<p>It’s a neat story and a great example of the way a culture makes something its own - and why oral history is not as reliable as we hope - because the dreidel is an old German game. The letters stand, as I remember, for yiddish words. </p>
<p>I’ll stop and look them up … the nun stands for nish, which is of course nothing; the gimmel is ganz, which is all; the hay is halb or half; the shin stands for shetl or stand put.</p>
<p>So of course that gets culturally recast as standing for a great miracle happened there (or here, if you’re in Israel).</p>
<p>The essence of Hanukah lasting 8 days is often cast as a miracle that the oil to burn the candles lasted that long - or, kind of weirdly, that it took 8 days to clean up the Temple - but the time directly reflects circumcision and that happens after 8 days because that assures the child has lived through an entire weekly Sabbath cycle. This means the child is then given by God to the family - because God otherwise seems to have a claim until a Sabbath passes - and that means for the Temple that it has been given back into the world and so accepted as given by God. Amazing what the human mind can conjure as God’s intentions. Very creative. </p>
<p>It helps to remember that individuals back thousands of years ago were just as smart as we are. The 8 days is built off what I consider to be one of the founding ideas, that of the Sabbath, because human beings - meaning some actual person, a very smart person - implied from what he saw around him that everything rests and that then led to “discovering” the Sabbath because it took a human mind to realize that God then must have rested too. I see the Sabbath as one of the earliest representations of the human mind drawing associations - the same kind that led Isaac Newton to look at every single object and at Keppler’s work and then realize that literally everything falls, from a pen to the largest rock to the earth orbiting the sun. The same skill, the same kind of intelligence buried in the invisible notion that God must have rested. </p>
<p>How that then became a “day of rest” can only be imagined because maybe God rested in between days - the way we do at night. But these very, very smart people must have realized that there are two kinds of rest, your nightly rest and the rest you need after working for a period of time. They must have inferred that if we are indeed made in God’s image - which gets into the whole numbers thing in the Torah - then we must rest at night and also must rest in this other way. </p>
<p>My personal belief is that because the Sabbath is hidden, that humans uncovered the idea, that is why religion made it holy. We all sleep. No one can stay awake for ever, but we must choose to rest in this second way. Since that is what God must have done, then we honor God by choosing to do what God did - the other, getting a good night’s sleep, is merely built into us as part of creation. Sabbath then is not only an immensely deep idea but one that invokes human choice. I do find it sad that so often religion enforces the Sabbath when the initial idea had to be rooted in an individual person seeing God’s own rest and choosing to emulate that.</p>
</p>