Dreidels on the Brain

The First Candle: Chopped Liver

Sunday, December 12, 1971

I could have stopped at three and called it a miracle.

After all, three in a row is good. Not just good—great. You know the odds of that happening by itself? Miniscule. A dreidel has four sides, so the chance of getting a single Gimel—which is the letter you want—is one in four. The chances of getting two in a row is one in sixteen. And three in a row—which I had just spun—is one in sixty-four.

And the number three makes a lot of sense. There are all kinds of things that come in threes: tic, tac, toe, three in a row; Snap, Crackle, Pop; third time’s a charm; three strikes, you’re out. And stories—which I love—are filled with threes. It’s always the third son who sets off to seek his fortune and actually finds it—which works for me, because I’m the third son. There’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The Three Little Pigs.

But those things aren’t Jewish. Especially the pigs. They are, as my dad would say, goyish, which is the Jewish word for non-Jewish things. For Christians, three is a magic number, like the Holy Trinity. And maybe if I wasn’t Jewish, spinning three Gimels in a row would have been enough. Then again, if I wasn’t Jewish, I wouldn’t have been spinning a dreidel in the first place, trying to figure out whether I should believe in magic, or God, or miracles, or anything at all.

For Jews, things come in fours, like the four sides of a dreidel. Just look at Passover: You drink four cups of wine, ask four questions, tell about the four types of children. Besides, four was the deal I’d made with God before the first spin.

“Hey, God,” I’d said, “happy Hanukkah.”

I never know how to talk to God, and always end up feeling foolish. “I’m looking for a sign. Nothing big. Nothing fancy. No lightning or thunder bolts. Just a little sign. Between you and me.” I held up the dreidel. “So I’m going to spin this dreidel four times. And if you’re there, I’d like you to give me four Gimels in a row.”

That didn’t seem like too much to ask—just one lousy miracle.

And why, you might ask, did I think this Hanukkah should be different when everything else in the first twelve years of my life has been so amazingly, astoundingly, unbelievably unmiraculous?

Well, for one thing, I could feel it in the air. Outside, it was really cold, even misty, that kind of feeling you get just before it snows, when the world gets all quiet and the light becomes soft. At least that’s how I think it feels. I’ve never actually seen snow, on the ground or falling from the sky, though I’ve read a lot about it in books.

But it had been raining all day, a cold rain, and I had just checked the barometer on the front porch for the tenth time, and I could see it was between 29 and 30, pushing toward snow. The windows were so foggy, I couldn’t see outside, so I could pretend I was somewhere else, anywhere else but here in Temple City, California.

It was also the perfect time for a miracle. The house was quiet and I was alone. I had looked through the garage and found the cardboard box of Hanukkah decorations. Sifting through the dreidels, which were mostly crooked or broken, I found a perfect one, made of wood, painted orange, with gold letters. I don’t know where we got it, but it was nicely balanced. Just to be sure, I spun it a half-dozen times. Just a regular old normal dreidel—excellent.

Then I cleared all the junk off the table—a bunch of papers, my dad’s electronics stuff, and some glow-in-the- dark phone dials—and piled it on the washing machine. I wasn’t going to let anything interfere with these four spins, so I took the sponge from the sink and cleaned off the tabletop so thoroughly that I could see the little gold sparkles among the black and gray swirls of the Formica.

“All right, God,” I whispered, “this is your chance. Four Gimels in a row. One little Hanukkah miracle. Right here, right now.”

I spun. A good, solid spin. And when the first Gimel came up, I was impressed.

“All right,” I said. “That’s one.”

But when the second Gimel came up, everything changed.

“Excellent,” I said, trying to play it cool. “That’s two.”

I tried to act casual, like miracles happen to me all the time, as opposed to never. I wound up the dreidel and spun again, hard as I could.

Gimel!!! This time, I went wild.

“Yes!” I shouted. “YES! That’s it! Woo-hoo!” I completely lost it, jumping around screaming “Man-O-Manischewitz!”

“Be quiet!” said Howard, who had come out of his room. “You’re making too much noise. I’m trying to concentrate.”

When I said I was alone, I wasn’t counting Howard. He’s my oldest brother, and he spends all his time in his room with the door closed, studying math. That’s all he ever does. He’s fifteen and he’s in high school, and is supposed to be some super-brilliant genius. At least that’s what he tells us. The only time he stops studying is to come out and eat or when Kenny and I are making noise. Kenny’s my other brother, who is two years older than me, and actually likes to have fun. His real name is Kenneth, but everyone calls him Kenny. But no one calls Howard “Howie”—he won’t let them. When Kenny and I make noise, Howard stomps out and yells at us, then goes back into his room and shuts the door. That’s one reason Kenny and I hardly ever have friends over.

But at the moment, I couldn’t have cared less about Howard. This was between me and God.

“All right,” I whispered, suddenly feeling nervous about the next spin. “Three in a row is pretty good,” I said. “Really good. But it’s not a miracle. Not yet. It might just be luck—after all, it’s just a one in sixty-four chance.” I stopped myself, because weird as it feels to talk to God, it’s even weirder to lecture God about math. I brushed off any microscopic dust that might have settled on the table. “Just one more Gimel,” I said, so quietly, only God could hear me. “That’s all I’m asking.”

I wound the dreidel between my thumb and middle finger—and spun.

I realize none of this will make any sense to you if you’re not Jewish and don’t know what a dreidel is. Even if you are Jewish and know all about dreidels, it still won’t make much sense, because the whole game of dreidel doesn’t make sense. Nobody can agree on the rules, which is how you know it’s a Jewish game.

A dreidel is a spinning top with four sides. Maybe you’ve heard that stupid, inane, insipid song, the one that always gets stuck in my head this time of year: “I have a little dreidel, I made it out of clay! And when it’s dry and ready, oh dreidel I shall play!”

Shoot. Now it’s stuck in my head. I’m sorry if it’s stuck in yours too. From now on, I’ll just refer to it as “The Horrible Song.” Anyway, “The Horrible Song” by itself wouldn’t be so bad, but when the choir sings it at school along with the Christmas carols, and everybody acts as if they’ve done us Jews a big favor, it makes me want to barf.

Back to dreidels, which, by the way, can be made of wood, plastic, metal, even Styrofoam—anything but clay. They date back to the time of Antiochus, this mean Assyrian ruler who wouldn’t let the Jews study Torah, which is the one thing Jews love to do most, like Howard studies math. So the Jews came up with this trick of keeping dreidels handy while they studied. That way, when the soldiers came by, they’d hide their books and whip out their dreidels, and the soldiers—who weren’t too bright—figured they were just gambling, not studying. As soon as the soldiers left, out came the Torah. That’s another totally Jewish thing. Other people might have toys they play with in secret to avoid studying. But Jews have toys we pretend to play with, so we can study in secret. Go figure.

Anyhow, there are four Hebrew letters on a dreidel—Gimel, Hey, Nun, and Shin. Gimel is the best—everyone agrees on that—and when it’s your turn to spin and it lands on Gimel, you win whatever is in the pot, which is usually pennies or stale chocolate coins. That’s easy to remember because Gimel sounds like “gimme-all!” When you get Hey, you get half of what’s in the pot. After that it gets confusing. Nun means “nothing,” but some people play that when you get Nun you do nothing, while others say it means you’re supposed to have nothing, so you lose everything you’ve got. The last letter is Shin, which is always bad, because you lose something, or maybe everything. The only good thing about Shin is that when you get it, you can shout, “Oh Shin!” It’s pretty vague between Nun and Shin, and that’s where the whole thing falls apart. I have never played a game of dreidel that hasn’t either fizzled out or ended in an argument.

If you still don’t understand the rules, don’t worry, because no one does, but here’s my point: If you spin a dreidel again and again, sooner or later it has to land on Gimel. You don’t need some kind of giant computer brain to figure that out. I’m not saying it should happen every time, or even very often, just once in a while.

If, however, you keep spinning and it only ever lands on Shin or Nun, then something is seriously wrong. Maybe the dreidel is loaded, like the dice they have at Berg’s Studio of Magic—my favorite place in the world, by the way. It’s on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, and Mr. Berg knew all the great magicians and tells stories about them. There’s a display shelf of illusions and, right in the center, there’s a straitjacket that Harry Houdini actually escaped from! There’s even a picture of him wearing it, hanging upside down from a crane over a street in Chicago, and the rope is on fire!

I asked Mr. Berg if I could touch the straitjacket, but he just laughed, then gave me a pair of dice to play with. Every time I rolled them, they landed on five and two. Sometimes one would land on another number, then flip over, like Mexican jumping beans. He said the dice were loaded, and would always win in a game called “craps,” which I’ve never played, but is a fun word to say.

Back to dreidel. If it’s not a loaded dreidel, and all you ever get is Shin, you have to wonder. It’s like the farmer who wakes up on a beautiful spring day, walks out of his front door, and steps on a rake. It flips up and hits him in the face—wham! Dazed and confused, he staggers and reaches his hand out to lean on a wall. Only it’s not a wall, it’s his bull—who doesn’t like it one bit! The bull chases the farmer all over until he dives onto his tractor for protection, but his hand accidentally hits the lever and the thing starts up. Only he’s not in the driver’s seat, he’s hanging off the side, from one suspender of his overalls, getting dragged through the mud all over his fields, until the tractor finally runs out of gas. And as he’s lying there in the mud, all beat up, the bull comes back, sniffs him, then poops right in his face. And the farmer looks up and says, “Why, God? Why are you doing this to me?”

Then the sky parts and this booming voice says, “There’s just something about you that really bugs me.”

I heard that joke from Brian, my best friend, and it’s pretty good. But I would like to believe it’s just a joke. I would like to believe that God is not up there snuffing out lives like cigarette butts. In particular I would like to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that my father—who never gets a break, no matter how hard he tries—is not one of those being snuffed out, and our home is not the ashtray. That even though we’ve lost again and again until now, we’re not actually losers. We just haven’t won yet. Because it seems to me that if life is a game of dreidel and you keep spinning enough times—and there’s a God who doesn’t hate you—it will eventually land on Gimel.

And by eventually, I mean now. Hanukkah, 1971.

It was a perfect spin, and went on so long that the dreidel moved slowly toward the edge of the table. That got me thinking about a whole moral question—if it dropped to the floor, could I still count the fourth Gimel?—when it began to wobble, and finally fell—right on the edge of the table, half on, half off.

Oh Shin.

This is the first night of Hanukkah. Or, if you prefer, Chanukah. Or Hanaka. I’ve even seen it spelled Khanukkah. That’s how you know it’s a Jewish holiday—we can’t even agree how to spell it. Mr. Culpepper—my seventh-grade English teacher, who is really tall, with a beard, and so cool that he’s practically a hippie—told us that the word catsup can be spelled more ways than any other word in the English language: ketchup, catchup, katsup, katsip, catsoup—there are about twenty different spellings. Really, you can combine those letters almost any way you want and it works. So that’s what I’ll do with Chonikah—keep trying different spellings until I find the best one. But however you spell it, catshup is about what you put on hamburgers and French fries. And Hanuukkka is all about miracles. At least it’s supposed to be.

Growing up Jewish, you hear plenty about miracles: Moses crossing the Red Sea, manna in the wilderness, Daniel in the lion’s den. There’s a whole song about miracles in Fiddler on the Roof, which we’ve seen more times than I can count. So I know all about how miracles are supposed to work. But they don’t. Not for me. And not for my family. What we get is the exact opposite.

Mr. Culpepper says you need to define your terms or no one knows what you’re talking about. According to Rabbi Goldberg, who took over at our temple after Rabbi Buxelbaum died, a miracle is when the exact right thing happens at the exact right time, just when you need it the most. It comes as a surprise. You can’t believe it, but there it is! Clear as day! And you say, “Wow! It’s a miracle!”

But Mr. Culpepper also said you can define a term by its opposite, which is called its antonym. So what’s the word for the exact opposite of a miracle? Like when you really, really need something to happen, even though it’s a long shot. So you hope and you hope and then when you can’t hope any more, you start to pray and ask God to please, please let this one thing happen, and if it does I’ll believe in you for the rest of my life. And then, finally, when it seems like time has run out and there’s no hope, at the last minute . . .it doesn’t happen.

I’ve been looking for a word for that for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I found one. Actually, two. My mom was talking to her friend Esther—she actually has three friends named Esther, but they’re easy to tell apart. This is the one who used to smoke, and keeps on quitting. I’m glad, because smoking stinks and is disgusting. Not only that, it kills you. Now that Esther has quit smoking again, she has a new hobby: complaining about her husband, Harold, who doesn’t pay enough attention to her.

“So there we were at the Finkelsteins’ daughter’s wedding reception, I’m wearing my new chiffon burgundy dress for the very first time, but does Harol...