Torah Codes Q: What are your thoughts and comments on the so-called "Torah Codes"? Do you think there is any validity in them? Have Rabbis of the past ever hinted at something like this? A: Presently, the Torah codes are most often misrepresented and misused. They have a certain validity in that they show that everything in the Torah is Divinely inspired, and that there is Divine beauty, called tiferet, in the Torah. This is most revealed through codes which refer to eternal truths and not to words or names of people or events, which are taken to indicate the prescience of the Torah. This is relatively superficial information. Obviously, the Torah contains all the information. To use the codes just to prove that the Torah foresaw certain events is a misuse of the beauty that is contained in the codings. The method of deciphering these codes today is very simplified, and should be much more developed. As to using the codes to prove the Divine origin of the Torah, anyone who has a deep appreciation of the Torah finds the attempt to prove the validity of the Torah slightly offensive. Probably, those books that you have seen are the superficial versions. It is unfortunate that people get the misimpression of what really lies in the hidden mathematical structures embodied in the Torah. There are books that contain amazing and beautiful mathematical structures from the Torah. This is all for the sake of manifesting the inner beauty inherent in our Divine Torah. There are indications of phenomena, which are in actuality Torah codes, which appear in classical Torah texts, even from the time of the early Rabbinical Sages. It is sufficient that the Sages use a particular system, such as revealing encoded words in the Torah by skipping letters, even once, in order to validate that system in general.
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