The following essay was part of an ongoing discussion
of Torah Codes in the Mail-Jewish email discussion list, and was posted
in Mail-Jewish Vol. 30 #83.
The subject of the Torah Codes comes up periodically. I'd venture
to say that I've given the Torah Codes more careful consideration than
anyone else posting here. I have been working on patterns in the
letter sequences of Genesis since 1968, and have worked full time for the
non-profit educational Meru Foundation since 1983 on various aspects of
the patterns in Torah.
Previous posters have summarized the situation fairly well:
The statistically detected codes have been badly abused by persons confusing
what was really done, with very simple ideas that make their pet names
and dates show up. This is an abuse, and it's been picked up on by
various non-Jewish groups for their own purposes.
The statistically detected codes are real, but the meaning ascribed
to them is not real. What I mean here is that no one who has examined
the codes research carefully disputes that there are equal interval
letter-skip patterns. It's the meaning of these patterns that's in
dispute. As others have posted, there is a solid refutation of the
"prophetic meaning" of the codes published by Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan,
et al., in Statistical Science, May 1999. [A
summary of McKay's article, and my response to it, are posted elsewhere
in the Meru Foundation website Torah Codes section.]
Of course, I agree with those who have posted their objections to the
use of the Torah Codes to attract Baalei Tshuvim, based on some sort of
"proof of Torah." This abuse has been picked up on by non-Jewish
groups, who are now attracting converts based on their claims of finding
Yeshua and other names in the codes. Whether for Judaism or for other
faiths, this is an abuse of the codes, and in the long run, IMO, is not
likely to be helpful to anyone.
The meaning of the equal-interval letter-skip patterns is much more
important and much more subtle than has been proposed by the "believers"
and debunked by the "non-believers."
There is a simple explanation for the equal-interval letter-skip patterns,
based on the first word of B'reshit. The commonly held root of B'reshit
is reshit, based on resh, meaning "head," or in other words,
"In the beginning." But that's not the only possible root.
The alternative is reshet, and reshet refers to a [woven]
net or network. We should also remember that Jacob passed to Joseph,
not a "coat of many colors," but rather a ketonet passim,
which is more properly translated as a "striped coat." Persons familiar
with weaving will immediately recognize that a woven, striped cloth will
exhibit skip patterns on its thread when it's unraveled. That's the
natural consequence of unraveling something that is striped, assuming the
stripe-making dye is on the thread. (Jacob's "striped coat" may have
been a prototype for the patterns in Torah, later received at Horeb Sinai.
This may indicate that Joseph brought Jewish science to Pharaoh's court,
and that that was a primary source of Egyptian knowledge at the time.)
My 30 years of research have been focused on this, and has come to certain
conclusions. (Some of this has now been published in the peer-reviewed Noetic
Journal, Vol. 2 #2.) Versions of these articles essentially similar
to the peer-reviewed material are available on the Meru website: The
God of Abraham: A Mathematician's View and Man
Bites Dog.
The first form woven by the letter-text string of B'reshit is a sort
of "tefillin strap," intended to be bound on the hand in the form of a
model human hand. When a person wearing this primitive "tefillin"
makes gestures, the outline of each of the rabbinic Meruba Ashuris letters
can be seen. The gestures that produce the letters match those reported
in ancient scripts, and as naturally produced by persons blind from birth
who have never seen gestures.
Examples of the weave, and how it was detected, can be found in the
essay, Symmetry Woven into the
First Verse of the Hebrew Text of Genesis, elsewhere on the Meru
website.
Because the human hand, and what's in the human hand, can be seen in
the mind's eye without difficulty, letters made this way can immediately
be seen in the mind's eye. This means that sequences of Hebrew letters
can be used to record and to reconstruct sequences of letters in the mind,
which could specify a meditational dance. It's my conjecture that
the meditational exercises of our prophets and sages, including the Pardes
meditation of Rabbi Akiba, are what is actually encoded in the letter-patterns
in Torah. Where else would a Jewish sage look for the preservation
of kosher meditations except in Torah? (Of course, it's not the potentially
idolatrous image of the letter-producing hand-model that is used.
The image is only a student's aid to memory. The actual meditation
is based on the feelings represented by each letter-gesture, not by the
image of the letter.)
Therefore, it's my proposal that the letter-patterns in Torah are not
a catalog of explicit prophecies (rabbis' names and dates, and the like),
but rather a meditational path by which a qualified tzaddik could attain
a state approaching prophecy. It seems to me that the potential for
recovery of Rabbi Akiba's Pardes meditation is a lot more important than
what's been proposed previously.
Besides the potential for recovering the meditational exercises intended
in Torah, the letter-patterns also appear to describe -- in great detail
-- the design of the Temple, the priestly garments, and Temple furnishings.
The models produced by the letter-patterns appear to satisfy a wide range
of discussion in kabbalistic texts that is now highly disputed, paradoxical,
or inexplicable. With these models, Kabbalah can no longer be treated
as mythology or mysticism, but rather must be understood as instructive
in the science of consciousness carried in Torah.
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