This is a beginning of a blog on this topic. I'm just getting started on it. Given my penchant for rumination, it will take a while to complete.
In the past number of years, a new element of appreciation of the Torah has surfaced, called the Torah Codes.
The Torah Codes are uncannily prophetic words and phrases apparently encoded into the Torah, as deciphered by some simple and some not so simple methods.
The original story is that a computer scientist decided to use a computer (go figure) to count fixed intervals of letters from the first letter all the way through to the end of the Torah. In other words, starting with the first letter, the program produced a string of every other letter in the Torah, then a string of every third letter, every fourth etc. etc. Then he did the same thing starting from the second letter of the Torah, and so on and so forth.
It was a bit like SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, where giant radiotelescopes are trained on sectors of outer space, and the noise they collect is translated into reams and reams of letters and numbers, the idea being to search through all the data to see if there is anything intelligible in it which might point to life elsewhere in the universe. [Ah, but is there intelligent life on Earth? Maybe we should try to establish that, first].
At any rate, much to the "surprise" of the researchers, intelligible phrases and words did pop out of the text of the Torah. I put "surprise" in quotes because I don't think they were surprised at all. People have probably known about the codes in the Torah since Moses brought it down from Mt. Sinai. I'm sure a lot of manual counting of letters has gone on through the ages yielding these intriguing results. I've heard about a Rabbi Weissmandl doing this type of work mid 20th Century, and I'm sure he was not the first.
Some of these codes are just simple words or phrases which do not have a predictive aspect to them but are compelling all the same.
For instance, every Friday night before the evening meal, when religious Jews say Kiddush, i.e. the special recitation sanctifying the Sabbath, we quote directly from the Torah about how all the work of creation was finished, and G-d rested on the seventh day. "Yom ha shishi. Vayechulu hashamayim vehaaretz etc." There is a code in this section of the Torah.
Start from the last letter of "Shishi," which means "sixth," i.e. as with all other days of creation, its completion is recorded by the statement, "The Sixth Day."
Of course, as we all know, the completion of the sixth day, is also the completion of all of Creation.
From this last letter of the entire creation, then, count -- tellingly -- seven more letters, writing down the seventh letter. Continue on in this fashion, and you will come up with the word, "Yi-S-R-A-E-L."
This is one thing you can most definitely try at home. Look it up either in a siddur (prayerbook) or Chumash (Bible). Start with the the "yud," the last letter of the word "shishi" (sixth), After the "yud," count another seven letters. See what the seventh letter is. After that one, count another seven letters, and record the seventh letter. Do not count the start letter in each series of seven, i.e. the "yud" we began with. Count seven letters after the start letter.
It doesn't take a master interpreter to figure out that the purpose of this code is to indicate that the Sabbath, i.e. resting on the seventh day to bear witness to G-d's having done so Himself after creating the Universe, is for the Children of Israel. Moreover, it may well mean it's not for anyone else.
It's a good thing, for instance, that the Church made its Sabbath on Sunday -- and that other religions keep other days -- because it is apparently a spiritual crime for anyone other than a Jew to observe the Sabbath on the seventh day, in the way halacha, Jewish law, requires of such observance. While it's unlikely that any gentile will, in fact, understand and keep all of the laws pertaining to the Sabbath, it's still a good idea for them to observe it on another day, just on the off-chance they somehow will.
They say that any non-Jew who keeps all the laws of Sabbath on the seventh day will suffer the death penalty from Heaven, i.e., G-d will see to it that, one way or another, they are punished. When someone is converting to Judaism, for instance, and they haven't yet completed their conversion, they must violate the Sabbath in some way while yet practising its observance, i.e. turn on a light, strike a match etc.
Not that Jews want to convert anyone. We're not in that business, and initially try to discourage any such intentions. The real work may be to try to regain the interest of the millions of Jews out there who are alienated from their own religion. I was one of them. My story, which G-d willing, I will add to the blog, is one of a desperate escape from a cynically nightmarish Hebrew Day school situation, and then finding shelter at a secular High School from which point on, secular life seemed the reasonable way to go for me -- although, all through my twenties, I was actively involved in seeking G-d and enlightenment in a personal quest outside of organized religion. But I digress.
So using the YiSRAEL example as our proof, we see the Torah clearly contains codes within it's textual structure. And please don't tell me that a million monkeys typing forever are bound to come up with whole words or phrases. The Torah will go on forever but it's text is clearly defined, i.e., it has a fixed number of letters. Furthermore, these codes cannot be found in documents other than the Torah, not in Shakespeare, not in any other work, at least as far as the straightforward counting of letters in simple intervals goes.
Now, in addition to being suggestive, as the YiSRAEL code is, some are downright prophetic. In the section where Joseph is in prison, a code has surfaced which in Hebrew, says: "Mahapachat Tzarfatit," and "Bastilia." These words mean "the French Revolution," and, of course, where it all started, the prison known as "the Bastille."
Now, how can a document -- the Torah -- which has been verified letter by letter as to having been in existence thousands of years prior to the historical event of the French Revolution allude unmistakably to it in clear, recognizable terms?
Here we have an indication of the transcendent nature of the Torah, i.e., that its secrets clearly supersede the time/space continuum, as we know it.
[to be continued ... G-d willing, I will find the exact details of the Bastilia code and provide them, as well as explain what it all means --- and doesn't mean]
