rome which is the current Exile Western Civilization is a an inheritor of of Rome when Jacob had his dream Jacob's Ladder he saw the administering angels of these of these Empires he saw how first the ministering angel of Babel of Babylonia went up 70 rungs of the ladder and came back down representing the fact that the Babylonians would rule over the Jews for 70 years and then then be toppled and then he saw how the ministering angel of Persia went up 52. rungs of the ladder and came back down and then he saw how Greece went up 180 rungs and came back down and then he saw the ministering angel of Rome going up and up and up and up and up and never coming back down and he became very afraid will it never end will the Roman Exile never end and then in the words of vodka the prophet who was against righteous prosely from the adamites he was a Roman convert to Judaism and became a prophet so in his words he says that Hashem promises that even if Adam Rome will lift itself up like an eagle Hashem Hashem says I will bring you down from there so the Last Exile of our people the Roman Exile will be a very long Exile 2000 years and Counting unfortunately but eventually Hashem himself will bring that Exile down so what does this have to do with dreidel in the four letters on the on the on the dreidel it has to do with the fact that the maharral maharami Prague I mentioned before that Franz Kafka was from Prague so there you got your Prague connection um the Maharaj says like this that each of these four oppressors targeted a particular aspect of the Jewish people a person is made up of different aspects the nephesh which is his spirituality the Goof which is his body his physicality this sehal which is his mind and hakoil which means everything it's sort of the the entire package as it is all can interconnected so he says like this the Babylonians attacked the Jewish nephesh the Jewish Soul how so because they destroyed the temple and Temple was the place as we mentioned earlier of sacrifices and sacrifices and is an atonement for the salt like the Torah says nephesh kisocative when a nephish when a soul will bring an offering for atonement so they attacked the Jewish Soul by removing the temple which was our way of atoning our souls then you have after that historically Persia they attacked the Goof the body Haman what did he want to do wasn't a religious War he wasn't trying to assimilate us he was trying to kill us he wanted to kill Jews so that's goof that's the body the Greeks Yovan the hellenists their whole thing was intellect with Seiko they wanted us to learn Toyota philosophically instead of as a uh instead of with a kadusha with holiness and Rome unfortunately did all of those things hot coil they did it all they destroyed the base of mcdosh they destroyed the second temple just like the Babylonians destroyed the first temple they killed Jews they they massacred Jews just like the Persians wanted to kill Jews they used their philosophers to try to uh taint our world view meaning the cycle the mind of the Jewish people just like the Greeks did Romans sort of inherited all the Greek ideology and so basically hot coil they did everything the whole package deal so what is that the letters of the dreidel ish that's what the Babylonians attacked the Soul by destroying the temple the gimmel is Goof the body that's what the Persians did the hey I'll do it in the order that's on the dreidel the hay is hot girl everything what the Romans did and the shin is sin same letter the intellect that's what the Greeks did so you have the four letters of the dreidel representing these four kingdoms that oppress the Jewish people now here's the thing you got to understand we are surrounded on all sides so as a dreidel spinning the Jewish people are the center point and around us we're being surrounded we're being encircled by these oppressors on every side but at the same time remember as you envision this they are divided and we are united because they're each on four different sides so those who oppress the Jews have disunity maybe the only thing they agree on is that they all hate Jews but they are divided to the four different sides of the dreidel the Jewish people are the center point of the dreidel we have unity and ultimately what will happen now you're going to say these kingdoms are trying to destroy us so what do we want to do to them we want to destroy them no actually not that's not our goal our goal is not to destroy them they want to destroy us we don't want to destroy them you know what we want to do we want to unite them we want to unite them we want to unite the world what does it say that when mashiach comes he Oz that then Hashem says I'm going to transform the language of the people to be a pure language that the entire world will have a language for speaking about God's Oneness they should all unite in calling out in the name of Hashem completely United as one a united front so ultimately the four sides of the dreidel that are surrounding the Jewish people were the central point we will eventually Prevail and unite them all around us to serve God as well and in the entire world will be focused on one goal the service of Hashem as a united front and that is why furthermore if you count the letters the numerical value of the letters we have none which is 50 gimmel which is three hey which is five Shin which is 300. so what do you get 50 plus 3 plus 5 plus 300 any accountants 358 and 358 is a couple of things first of all it's a snake not just a snake the snake none Shin is 300. so when we finally unite the entire world even those who try to oppress us and we get everybody focused on serving God what will happen we will transform the source of all evil the primordial serpent the knockish himself will become transformed into a helper a shamish godo like the gemara says become a big helper a good attendant the entire world will put down all of their self-serving agenda and they will focus on promoting the knowledge of God and what will happen when that knockash that primordial serpent is transformed will have mashiach which is also 358. mem is 40 and shin is 300 and yud is 10 and Hess is eight so you add that up the letters of mashiach and you get also 358. so what do you have you have the whole history of the Jewish people with all of the four kingdoms that tried to undermine us and we're surrounded on all sides and what's our final solution we know their final solution against us is our final solution is to bring them all into a united front to serve God and to know the truth that we want to unite the entire world in peace and in knowledge of God by the way that's our Global Jewish conspiracy if you really want to know we want to unite the entire world to know God and to serve God together pretty nefarious of us now Avi was upset about the fact that he wanted me to talk about the Israeli dreidels that I could read your facial expression I knew what you wanted me to speak about so first of all let me tell you something that the Israeli dreidels is a new thing the nase well you should probably should probably say it the way the NES Paul right okay with the right Havana okay so I don't know when that started happening but I did look it up and I wanted to know when the word uh what do they call the the dreidel it's vivon yeah so that I found out is from the 1870s Ben yehuda's son when he was five years old he made up that word that's what I heard that's my that's what my research Department tells me at any rate so what do you do about the fact that in Israel they don't say A great miracle happened there because it's not there it's here we're in the Holy Land right so you know how it changes the math and messes up the math you want to do the math so basically the shin which was 300 gets switched for a pay which is 80 so you end up being what 220 short so 358 minus 220 is 138 am I doing my math correctly does that make sense no okay no no just the first letter you're just counting the first letter so you have none which is 50. Nace then you have godo gimmel which is three so now we're up to 53. hey is Hoya was hay is five so now we're up to um 58. and then you have the pay for po which means here which is 80 so 58 plus 81 38 okay so now we got 138 what are we gonna do with 138 so I have good news for you we spoke to a Jewish accountant and we we made it work mashiach has many names Michelle has many names in the prophet zacharya Zechariah he refers to Messiah which means this sprouting because he will Sprout forth he says his name and samach which is 90 men which is 40 cats which is eight so 90 plus 40 plus 8 138 so tamak is 138 so NES 138 is and if you like a bargain I'll tell you something else that 138 is do you know that uh the Third wrote a safer called and he was known as the Baltimore we refer to him asadic why did he write that why do you use that title because his name was menachemando same name as the seventh rabbit who's his descendant so Menachem is the same gamatri as Sema and Mandel's the same gematry as sadik so 138 is also Menachem and Menachem is one of the names in Gamora Sanhedrin of mashiach says that there were different opinions the name of meshiach obviously they're all valid opinions but it says some said the mashiach's name is Menachem others said shilai some said yanai Sam said khanina by the way if you notice those four names are an acronym for mashiachen is ma'am Shiloh yes so those four names are also the the initials or the the acronym of of mashiach so Menachem is also 138 so even on the Israeli dreidels where it says it's 138 so it's the same game which are both mashiach so we can't get away from meshiach okay now I don't know how many people are familiar with this but when I was a kid we used to sing a song it goes like this dreidel dreidel dreidel I made you out of clay and when you're driving ready a dreidel I will play you heard the song oh you also knew it okay now you know there's alternative verses I made you out of sand when I went to spend you you crumbled in my hand there's another one dreidel dreidel made you out of snow I put you in the oven oh dreidel where'd you go that's cute okay all right what should a dreidel be made out of everything in Judaism you have these building uh specs everything's so specific what everything has to be made out of where do you see that there's a specific uh specs for what a dreidel should be made out of so I'll tell you it's interesting first of all dreidel's not a halaka it's not a Jewish law it's a it's a custom so it doesn't say anywhere specifically what it has to be made out of but uh I'll tell you there were great rabbis who did particularly focus on the the material of the dreidel the Sam Cipher used to have a silver dreidel and he used to actually play so the the silver dreidel with his children on Hanukkah he would have the great Sam Cipher we'd get down and play Dreidel with his children and he was the silver one because uh Heather Mitzvah beautifying beautifying a mitzvah so if you want to get a silver dreidel there's a source for that but uh liberty before says you should use wood interesting nobody says clay in in with all apologies to the famous song I made you out of clay nobody says clay says wood why would tell you something interesting so we mentioned that that word geishna Jacob sent Judah to Goshen that happens in which Parsha and remember which is the week of Hanukkah in the haftura of vayigash which is from The Book of Ezekiel not the bread but the profit it says that Ezekiel has a vision where God tells him to take a piece of wood and eights he calls it an eights he says take one piece of wood and write on it Yehuda remember there was a division between the tribes the different kingdoms the northern kingdom the southern Kingdom at that time and you should take another eight another piece of wood and write on it Joseph which are the other tribes so you have Yehuda and Yosef representing the the leadership of the two different Jewish kingdoms during the time of Jewish Civil War and then put them together this is what it says put them together until they become to one piece of wood they should merge miraculously they should turn into one in your hand so obviously the connection to the Parsha is that yankovino is sending Yehuda to yasif yes if Joseph is already in Egypt and he says remember we said geishma who gets sent to Grecian Jehovah Judah to go to yasuf who's already there in Egypt so in the Parsha you have the unification or the reunification the reunion of Yehuda and yasuf and in the haftura what do you have the reunification of Yehuda and yasuf as representative of two different kingdoms that were divided in a bitter Civil War which did not happen yet but will happen in the times of mashiach this is what is envisioning is is envisioning the reunification of the Jewish people during the times of mashiach so what is the reunification of Judah and Joseph in addition to it being the coming together of all the tribes meaning Jewish Unity but Yehuda the name Yehuda in Hebrew is hashem's name which is hashem's ineffable name which we don't pronounce with a dollar in it what's a dollar is four olive based gimbal dollar rate dollar is four what is four I'll tell you one four that I know what we said earlier the four kingdoms that oppressed us and drove us into exile so when mashiach comes you're gonna have Hashem revealed in the entire world and to unite the entire world which is represented by the four kingdoms which oppressed us furthermore what it's going to be United 4 represents the four corners of the Earth the entire world is going to come irrespective of geographical location the entire world will be United in the service of God so yahudah represents with a dollar in it meaning the power of God uniting what the four kingdoms did to us and what being geographically dispersed across the four corners of the globe did to us that will all be reversed the disunity will turn into unity and of course who is a descendant of yehudah meshiach himself has a davidic king he's from the dynasty of King David who was from the tribe of Judah so the reunification of Judah and Joseph in the haftura is um hinting to the unity that's going to Prevail when mashiach comes Not Just Between the Jewish people but the entire world and how is that embodied in your high school's Vision by holding in your hand a piece of wood used wood because he said when you use a dreidel made of wood you're invoking this idea that you're holding in your hands just like Hashem told you high school a piece of wood which represents the unity of the Jews and the unity of the ultimately of of the entire world okay now Let's uh let's talk about something else about the dreidel not just the letters that are written on the sides let's talk about how a dreidel is used you know how dreidel is used you know you deal with it how you use it yeah you spin it right exactly yeah it's not a trick question you hold on to the handle or the stem and you twist it right and it spins so also from the vanilla sauce Curry so very interesting there are two rabbinic holidays Kanika and porm Hanukkah is represented by the dreidel you spin the dreidel Purim you have the grogger the noisemaker when you're booing the name of Haman so he says they both spin they both spit what's the difference though how you hold them dreidel you go you go from the above to below you come down like grogger below above you hold it from the bottom and you spin it on top six eyes like this in the times of Hanukkah with the Maccabees the whole thing was a miraculous occurrence like the everything like the military Victory to begin with it's not really possible the tiny little band of uh gorillas are going to beat the most organized military in the world so that was a miracle and then we found the the oil and the oil stayed lit for eight days so everything was miraculous meaning it's coming from above to below it's God raining Divine kindness down upon us Purim was the exact opposite there are no overt miracles in fact in the porn story as recorded in the Magilla God's name is not mentioned once the whole thing can be attributed to just weird things that happened um King couldn't sleep king killed his wife um Mordecai was in the right place at the right time like Palace Intrigue stuff that just you know afluke but like nothing miraculous nothing Supernatural and uh oh wow just really lucky oh wow what a coincidence oh and then Esther happened to be the the the become the queen at that time just at that wow everything just really worked out well so the whole thing is below to above and also the Jewish people they had to reconfirm their commitment to Hashem without miracles in their lives so that's again below to above because they have to look within themselves and find that desire to commit to Hashem it's not something where Hashem is overwhelming us with with signs and wonders it's more like introspective that's what poor Moses had to look within and find that connection that's why also the way we observe Hanukkah and Quorum is different and Hanukkah we like the minority we get light light is intangible it represents spirituality on poor it's all physical we eat we give our friends food and we give money to the poor it's all physical also Hanukkah was it was a culture War they wanted to get rid of the way that we study Torah we spoke about it earlier that's why Yavin is the sin of Seiko not sin as I am but sin the Jewish the Hebrew letter sin Seiko remember we said according to the mahad AL Yavin isekel so there was it was a culture War but uh Persia was they wanted to physically exterminate us get rid of our bodies so Hanukkah is spiritual form is physical and that's why when we commemorate them Hanukkah being spiritual you come at the dreidel from on top from above to below because that's spirituality God's hand and when you celebrate Purim you come at the grogger From Below because that's the whole story of Purim everything coming from human power or apparently coming from human power from below to above thank you um I tell you a Hanukkah story dreidel story that happened in our day and age there was a you know there still is a rabbi he's a Rob in Staten Island mayor Weiss and he's known for many things he give shoot him and he wrote some books about education for children and I guess that's why Milton Bradley called you know Milton Bradley is so I believe Milton Bradley got bought out by Parker Brothers we'll Google it afterwards but they're a toy or a game company so Milton Bradley wanted to sell a packaged version of dreidel and they're like a whole thing like what do you need Milton Bradley for a dreidel for but it was gonna be like a first of all it's supposed to like light up and also they were going to sell you the chips that you're supposed to use for it's a whole thing so they contacted Rabbi Weiss in Staten Island and asked him they said we know that you're a rabbi and you write about education and we're doing this kids game could you write for us kid-friendly directions or instructions you know we have a game it has instructions right could you write for us the instructions for how to play this game so uh so he wrote he wrote the instructions he just wrote straightforward like the instructions that we all know we explained to them you have four letters Let's Dance A great miracle happened there so uh they came back to him and they said well this doesn't make sense to us because like we're looking at it and we were like comparing what each of these these Hebrew letters what English word they they correspond to so you're saying the nun is Miracle known as NASA's miracle so how come that's that's nothing that should be like the best one or like sham is there that means your holy city of Jerusalem that should also be good and you have to put in like what what's going on here so then he he explained to them more like the the Yiddish meanings the nun is nisht nothing Yiddish that uh gimmel is is gone so you get everything and uh hey it's halb you get half and shin ishtel you put in so then they came back to him and they said our research Department tells us that in the times of Hanukkah the Yiddish language did not yet exist [Laughter] now just to pause for a second this story but I told you earlier let's say if you remember that in the times of Hanukkah what letters did they have the same letters we have except they didn't stand for it stood for Geisha I told you the answer what did it stand for in the times of Hanukkah okay so we know it's not which means the power to survive exile but it still doesn't explain why each of those letters means what it means in the context of the game like the Yiddish is very good the Yiddish does help you to understand it but why the each of these four letters mean what they mean in the game so here's what Rabbi Rabbi Weiss wrote back to them he said the Hebrew alphabet starts with an olive olive is the first letter and aleph means one and who is one Hashem God is one also if you look at the way an aleph is written it hints to Hashem because it's uh a DOT and a DOT and a line which is a good and a yud and above you this 10 you're this 10. of all the six so 10 10 and 6 is 26 and that's the same numerical value as you're in the hay and above and a hay but at any rate Olive is what who's won Hashem is one so he says like this King David said for me my opinion just my opinion you could disagree but for me closeness to God is good being close to God is good so it says like this you look at these letters on the dreidel why is it this I mean I don't think he explained to him why it was those four letters well we know because it's geisha but however it became those four letters he said here's why each one of them corresponds to the moves in the game that they correspond to because you look which of those letters is closest to the alif is closest to Usher so gimmo is pretty cloudy this olive based gimmel very close to Olive so that's the best one and and then you have the hey hey it's a little bit further away Olive face gimmel Dolly hey okay so that's only half you get half the pot and then you have much further down the nun the known as like in the second half of the olive face already once you get past mem is the central letter so once you get past ma'am you're already in the the back half so notice nothing happens and then the way down furthest from the olive is the shin Shin is almost the very last letter it's the penultimate letter in the olive base so that's the furthest away from the olive so then you have to put in and what does this teach us that it's good to be close to Hashem and that even when you're playing a child's game the real way to win this game and the real way to win it life and the real way to have any type of success is Kira vasolakima's closeness to Hashem so we should remember that whatever we do whether it's spinning dreidel with our kids or it's eating latkes or anything it is that might seem like it's just fun or it's just cultural Judaism or it's just nice family time which it is it is all those things but we have to remember that all of this stuff has deep deep meaning if you know the deep meaning it's even better but even if you don't know the deep meaning have in mind that whatever it is that the deep meaning is whatever I'm doing right now should bring me closer to a shop and when we're close to Hashem we win okay so that was all about the dreidel I didn't speak at all about the Hanukkah menorah about lighting the Hanukkah lights and that has a lot of deep meaning in it as well if you want to understand the mysteries of the oil and the Hanukkah menorah as it pertains to our in her spiritual connection check out this video