For Jews seeking to reconnect to Judaism, religious educators are relying on fact and information rather than blind faith.
At a recent weekend retreat in Palatine, computer encoding programs and investigative techniques of the Israeli spy agency were used to appeal to the minds, rather than the hearts, of non-practicing Jews in an attempt to bring them back into the temple. The approach by educators at Discovery, a New York-based, non-profit Jewish education center, is to provide concrete references instead of vague assurances.
“We ought to investigate religion the same way as if we were buying a car,” said Rabbi Avrohom Alter, director of the Jewish Learning Center of Chicago, which sponsored the Discovery seminar. “Our mission is a wake-up call to Jews to get them to think whether we’re just people or whether we have a purpose in life.”
That purpose stems from the Torah, which contains the first five books of the Old Testament, and is viewed as a manual for Jews on how they should live. But to get Jews to believe in the Torah, educators have brought in a mountain of evidence that they say proves the Torah was written by God.
For instance, during the “Hidden Codes of the Torah” seminar, participants learned about a computer analysis of the Torah that shows that God hid codes in the 3,300-year-old text. Discovery educators said those codes foretold events such as the Holocaust. Computers were programmed to search through the Torah by skipping a certain number of letters each time, eventually spelling a word or a name.
In one study, Discovery educators randomly selected the names of 34 rabbis who had lived anywhere from the 10th to the 19th Centuries. Using the encoding program, educators not only found the names of the rabbis in the Torah, but also the dates of their deaths and the cities where they lived.
“This is just another layer of evidence that points to a divine author,” said Yaakov Salomon, a Discovery educator, who added that “no one else could have placed that information.”
The seminar also used investigative techniques from Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, to back up the theory that the Torah was written by God. By using a system of analysis that breaks down into five categories, educators say they can verify the book’s authenticity.
“I definitely walked away wanting to learn more about where I come from and about my religion,” said Rachel Fatoorachi, 22, of Niles, who attended the Palatine seminar.
