From: alu@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (Alan Lustiger)
Subject: Re: Discovery
Organization: AT&T Engineering Research Center
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 17:19:06 GMT

While I have never attended a Discovery seminar, I have attended
a couple of "codes" lectures and I've played a bit with them. 

From what I understand, nobody (especially from Discovery) is
positioning the "codes" as the basis for belief, so all of
the criticisms I've been seeing are at best misplaced and at
worst malicious.

If one accepts that the Torah is written by G-d, and that the
alphabet itself was created by G-d, and that G-d has infinite
wisdom, why is it so far fetched that these codes would exist?

After I first heard about the codes, the major claim seemed to
be that the "minimal gap" that a word or phrase would appear
would be significant. (Essentially, every word you can think of
can be found in the Torah at some gap, so the minimal gap would
seem to have some importance.) So I decided to look for the
minimal gaps of the names of major characters in Bereshis,
in Bereshis. In other words, I wanted to look for the minimal gap 
of "Avraham" (besides the trivial case of his name itself) through
Genesis and see if it came out in Lech Lecha or Vayechi. I looked
for both forwards and backwards spellings. (Kids, you can try this
at home.) I chose only Bereshis because at the time that was all I 
had and all I could fit in memory at once for a relatively fast 
search.

Well, three letter names like "SaRaH" and "LeAH" and "ADaM" can 
be found with a gap of 2 all over the place, so you can't find
anything out from them. (Similarly, AHaRoN can be found with a
gap of two everywhere the phrase "Et Hayarden" is. ) 

For the longer names (Avrohom, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Yosef, etc.) I 
found that their minimal gaps occurred where you would expect them to
about 70% of the time. A couple of the results were, to me, 
stunning, but your mileage may vary. 

Is this a significant finding? I don't know. I'm no statistician. 
It seems to me that the codes are a good means to strengthen emunah,
but no one is claiming that they are something to base emunah on. 
The fact that the minimal gap of "Chanukah" and "Purim" happen to
occur only in the parshiot that are read on Chanukah and Purim 
respectively is very neat, IMHO, but it ain't going to convince
a skeptic. Along with everyone else, I would love to read the paper 
"that's about to be published in a major scientific journal" (and
has had that status for at least four years) that discusses the 
congruence of the minimal gaps of the names of major rebbeim and
their birth-years in the Torah. 

I am far more reluctant to apply codes to events like Desert Storm
because anyone who has actually looked at the topic knows that
if you look hard enough you can find anything. Saying that the minimal 
gaps of words relating to the Holocaust would occur around the
"Tochacha" is a bit arbitrary; maybe they would be found around
the Flood? Or the description of slavery? 

That does not, however, imply that these codes do not exist; only that
we should not take them very seriously to teach us historical lessons.

But I would not take seriously anyone who dismisses the codes
out of hand, or even with derision, without telling me specifically
why. 
-- 
               		Alan Lustiger
    |_ | |             	AT&T Bell Laboratories ERC, Princeton, NJ
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