Shaarei Shamayim

YITRO 5770

Do you believe? Do you really believe? For Jews, what are our core beliefs? According to the Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1), there are 3 core beliefs that Maimonides later expands into 13: that there is a Gd; that the Torah is the word of Gd; and that there is life beyond the grave. Today’s Torah reading speaks to all these core beliefs in profound ways. When the Jews heard Gd speaking directly to them, giving them the 10 Commandments, they personally experienced Gd and His Torah. And this, Yehudah Halevi, medieval philosopher and poet, maintains is what separates Judaism from all other faiths. All other faiths were established, he maintains, when a charismatic figure appeared and told his people that Gd came to him and told him to tell them His word. But ALL the Jewish people were at Sinai and heard Gd speaking directly to them! Akiva Tatz adds to this that if you consider a generation of transmission from grandparent to grandchild to be 40 years, then there have been only 83 generations of transmission. If it were not true that the Torah is the word of Gd, Tatz asks:

Which generation of Jews unanimously took it upon themselves to convey a lie to their children with no trace of descendant?...and yet we have no trace of even one admission that the whole thing was false. The unavoidable conclusion, no matter how uncomfortable for the skeptic, is that if it were not true, it would be impossible to fabricate and propagate. There is unequivocal evidence that the transmission has been identical in all places and in all times, because Torah scrolls in all communities in the world, and excavated from all periods of history are identical.
   
So we believe because our fathers and mothers have shared this transmission from the generations with us; we believe because life confirms this belief again and again in many ways; and we believe because science is confirming these beliefs. From the “Big Bang” theory that beautifully supports the Torah’s story of creation to the Y2 chromosome found only in Kohanim passed down only from father to son, science more and more points to the truth of Torah.
Recently, scientists have been able to find proofs in the text of the Torah itself that indicate that it must be Gd’s word. Hidden codes have been discovered in the Torah using ELS—Equidistant Letter Sequencing. If you look at every 7th letter or every 50th letter, a message may suddenly appear. These messages sometimes refer to people and events that happened thousands of years after the Torah was given. The odds of these messages appearing in the text are hundreds of thousands to one or greater and cannot be duplicated in any other book.

Using these codes we have found names and dates and cities of famous rabbis from the middle ages; the Holocaust with Hitler and Nazis are mentioned; the twin towers are there along with Osama bin Ladin, etc.—things that couldn’t possibly be a random occurrence in the text. The History Channel was so impressed that it has even done, not one, but 2 special programs on it. It’s not that a believing Jew really needs any proof. But it’s nice to have our faith confirmed.

And this past week I was listening to the Tamar Yona show on IsraelNationalRadio.com and heard an interview with mathematician, Reuven Wolfeld, author of the book, Truth In Numbers: Revealed Secrets In The Bible, who discovered in the Torah codes a prediction that there would be a devastating earthquake in Haiti. After the magnitude of the disaster was reported, Wolfeld went to his computer and entered the word “Haiti” into the Torah codes program he wrote. He specifically chose to look in the Torah portions that followed January 12th, the date of the quake: Va-eyra and Bo. What he found was astounding: the words “Haiti,” “earthquake,” and “many dead.” The letters also spelled out the word “Port” which makes up part of the name of “Port au Prince,” the city which suffered the most devastation.

Torah code proponents know that one cannot really predict the future with Torah codes because every future possibility is already encoded into the Torah. It is up to our free-will to determine which future will materialize. However, in one case, a future prediction did indeed take place, and that was the prediction of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Michael Drosnin, an American journalist and author of the book, The Bible Codes, took the prediction he found with scientist, Eliyahu Rips, to Rabin in 1994. But the warning was not heeded. However, Rabin’s assassin’s name, Amar, was later found in the Torah in the same place!

The question that this raises is: could the codes be used to prepare for a future calamity? With this thought in mind, Wolfeld continued to search and found additional words encoded with Haiti that give a possible hint of what may develop in Haiti in the near future: machala, “disease;” cholera;  dengue, a mosquito-borne viral illness & fever usually found in the West Indies; and the word dimum, “bleeding” or “hemorrhaging.” Wolfeld then sent a notice of his findings to the World Health Organization who ignored him. But the Center for Disease Control here in Atlanta did not. The CDC got back in touch with him about his findings and told him that they’ve notified their doctors to look out for these diseases in the near future. With water supplies in Haiti contaminated and the lack of hygiene because of the devastating conditions there, an outbreak of disease is a real possibility.

Wolfeld also found the words: sufah, “storm;” Elul, the Hebrew month before Rosh Hashana which is Aug/Sept; and the phrase, ruach yam chazak m’od, “a strong wind from the sea.” His conclusion is that this points to a large tropical storm which could hit later this year around August-September which would devastate Haiti even more! Finding this gives him hope that maybe what is encoded could save lives in the future by helping us prepare for what is warned.
I ask again, do you believe? Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here praying to Gd this Shabbos morning. Eytz Chayim hi, “The Torah is a tree of life.” We Jews have known the spiritual aspects of this Tree of Life since the Torah was given 3323 years ago. Now we may see how it can be our Tree of Life in every way. Amen!

Rabbi Mark Hillel Kunis 2/6/10

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