Laughing at Hierarchies: Rabbi Nahman of Breslav and the Dreidel

By Yaakov Mascetti*

The celebration of Hanukah brings the individual to expand the reach and quantity of light as the year reaches its lowest point. Yet, while the accepted rhetoric for Hanukah is that of the contrast between light and darkness, and the celebration of spiritual enlightenment vis-à-vis the dangers of cultural assimilation, a marginal and little known explanation of this holiday is the one proposed by Rabbi Nahman on the dreidel (the four-sided spinning top), upon which Rav ShaGaR (Shimshon Gershon Rosenberg) based one of his rather postmodern interpretations of traditional Judaism:

It is a known fact that we are prohibited to learn from the books of the philosophers… even when these are written by the great minds of Israel… for we are required to believe in G-d blessed be His name, and to understand, without the need for investigations of any kind, that He created the universe, that He supports the existence of the universe, and that He will renew one day the universe. And in these philosophical books, all we find are objections and questions which weaken our belief…

In those philosophical books we find, in fact, objections and questions posed on the order of things in the universe – why is the star supernal, and why were the lower things created lower in the scale of created beings such as beasts, and why did He not create things the other way around, and why is the head on top and the leg at the bottom and why did He not create things the other way around… And indeed you will see how this is utterly meaningless, for the entire universe is a rotating wheel, which we also call dreidel. For everything rotates, goes around and comes back, from man to angel and from angel to man, from the leg to the head and from the leg back to the head, and all the things in this universe rotate around a fixed point and go up and down and then back up, from the supernal downwards and then back up to the supernal sphere. And this is because all comes from one root… and the universe is therefore like a wheel, which we call dreidel… (Sichot Ha-Ra”N, p. 40)

The philosophical investigation into the nature and reason of things is, to Rabbi Nahman, the clear manifestation of men’s need for hierarchies, structures of being where one can assume there is a foundation of some sort which will then justify the existence of an order of some sort – in his words, why is the angel above and man below, why is the beast below and man above it, and why is the head above and the leg below. To this approach Rabbi Nahman opposes the circularity of the dreidel, which contrasts the linearity of philosophical thought with a circular movement where that which today is above may well be below tomorrow, and vice versa. This conception is based, of course, on the kabalistic idea of Divine infinity as a circularity which envelops all things, and makes all intellectual endeavors to perceive and define the structures of existence senseless, vain and meaningless. Rav ShaGaR sheds light on this idea by quoting a sentence from the Alter Rebbe, Shneor Zalman of Liyadi, who states a similar idea in his Torah Ohr: “Before G-d created things, all was truly senseless and meaningless, and what was above was paramount to what was below, and what was below was equal to that which was above.” Philosophical inquiries are thus the exact opposite to this lack of order – they endeavor to find the reason why things are as they are, and thus to provide the individual with a clear understanding of the order of things as they appear to him. Yet the dreidel teaches us, says Rabbi Nahman, that the laws of things are actually lawless, that all things created are, in the eyes of Divine infinity, of equal value. There is no essential law regulating things – and even when one can find and delineate the traits of an apparent rule explaining some sort of regularity of events, nothing will prevent that specific order from changing suddenly, and to be substituted by its exact opposite.

Quintessential exemplification of this inverted model of things, of this dreidel ontology so to speak, is the Temple of Jerusalem, the Bet HaMikdash:

And this is what we call the Hanukah dreidel, because Hanukah is paramount to the Bet HaMikdash. For the Bet HaMikdash is the exemplification of this wheel-like movement, where the supernal is brought down into our lowly realm and the lowly is elevated to the supernal spheres. In the eyes of the philosophers, the way in which the infinite Divine reduces itself within the Templar activities will in fact be incomprehensible – and this is in fact true, namely that G-d brought His presence upon the Temple. Equally impossible to understand for these inquirers will be the way in which man, a lowly and physically limited being, has the power to perform acts which influence the Divine, sacrificing a lowly animal and then burning it as a pleasing odor to G-d. Yet the Bet HaMikdash is the clear example that they are wrong, that Divine Presence can limit itself to a material space and that the odor of sacrifices is indeed pleasant to Him. And this is what we defined as the inversion of accepted orders, where that which is above is brought down, and that which is lowly is elevated to higher orders.

The Templar activities are to Rabbi Nahman the dreidel-like undermining of accepted ontological hierarchies, the undermining of clear-cut dichotomies separating the Divine from the human, the internal from the external, the hidden from the revealed. In the sacrifice offered upon the altar of the Temple, the lowly is elevated and the supernal is brought down – in this sense the Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban from the root k-r-v which indicated proximity or closeness, supports Rabbi Nahman’s explanation.

The dichotomies men create to provide the perceived existence with an order and with well-structured hierarchies – the essential inner truth and the external appearance of things, the spiritual versus the physical, and so on – are to Rabbi Nahman nothing but laughable endeavors, and must be approached with a smile, as the dreidel spins around and around, confusing the upper with the lower, the internal with the external. The appearances of this world are, though, not addressed with a Platonic dismissal, nor are they seen as the necessary evil on our way to truth – the outer is, in the dreidel-like rotation of things, always already part of the inner truth, and the inner essence reveals itself by, through and beyond the outer appearance. The illusion is truth, and there is truth in illusion. And as human beings strenuously build their towers of Babel, ascend the ontological ladder up to their creator in a desperate search for truth, stepping each time on steps which they themselves create and relying on hierarchies they define, G-d laughs.

(Psalms 2: 1-4): Why do nations assemble, and peoples plot vain things; kings of the earth take their stand, and regents intrigue together against the LORD and against His anointed? “Let us break the cords of their yoke, shake off their ropes from us!” He who is enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord mocks at them.
Divine laughter undermines hierarchies, breaks the ontological strictures of things and scoffs at the philosophical inquiries of those who wish to know, of those who ask the “why” of things. The Hanukah dreidel spins, and remits into the hands of an unforeseeable fortuity that which men have tried to defined with orderly models of thought. Are we not also invited by Rabbi Nahman to laugh more and take things less seriously? Are we not invited to see the circularity of things and to avoid imposing on them linear structures which may make more sense and turn the events off this world into understandable? On Hanukah the light is dark and the darkness is enlightened, the impure is purified and the pure embraces the impurity of things. Dichotomies, regularity, linear structures and strictures, truly are the solid ground upon which we may stand as we observe the unexplainable course of events – but let us not forget that they are laughable, and that we must do what we must for the establishment and maintenance of orderly structures while keeping a wry smile on our faces, both doing and undoing things, both creating hierarchies and undermining them.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.