VAETCHANAN 5783
A Remarkable Faith Restoring Code in the Torah
Tisha B’Av was 2 days ago, and its effects are still resounding within me. In some ways, Tisha B’Av is a challenge to our faith. After all, it mourns all the great tragedies that the Jewish people—Gd’s people—have suffered. On Tisha B’Av day, the Torah portion that is read comes from this morning’s Torah portion. And as I listened to it being read on Tisha B’Av, I was filled with hope. Please take out your ArtScroll Chumashim and turn to page 962. Follow me as I read in English 4 of those verses beginning with verse, Deuteronomy chapter 4:25:
When you beget children and grandchildren and will have been long in the land, you will grow corrupt and make a carved image of anything, and you will do evil in the eyes of Hashem, your Gd, to anger Him. I appoint heaven and earth this day to bear witness against you that you will surely perish quickly from the Land to which you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not have lengthy days upon it, for you will be destroyed. Hashem will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where Hashem will lead you. There you will serve gods, the handiwork of man, of wood and stone, which do not see, and do not hear, and do not eat, and do not smell.
Now this doesn’t much seem like a hopeful passage—does it? After all, Gd here is saying to the Jews about to enter the Promised Land that if you abandon My Torah and worship other gods, I will spread you among all the peoples of the earth and only a few of you will remain. There you will serve other gods—the god of wood and the good of stone.
What was it about this passage that filled me with hope? Let’s take a closer look. What is the god of wood and what is the good of stone? The god of wood refers to Christianity—the wood of the cross of Jesus. That’s why Christians—and too many Jews who are not aware of its origins—say, “Knock on wood.”
And what is the god of stone? This refers to Islam—the Black Stone in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Every year, millions of Muslim pilgrims gather around the Kaaba, also known as the Sacred House, a cubic-shaped building at the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram, in Mecca, during Ramadan for the ritual of the Hajj, where pilgrims must walk 7 times around the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction, a ceremonial practice that has endured for 14 centuries.
According to Islamic tradition, the stone was set intact into the Kaaba’s wall by Muhammad in the year 605 A.D. Since then, it has been broken into a number of fragments and is now cemented into a silver frame in the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of millions of pilgrims. Islamic tradition holds that it fell from Heaven to show Adam and Eve where to build an altar. Some scientists, after analyzing surrounding soil, suggest that it was probably a meteorite.
Why was this hopeful to me? Consider that 1300 years before the advent of Christianity and almost 2,000 years before the advent of Islam, the Torah tells us Jews would be living in Christian and Islamic lands serving the god of wood and the god of stone.
You might say that perhaps this could be just a coincidence—that this verse refers to idols made of wood and stone and doesn’t necessarily predict our future. Then I would direct you to the Torah codes to confirm it. What are the Torah Codes? A little over 25 years ago, Michael Drosnin, in his bestselling book, The Bible Code, introduced the world to a concept that has been part of Judaism for thousands of years. And that is, that there are many layers of knowledge contained in the Torah and some of them are found in secret codes. And that when you begin to unpack some of those codes, it will reveal how the Torah could not have been created by anyone else but Gd!
I’ve showed you over the years that there are many remarkable such codes in the Torah. One code relies on gematria—the numerical value of Hebrew letters. Thus, the Vilna Gaon in the 1700’s predicted based on the numerical value of the word in the Torah, tashuvu (they will return) which is 708, in the discussion of returning to one’s ancestral land in the Jubilee year, that the Jewish people will return to their ancestral land in the Jewish year 708 which must be 5708 (the thousand year is often not included in a Jewish date) which is 1948!
Another code notes that there are 5,845 verses in the Torah. This is the Jewish year 5783. Each year corresponds to a verse in the Torah. On the years where significant events have occurred, we see amazing correlations. Let me give you a contemporary example. When did the Holocaust occur? 1939-1945, or in the Jewish calendar, the years 5699-5705. If you take a look at verses 5699 to 5705, it speaks about a “conflagration” like the cities Sodom and Gomorrah that were incinerated, their inhabitants burned and cremated and people asking how could Gd do this? Sound familiar?
The most talked about code today is ELS (Equidistant Letter Spacing). Hidden words are looked for by reading the text every 2, 3, 7, 20 or 50 (etc.) letters. Although our tradition knew about this code, it wasn’t until we had computers that we could really mine this code. Thus in 1995, a code was discovered that predicted the assassination of Israel Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He was shown the code and dismissed as nonsense. After his death, they looked at the area of this code in the Torah and it revealed the name of his assassin—Amir!
Let’s take a closer look at our passage. Turn to page 964. We begin with the 1st Hebrew word in verse 27, V’heyfitz (scatter), and with the ELS Code we will see where the Jews would be scattered. If you take the 2nd letter—hey—and count an equidistant skip of 50 letters you will see the next letter is a kaf in the word etchem (at the end of line 4), and the skip of another 50 letters goes to the letter mem in the word, yishm’un (the 4th word on line 6). These letters: mem, kaf, hey spell Mecca—where we find the home of the “god of stone.”
If you take the 4th letter in V’heyfitz (scattered), which is a yud, and with an equidistant skip of 50 letters the next letter is a shin in the word Shama (the beginning of line 5), and another skip of 50 letters to a vav in the word yishm’un (the 4th word on line 6). These letters spell Yeyshu or Jesus, the god of wood!
