Hanukkah means dedication. This post is dedicated to Dusty, who surprised me by actually knowing I have a blog and being distressed by its lack of updates.
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It is the second night of Hanukkah in Jerusalem.  It is still relatively warm here, as though Winter were a little shy, peeking out from behind the clouds and then running away for a few weeks after every short visit.  The time is soon coming for the change of seasons though.

It is my 23rd Hanukkah and the first one I’ve spent in Israel.  For most of my life, things have been more or less similar every year, but now change is here, it is a new season for me in my new role as a rabbinical student.

Right now, dreidels are spinning in homes all over the country and thousands of people wait for them to fall, to see which letter they land on which will determine their luck in the game.  I, my classmates, and perhaps you too, continue to grapple with the exciting, consternating, sometimes painful sometimes joyful process of discovering which letter the cosmic dreidel has landed on for each of us but then before we can come to terms the dreidel begins to spin again.  Life can seem like a chain of changes and we are barely hanging on.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (an important Hasidic rebbe of the 18th century) offers a different and insightful perspective of dreidels and of change:

For in truth, the entire universe is a spinning top, which is called a dreidel. Everything moves in a circle: angels change into men and men into angels; the head becomes a foot and the foot a head. All things in the world are part of this circular motion, reborn and transformed into one another. That which was above is lowered and that which was below is raised up. For in their root all of them are one.

One dreidel spinning, that’s all life is.  We all have our sides, some we like and some we don’t.  We all experience changes, some for better, some for worse.  But in the end I am still me, and you are still you, come what may, and I hope that we will always be we in the one that is all*.

Chag sameach (happy holiday)!

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*I welcome comments, especially if they can help explain what the heck I’m saying.  I’m also curious what you think about the Nachman quote.

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