News from Middle Tennessee's Jewish Community |
Monday, Sept. 15, 2025
Dr. Mark Goldfarb is no stranger to the Nashville Jewish community. For 33 years, he lived and raised his family in town, and worked at St. Thomas Hospital. He was on the Board of the Gordon Jewish Community Center where he also coached his children’s sports teams, and he was a Board member at both The Temple and Vanderbilt Hillel. Now remarried, semi-retired, and living in Park City, Utah, the cardiologist says his years in Nashville, and the friendships he made, inspired him to make a lasting contribution to the future of the community. “Whenever I would enter the JCC and see the names Eugene and Madeline Pargh, and Joel and Bernice, I knew that someday I wanted to make a similar contribution. They were very special role models for me. They truly provided the infrastructure to ensure the vibrancy of the Nashville Jewish community,” he says.
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A few days ago, I found an interesting piece written by Rabbi David Golinkin about the origins of the Dreidel and its connection to Hanukkah. According to Rabbi Golinkin, in the past, some Rabbis claimed that the Dreidel was used by children as they were doing their best to fool the Greeks. While the foreign soldiers thought that those kids were wasting their time playing with this four-sided spinning top, in reality they were using all their energy to study Torah. Rabbi Golinkin also quotes an explanation that connects the Dreidel to Hanukkah through gematria. So, for example, the gematria of nun, gimmel, hey and shin equals 358, which is also the numerical equivalent of the word Mashiach. The idea, then, is that when we play with the Dreidel on Hanukkah, we are reminded of the miraculous salvation of those days, hoping for a new redemption in the near future. Finally, Golinkin mentions those who see in the four letters of the Dreidel the hints of the four kingdoms who tried to destroy us throughout history. The nun stands for Nebuchadnetzer, ruler of Babylon. The hey stands for Haman, the bad guy from Persia. The gimmel stands for Gog or for Greece and the shin (or actually sin) for Seir, which is one of the names for what came to be the Roman Empire. The message is clear: In every generation we face enemies willing to wipe us out of the map, but we always find a way to overcome those threats, and we celebrate transforming those bad guys into amusing toys.
