A couple of months ago, I received an email from a historian in Germany about the tiny synagogue my ancestors helped build in their Rhineland village of Ehrstädt. I’d visited this one-room prayerhouse several times over the years and had met this historian on one of my trips. The synagogue’s facade was now undergoing restoration, and he had a question about the building’s dedication, carved in stone over the lintel. It was a quote from Psalm 118: zeh hasha’ar ladonai, tzadikim yavo’u vo — “This is the gate to Adonai; let the righteous enter through it.”
His question for me: Why are there words added before and after this quote? He had heard that you are not supposed to add to or subtract from the text of Torah.
Words? What words?
I pulled up a photo of the inscription I had taken on one of my trips and looked closely. Sure enough, in smaller script were letters before and after the verse from the psalm. How had I never noticed this? The word preceding it was bishnat, meaning “in the year.” The letters following it — lamed-peh-kuf — formed a Hebrew acronym indicating that a year is being spelled in Hebrew without including the thousands. For instance, our current year 5786 would be expressed in Hebrew letters as 786 — tav-shin-peh-vav — as is our current custom, making it a simple four letters.
I stared at the inscription for a while: “In the year of — [This is the gate to Adonai; let the righteous enter through it] — according to the short counting of years.”
It suddenly dawned on me that the year of the building’s dedication must somehow be encrypted right in the quote from Psalms. My heart raced as I pulled out a pencil and paper and started adding up the numerical values of Hebrew letters.
Tallying the entire quote yielded a number way too big. Then I noticed in the word for “gate” a small dot centered over the letter resh. That’s 200. And a damaged spot over the same word’s shin that could have once been a dot — that would be another 300. A clear dot over the tzadi of tzadikim: 90. And a damaged area over the vav of “enter through it.” Another 6. That’s a grand total of 596, meaning the year 5596, or 1836 in the Gregorian calendar, which is, in fact, the documented year of the synagogue’s completion.
I wrote back to the historian full of excitement, describing my discovery. “Oh yes,” he replied, “we do that in German too, painting buildings with quotes that hide (and reveal) Roman numerals. It’s called a chronogram.”
A new word for me. And sure enough, there is a long history of Hebrew chronograms used in cornerstones, epitaphs and book dedications. Poetic words, suited for the person or occasion being honored, which also encode the date. It’s what we might now call “metadata.” And so here, my ancestors hid a message in the stone, and a historian knew enough to notice the riddle and send it to me. And I, in turn, was clever or lucky enough to solve it.
This building, now known as the Ehemälige Synagoge, or “one-time synagogue,” is also lucky. Unlike most European synagogues whose structures and membership were destroyed in the conflagration of the Shoah, this community of Jews dwindled in the natural course of things. Its people left the countryside to seek opportunity in big cities — Stuttgart, Mannheim, Cleveland, Chicago. In 1912, the last Jews of Ehrstädt sold the building and peaceably turned over the keys. It became a feed store for decades, then an accounting office, and in more recent years a community center hosting civic meetings, choir rehearsals and yoga classes.
It has now been a not-synagogue significantly longer than it was the synagogue it was intended to be. And its dedication stone still announces the circumstances, or at least the year, of its birth, for those who know how to see it.
Knowing how to see it is a tall order in our time. Those of us who have not lived our lives in immersive Jewish realms do not have ready access to the languages of our people, or to the references, stories and quirky tidbits of custom that would enable an easier (and perhaps more playful) relationship with the particulars of our Jewish past. I have been a student of Jewish lore my whole life, and I missed the chronogram entirely, until someone more removed — not Jewish at all, in fact — posed the question. Only then, once my curiosity had been piqued, were the ancestors able to tap me on the shoulder and say hello.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses sees a bush burning, and it is only after he turns aside to examine this oddity that God speaks to him. His curiosity was an essential condition for the revelation he received.
We might not be in a position to receive prophecy of biblical proportions, but Exodus recognizes that the uncanny happens to the curious. We don’t need to be experts in gematria or scholars of Psalms to open the lines of communication with our ancestors and with our rich, varied, colorful Jewish past. But we do need to be curious.
The more we follow our questions and the more our imaginations are stoked, the greater the field of contact we have between past and present. The more our eyes are open, the more we see. The more we wonder about connections, the more connections reveal themselves. Being curious is not in itself a method, but a stance from which we can better breathe the breadth of our past and be part of the fullness that still lives on, even in hidden ways.
No promises as to what your results will be. But this is the gate. May the righteous — and the curious! — enter through it.
