“And yet it moves.” So said Galileo—almost at the cost of his own life. The consciousness-reversal that Galileo suggested to scientists and theologians of his time was too heavy; it was impossible that the earth could move—and impossible that it could move peoples’ consciousness in such a radical way.
One of Rebbe Nahman of Breslov’s sihot (excursus, or “shmooze”) with his Hasidim in preparation for Hanukkah (Si h ot HaRa”N, 40) revolves around matters of science and scholarly research and the mentalities that animate them. As part of his battle against Enlightenment forms of scholarly research, Reb Nahman summons up a well-known object from the world of folklore—the dreidel.
Reb Nahman opens by marking severe the prohibition to engage in works of scholarly research,
a frequently cited prohibition in Reb Nahman’s work:
With regard to books of [modern scholarly] research, we have explicated a few times that it is forbidden to engage in them, and one must greatly distance oneself so as not to learn them or even glance at them at all. Even the scholarly works of g’dolei Yisrael (great Jewish minds)... for in these we find not h eileq Ya‘aqov (“Jacob’s portion”), since we have no pertinence to them. For we believe in Him, may He be blessed, with faith alone and without any [scholarly] inquiry, since He, may He be blessed, created the entire world and establishes His world and is bound to renew His world. …
Reb Nahman doesn’t only oppose engaging with secular books of academic inquiry that were becoming popular during his lifetime with the spread of the modern Enlightenment; even studying Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed, Rabbi Isaac ben Moses Arama’s ‘Aqeidat Yitzhaq’, and other foundational Torah texts is forbidden because of the “scholarly” one finds in them. The problem with scholarship for Reb Nahman is that such books tend:
l’haqshot qushyot, to raise intellectual challenges that seem like major qushyot, whose resolutions are actually quite weak. One who wishes to research further and raise qushyot to [the aforementioned weak] resolutions can raise such challenges, and [even] their esolutions will not be advantageous to that person. Therefore it’s prohibited to study [scholarly inquiries] at all.
The challenges raised in these books are too strong, so strong that they leave the individual disheartened and doubtful. Here, the Believer is presented ostensibly as a person without qushyot, one who doesn’t experience the challenges of intellectual inquiry—a controlled, stable way of thinking, without doubts. One might stumble upon a scholarly qushya such as this, says Reb Nahman:
On what basis did the star merit to be a star, the Zodiac sign to be a Zodiac sign? And in what way did inferior, base things sin such that that they turned out inferior, like cattle and beasts and the like—why did they not turn out the opposite? And too, for what reason is the head a head and the leg a leg, and not the opposite. So too other such intellectual challenges.
Qushyot on the order of creation, the laws of nature, and the cosmos are considered shortcomings of faith, a human weakness, indeed, a sin. Nonetheless, Reb Nahman in a flash
flips this picture on its head:
In truth, know that the whole world is like a spinning wheel called a dreidel. Everything turns on itself again and reverses itself: from a person to an angel and from an angel to a person and from a head to a leg and a leg to a head, and so too all other things in the world turn again and reincarnate and transform from one thing to the next and that thing to another, from the supernal to lower and from the lower to the supernal. For in truth, at the root of all, all is One.
The dreidel represents the potential for reversal: no longer does reality need to be stubborn and uncompromising, law-driven and fixed. Reality is dynamic and open to change. The head need not be one’s head, the foot need not be one’s foot. Here, we might wonder: did Reb Nahman just justify the claims of modern scholars? After all, if he concedes that head need not be a head, these researchers’ doubts are on the mark!
To properly understand the difference between Reb Nahman’s “ dreidel mentality” and the mentality of scholarly inquiry, we must return to the core of Reb Nahman’s claims. The problem with the worldview of scholars is not that “doubt” leads to a critique, but rather that doubt, according to the scholars, is not solvable. The scientific-empiric point of departure, which Reb Nahman opposes, assumes (or at least it did in his lifetime) that the world is fixed and not given to change. Based on this outlook, a person has no task other than to understand the world, measure it with the tools of science and rationalism, and ask “why?”. So really, the scientific person can only understand the rules of the game, but cannot unsettle and challenge the very fact of the game.
Scholars may ask “for what reason is the head a head,” but they don’t actually believe that a head can be anything other than a head. The Believer, on the other hand, who intuits how “at the root of all, all is One,” doesn’t view prima facie the constancy of nature. One’s religious faith allows one to believe in the “miracle”—the Believer’s phenomenology comprises a flexibility much greater than that of “natural law.” With this in mind, the Believer is presented as more of progressive, developed, and free thinker than the scientific scholar. The scholarly fixation, however, is identified with sadness and despair.
This dynamic thinking of Believers taps into the Infinite realm, the Ein Sof, a consciousness in which at root all is One—for Reb Nahman, a realm that operates like a dreidel. Tapping into this realm, one is able to free oneself from the fixed, “square” rules that ostensibly constitute reality, and to “spin” reality on its head. The dreidel may be built like a geometrically sound cube, but this cube spins. If we think about the Believer as embodying the dreidel, the Believer is actually open-minded to qushyot of scholarly inquiry, shunning only the rigid frameworks that brought those qushyot to light. This “lucky cube” communicates a belief in a changing, unpredictable reality: one moment the entire treasure pot belongs to you, and suddenly one spin and that’s that! The poor becomes rich and the rich loses all the chocolate gelt!
We can now jump into a new contemplation on the holiday of Hanukkah. Faith—any faith—is a flexibility of consciousness and a belief in change. Even one who believes in absurdities or nothingness—or Communism, Buddhism, or even in a soccer team!—refuses to believe that the way reality functions is unchanging. A stable “natural law” is not something that epistemically obligates. All the more so for Faith in the Inifinite One.
Hanukkah itself embodies this reversal of consciousness—” rabim b’yad m‘atim ” the many at the hands of the few, “ giborim b’yad h alashim, ” the mighty at the hands of the weak. We don’t celebrate the “victory” per se, the military and sovereign gains (which, in any event, were meager and questionable), nor do we celebrate “ haNissim asher h olelu haMaccabim, ” the miracles that the Maccabees catalyzed. We celebrate the very change itself, the element of surprise, the world’s ability to spin and flip, and the ability of Believers to hold onto that mentality, and to continue in their open-ended hope. More than traditional images of messianic redemption, those who believes they can spins the dreidel themselves are themselves the hope and redemption.
As you spin the dreidel this Hanukkah, may you merit to reach your hand out to the world and flip it on its head!
