Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel

One of Chanukah’s most well known and enduring symbols is the dreidel, the four-sided top with a Hebrew letter on each of the sides—nun, gimmel, hey and shin which stands for nes gadol hayah sham—a great miracle happened there. In Israel, the shin is often replaced with a peh for po, meaning here. The dreidel continues to be immensely popular with children and adults alike.

The word dreidel is derived from the Yiddish word dreyen meaning to turn. In Hebrew, the dreidel is called a sevivon. The rules of the game are quite simple. Each player begins with an equal number of the item that you are using as a game piece—a popular choice is chocolate gelt or chocolate coins. Each player places one piece in the pot. When someone spins and the nun is facing upwards, you do nothing, when the gimmel is facing upwards, you take the entire pot, when the hey is up, you take half the pot and when the shin is facing upwards, you add to the pot.

In addition to being used to represent nes gadol hayah sham, the nun, gimmel, hey and shin have also been seen by some commentators as representing the four kingdoms that tried to destroy the Jewish people in some way or other—Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical equivalent. By adding up the numerical values of each of the dreidel’s four letters—nun is equal to fifty, gimmel is equal to three, hey to five and shin to three hundred, you get three hundred and fifty-eight which is the numerical value of moshiach or messiah. One legend maintains that children would play dreidel as a means of masking the fact that they were studying Torah at a time when the Romans outlawed Torah study. Children would secretly learn in caves and when they noticed a Roman soldier was approaching, everyone would get out dreidels and begin to play and the Romans were none the wiser. Jewish mystics or Kabbalists have come up with many additional meanings of the dreidel’s four letters. The dreidel is also thought by many to be based on a 17th and 18th century English and German game Teetoum.

There have been several much loved children’s Chanukah songs written about the dreidel—the most popular are the Dreidel Song and Sevivon SOF. Contemporary artists and musicians have put their own spin on these classics.