The Esther Code

by Michael Danneman

  Seth puts on his jacket and turns to her with a smile. “Anytime.”

  Before he leaves, Jamie kisses Seth on the check. His smile expands, taking over his face. “See you later,” Jamie titters nervously.

  “Count on it,” Seth assures her, beaming.

  He walks down the hallway and disappears down the steps. Jamie watches for a moment, her heart beating faster. She is confused and excited at the same time. Jamie begins to wonder if Seth is starting to mean more to her than just a friend.

  Chapter 29

  My cousin Edit Engelmann was still living in Prague when World War II broke out. She had decided to work for her father in their glatt kosher restaurant, located at 1 Maiselova Street in Prague. It was the only glatt kosher restaurant in Prague. I think back how her father’s name was Adolph. Can you imagine that name today, Adolph? Amram was his Hebrew name. Her father originally moved to Prague to learn Torah in a Yeshiva, an advanced school for Torah studies. Eventually, Edit's father was told by her grandfather that he could not keep learning forever. It was then that the restaurant in Prague was born.

  Since Prague was part of Czechoslovakia and did not belong to Hungary, the Jews there were transported off to concentration camps in 1942. At the time, I had little knowledge of my cousin’s whereabouts. We worried for their family and prayed for their safety. It wouldn’t be until later that I learned her fate was none other than Auschwitz.

  Our own fates hung in the balance as well. Many of the Jews were exiled to the Slovakian border or later, as we learned, to the Garany concentration camp. Those of us who were allowed to stay did not know what the future would hold for war-torn Europe. But life went on.

  Many of the men from our town were conscripted into the Hungarian labor force. This was to be both a blessing and a curse. You see, the Hungarian Forced Labor Corps were brutal. Prisoners lived in inhumane conditions, with limited food, and endured terrible winters building railroads, supervised by sadistic Capos, beaten and abused. But, unlike the Nazis, there were some humanitarian Hungarians who kept the conditions from deteriorating too badly. In the end, living in this tiny slice of Europe, protected until 1944 from Nazi control and deportation to concentration camps, would save many lives. There were casualties, though. One of my uncles suffered this fate. Some who went to work for the Hungarian labor force were never seen again. Until I meet with God, I will never know the fate of my Uncle Moshe, who disappeared.

  Chapter 30

  The morning light streams in the windows at the NCAVC as Jamie enters the building.

  She goes into her office, sits down, and checks her email. She has received three new messages from rabbis—one apologizing because he cannot help her, one saying he can meet next Thursday, and one recommending she contact Rabbi Silverman. This furthers Jamie’s hopes that Rabbi Silverman will be able to shed some light on her case.

  She remembers that she wants to find out what a kollel is. She does not like surprises. She pulls up Google and types in the word “kollel.”

  Kollel turns out to be a Hebrew term meaning “collection” or “gathering”, specifically in reference to scholars. Jamie smirks. It is perfect. That is what she needs, a group of rabbis who do nothing but study the Jewish texts and hash out Jewish philosophy and theories. They should have some sort of answers to her questions about Purim and the Holocaust.

  * * * * *

  The Beth David Synagogue is built of white granite. A large window is decorated with the Star of David. It is, in fact, a humble sort of synagogue otherwise. Jamie enters the building feeling slightly out of place. There is an office, not far away from the entrance, where a woman greets her.

  “I have an appointment with Rabbi Silverman.”

  “Rabbi Silverman, he is with the kollel.” The woman pauses, then points. “Located around the back of the building.”

  Jamie thanks her, then leaves through the doors she just entered. Out the front door of the synagogue, Jamie turns and finds a side path, which she follows to the back of the building. A brass plaque on the brick next to a door reads, “The Francis and David Katz Kollel Learning Center.” Jamie opens the door and finds herself in an anteroom with access to coat closets and bathrooms. The rest of the chamber opens up to a single large room with wall-to-wall books. In the middle of the large library room are several tables and chairs.

  Jamie walks slowly forward, trying not to attract attention. Four of the tables in the middle are occupied, each with two rabbis sitting opposite of each other. Jamie notices that several large volumes lie between them on the table. All of the rabbis are dressed the same, dark pants and long-sleeved, white dress shirt.

  As Jamie draws closer to entering the book room, one of the rabbis stands up suddenly. The man starts yelling at the rabbi sitting opposite him. Jamie jumps back a couple of steps, startled by the outburst. She notices that the other rabbis in the room do not flinch. They do not even seem to notice. Curious about the show of temper, Jamie watches cautiously from her vantage point, still unseen by the rabbis.

  “That’s not what Tosafos is saying at all! He disagrees with the Ri!” the standing rabbi shouts with vehemence.

  The sitting rabbi shakes his head in clear disagreement. “Let’s read it again, and the Rashi.”

  But the Ri agrees with Rashi!”

  The sitting rabbi states calmly, “I realize that, but the Rif argues with Rashi, and so does the Ritva. Let’s look at the Ritva.”

  “Fine,” the standing rabbi mumbles, regaining his seat and, apparently, his composure. He starts flipping to the back of the large volume in front of him and says, “Okay, here it is.…”

  At this point, one of the other rabbis spots Jamie. He puts on his jacket and large-brimmed black fedora and comes into the antechamber to greet her.

  “Jamie?”

  “Yes,” Jamie answers. “Rabbi Silverman, I presume?”

  “Come on in,” the rabbi invites, motioning her into the large room. He is of medium height, probably in his mid-twenties, Jamie suspects. His carefully-trimmed beard makes it difficult to pinpoint his age. The rabbi’s hair is dark brown, matching his eyes.

  “Jamie Golding,” Jamie says amiably, holding out her hand to shake his.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet with you,” Silverman replies. He quickly retrieves a book off of the table and acts like he does not see her hand. “Here, let me put this book back on the shelf. We are just finishing our morning learning session.” He crosses the room and returns the volume to its space on one of the bookcases.

  Jamie follows behind him and admits, “I’m so sorry for being a little early, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to get here, or how bad traffic would be.”

  “Understandable. It’s not a problem. I’m happy to help,” Silverman assures her.

  “What was he so upset about?” Jamie inquires, jerking her head toward the rabbi who stood up during the session.

  Silverman explains, “Oh, he is not upset. He is just excited about his opinion. Let’s go where we can talk.”

  “He sounded upset to me.” Jamie cautiously eyes the two rabbis involved in the argument. “I thought it was going to come to blows there for a second.”

  “No,” Rabbi Silverman answers gently. “They just disagree on what one of the commentaries means. Here, have a seat.”

  Rabbi Silverman takes a seat at the nearest empty table. Jamie looks at him doubtfully.

  “Could we go somewhere a little more private?” Jamie requests, surveying the room.

  “Sorry, this is as private as it gets. It’s a modesty thing. We don’t seclude ourselves with women, other than our wives,” Silverman tells her with a smile.

  Oh. Right.

  Seeing her hesitation, Silverman assures her, “No one will hear us.”

  Jamie pauses as she considers presenting her badge, but she decides against it and instead takes another moment to observe her surroundings. She hears a mixture of Hebrew, English, and Aramaic, being bantered back and forth. The intensity of
the rabbis in their own studies and discussions reaffirms the rabbis claim: no one is going to be listening to their conversation.

  “So, are you married?” Rabbi Silverman opens politely.

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “Oh, if you were, I was going to ask if your husband was also interested in things Jewish, and, if not, I might know someone…you just never know,” he says, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Right, okay,” Jamie concedes, sitting in a chair across from Rabbi Silverman. “So you’re married, then?”

  “Yes, and we have four kids, and one on the way, bli ayin hora,” Silverman declares.

  “Congratulations,” Jamie wishes him with a smile, looking more closely at his face, searching for signs of age. Five kids? He looks twenty-five!

  “Thanks. We are excited too,” Rabbi Silverman agrees, also smiling. “But now we should talk about the reason for your visit. What can I do for you?”

  “I am Jewish, but I’m not very religious. I am also a Special Agent for the FBI. I’m working on a case for which I cannot disclose many details, but I need to know as much as possible about the book of Esther, about Purim, and about a possible connection to the Holocaust.”

  “I see. This is not a question I get every day. Well, do you know anything about either one?” Rabbi Silverman responds, looking right at Jamie.

  “I’ve read the book of Esther recently, and I know the basics of the Holocaust from history classes,” Jamie admits with a shrug. “And I’ve seen Schindler’s List.”

  “A friend of mine’s grandfather was actually on Schindler’s list! And I don’t mean the movie—the actual list.” Rabbi Silverman’s enthusiasm is endearing. Jamie decides she can trust this man.

  Rabbi Silverman thinks to himself for a moment, choosing his words carefully. Finally he answers, “In a nutshell, the Purim story and the Holocaust are the same story. Same history, same enemy, and same plot. Very different outcome on the surface, but underneath they are, essentially, the same. You could spend years researching either one.”

  “I don’t have years,” Jamie hurries to let him know, “I may not even have weeks.…”

  “We should get started then. Tell me where you want to begin.”

  “When I sent out the emails, I copied a few synagogues, and almost immediately I received a response from a rabbi stating that the connection is all science fiction. I didn’t even know there was a connection. I had just wanted to learn about each one separately. But it would seem that a connection would be much more illuminating in terms of my work. So…” Jamie drops her briefing-room style and lets some of her curiosity show through as she asks, “Is it true? Are there hidden codes about the Holocaust in the book of Esther? How do these things go together?”

  “Like I said before, they are the same story, and, yes, there are fascinating codes in the Megilla. That’s what we call the book of Esther in Hebrew. The codes point directly to the Holocaust. But, first, do you know anything about the codes in the Torah and how they work?”

  “I’ve never heard about them until now.”

  “This will change the way you look at the Torah,” Silverman cautions her. He pauses for a moment, contemplating Jamie’s face. Then he continues, “You have to see the codes in action to comprehend the connection. Jamie, who wrote the Torah?”

  “I was always told it was written by God. Although after a few years in the Bureau and after seeing some of the horrible things people do, I don’t really believe in God anymore. I’m not sure if I ever really did. So I guess I believe it was written by man,” Jamie tells him candidly.

  “It was written by God, and I can prove it to you,” Rabbi Silverman asserts boldly, locking eyes with Jamie.

  “I…uh…I appreciate that, but that is not why I am here. I have to solve a crime, not brush up on the Torah,” Jamie reminds him.

  “Let me tell you about the codes, which is the information you’re looking for. Then, after you see them, you may accept them as proof of who wrote the Torah. What I am going to tell you will sound like some recent invention—a mad new theory that there are secret codes in the Torah. But there is nothing new here. We have known about the codes for thousands of years,” Silverman explains with a smile.

  “Thousands? Come on,” Jamie rejoins, her expression disbelieving.

  “Yes, thousands,” Rabbi Silverman repeats. “The Atbash code, for example, is used openly in the book of Daniel, for all to see. There are other examples as well.”

  The rabbi picks up a book from the end of the table with the title “Chumash” written on the front cover. “This is a Hebrew/English volume of the Torah. The codes only work if you read it in the original Hebrew. It contains the Torah or ‘Five Books of Moses’,” he informs her as he opens the book to the first page.

  Jamie leans far over the table, trying to see better. Rabbi Silverman spins the book until Jamie can read the writing, now upside-down to him.

  “Here—this is the beginning of the Torah. Let’s find the first occurrence of the letter ‘tav’, which is the first letter of the word “Torah.” It is right here, at the end of the first word - BreisheeT - ‘in the beginning’. If you count every fiftieth letter from this “tav”, or the Hebrew ‘T’, it spells ‘Torah’!”

  “That’s pretty cool,” Jamie admits, actually impressed.

  “It gets better,” Silverman assures her, then continues, “If you go to the beginning of the book of Exodus and find the first ‘tav’, and if you count every fiftieth letter from there, it spells Torah again. And it is the same in the book of Numbers, again from the first ‘tav’, but this time counting backwards towards the center. And also in the book of Deuteronomy, from the first ‘tav’, going backwards, it spells ‘Torah’. But this time it is on every forty-ninth letter instead of every fiftieth. In the book of Leviticus, you find God’s holy four-letter name, the Tetragrammaton. So you have ‘God’ in the middle and ‘Torah’ spelled out in the first two books going forward towards the center, and you have ‘Torah’ in the last two books going backward, also pointing towards the center. The odds of this occurring randomly are astronomical.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?” Jamie interjects, perplexed.

  “It’s no secret. I heard a reform rabbi say that the Torah was authored by committees over hundreds of years. I asked him about the codes, and he said he doesn’t look at them. Just ignores what he doesn’t want to see.”

  “Okay…so how does this connect to the Holocaust?”

  “We’re not ready for that quite yet. The Holocaust codes are pretty advanced,” Silverman explains. “Another thing you have to know is gematria, or Jewish numerology. Before the Arabic system of numbers that we use today, the Jews used the alphabet as their numbers. Each of the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet is also a number. The first ten letters are one through ten, and the next nine letters are twenty through one hundred, and the last three letters are two hundred, three hundred, and four hundred.”

  “What if you need a bigger number?” Jamie wonders aloud.

  “You can string together more letters, like you would with numbers, but here you always add the total. You don’t write thirteen as a one and a three, but as a ten and a three. Seven hundred and fifty six would not be seven, five, and six, but the letters for four hundred, three hundred, fifty, and six.

  “Like Roman numerals?”

  “Up to a point, yes.”

  “So couldn’t you do this with any text?”

  “Yes, you could, but Hebrew is a holy language. When God said “Let there be light” he didn’t say it in English or Swahili, but in Hebrew. The Torah is the blueprint of creation, the DNA. An easy example: The word for father in Hebrew is ‘av’, made up of the first two letters of the alphabet. One plus two equals three. So ‘av’ has a gematria of three. Mother in Hebrew is ‘aim.’ Same first letter, one, plus mem, which is forty, equals forty-one. You take “father,” gematria three, plus “mother,” gematria forty-one; and you get for
ty-four, which is the gematria for “yeled”, which means “child.” Father plus Mother equals Child.

  אב + אם = ילד

  3 + 41 = 44

  child = mother + father

  “There are so many examples like this.”

  “Very interesting—father plus mother equals child—and all that. But, I really need to know something specific, about Esther and Purim.”

  “One of my favorites has to do with the Book of Esther. The word Esther is found in Genesis in the Cain and Abel story. There are no vowels in Hebrew, so the same letters can be pronounced more than one way. This is the only occurrence of the letters that spell Esther in the Torah. With the advent of computers the code researchers looked for the word ‘megillas’ near the word Esther. We call the book of Esther ‘Megillas Esther.’ If you skip every 12,111 letters from the letter mem (M) right before this word it spells ‘megillas.’

  “That’s a pretty random number.”

  “It happens to be the exact number of letters in the book of Esther! So you have the only occurrence of the letters that spell Esther and then encoded right next to it is the word ‘the scroll of’, with a skip of the number of letters in the book. Now did some committee of authors put this in the Bible hundreds of years before Esther was even written? In the Torah, there are countless examples that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

  “I’ll have to admit that is very cool. Before I explain any further about my case, I need to evoke the clergy confidentiality privilege and be assured that what I tell you will stay between us,” Jamie requests solemnly.

  “Not a problem,” Rabbi Silverman tells her.

  “The core of my problem is that I need to know why the perp is leaving a cryptic note with a name of one of Haman’s sons on it at the scene of each crime,” Jamie says. She leans on the table with her elbows with her hands hiding either side of her mouth.