He was heartened too by the game of dreidel which started not long after dinner ended. He and Jake and Tony and Libby sat in a circle on the living room floor. Their grandmother passed them a wooden dreidel and some gelt to play with and they took turns spinning the four-sided top. Two of the four faces – gimmel and hey – meant he got at least some of the gelt in the pot. Only one, shin, meant he’d have to give something up. With those odds, Andy did more than OK for himself.
While he was playing, two things happened. The first was that Andy began to think about what it really meant to be Jewish, about how the stuff he liked, like latkes and dreidel, connected to the stuff he didn’t like (sitting in Synagogue during the High Holidays…bleh) or didn’t really understand.