It takes a lot to shock me, but on the first night of Hanukkah my teenage daughter succeeded (in a good way).

At the dinner table, we were discussing the difficult situation on campus. One of our daughters piped up and said: “I really liked your email about it last week.”

I played it cool, totally thrown off that my teenager took any interest in what I'm doing and thinking. “Where did you see my email?”

“I signed up for your updates after October 7th, because I wanted to stay up to date on what's going on.”

I was witnessing a Hanukkah miracle: a teenager who cares. I tried not to show emotion (because they don't like that), but I thought about the original Maccabees and how they were fighting just for this moment. And I thought about dreidels. Stay with me here:

After the Syrian-Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes took control of Israel, he instituted harsh decrees against living a Jewish life: he made it illegal for Jews to study the Torah or receive a Jewish education, or celebrate Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. This was the first instance of antisemitism in history where our enemies weren’t interested in destroying us physically – they wanted to destroy us spiritually by snuffing out our religion and culture.

So we went underground. Jewish parents kept teaching their children the Jewish traditions and way of life in secret. And therein, the legend goes, lies the origin of the dreidel.

Jewish kids started keeping a gambling toy similar to a dreidel in their pockets, so in the event that Greek soldiers passed by while they were learning Torah, they could quickly whip out their spinning tops and say they were just playing a game. This deception enabled an entire generation of Jewish children to defiantly practice Judaism and live clandestine Jewish lives.

Fast forward to today, and unfortunately there are still young Jews compelled to outwardly hide their Jewishness – especially on campus. But our dreidels aren’t going anywhere, because like my daughter, these young Jews still care. Despite all the fear of rising hate and opposition, thousands of JGO students all around North America are celebrating Hanukkah together with our help.

So tonight, after we light the fourth candle in our menorah, I'm going to sit down with our kids and play dreidel. Because our dreidels (and everything they stand for) will always keep on spinning, no matter what.