How your name is written in the letters of the Torah
Your name in the Torah: in Hebrew letters, as a number, with the verse it lands on and the sources. Computed, not divined. Free.
Your name
Gortenziya
Tap the letters of your name and add up its number yourself
0
The number of your name
Gortenziya (גורטנזייה) — Gortenziya is the Russian form of the Latin name Hortensia, from “hortus”, which means “garden”. And the same number belongs to the Torah word כפר — “to cover; atone”.
Your word in the Torah
The word כפר — “to cover; atone” — has the same number as your name. Here is the verse where it first appears:
עשה לך תבת עצי גפר קנים תעשה את התבה וכפרת אתה מבית ומחוץ בכפר
Genesis 6:14
The verse of your name
There is a sentence with which, by custom, a person answers when asked who they are.
Yours is this one.
גמלים מיניקות ובניהם שלשים פרות ארבעים ופרים עשרה אתנת עשרים ועירם עשרה
Genesis 32:16
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ג, and ends with the last, ה.
The custom is written down in the Kitzur Shelah and in Sefer Ben Zion: “say it regularly and never forget it as long as you live.” The Rokeach gives the reason in Chochmat ha-Nefesh: a person is asked their name, and whoever does not remember cannot answer. The verse holds the name for them. Siddur ha-Rashban puts it more plainly: children were made to learn their verse by heart — so that if they were taken and forgot everything else, they would still know who they were.
The week you were born
Add your date of birth and we will show which portion the world was reading the week you appeared, and whether it holds a word of your number.
How rare this number is
Torah portions with a word of number 300: 43 of 54
A word with the number 300 appears in 43 of the 54 weekly portions. That is a common number — it is in most portions.
Fact. The letters of the name גורטנזייה add up to 300. Plain addition — you can check it yourself.
Meaning. There is a Torah word with the same number — כפר (“to cover; atone”). A matching sum does not mean the word is 'about you'; it is a reason to look at what in it matters to you.
A question for yourself. What in this do you recognise in yourself — and what would you like to strengthen?
Practice. This week: open the verse of your name, read it slowly three times and write down one thought that stays with you.
The tradition counts a name in nine ways, each giving its own number. 5 of the nine have a word of their own in the Torah. We showed one. The rest are in the full report.
A verse for what you need
Pick a theme — we show a Tanakh verse on it that contains a word with your name's number (300).
Our verse — for two
Type the name of someone close. We find the verse that begins with a letter of one name and ends with a letter of the other — your pair's verse.
My days of the year
The days when the number of the Hebrew date equals your name's number, and the Shabbat when the world reads the portion of your verse — straight into your phone's calendar.
Every morning in Telegram — your verse, how to read it in Latin letters, and one new word. Half a minute a day. After seven days the verse stays with you.
Your name in Hebrew letters is גורטנזייה. Gortenziya is the Russian form of the Latin name Hortensia, from “hortus”, which means “garden”. In Russian the same word is the name of the garden flower hydrangea. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 300 — the same as the Torah word כפר, “to cover; atone”. That number points to Torah page 300 of 354 — in the portion Vaetchanan. What that portion is about: Moses pleads to enter the land; the Ten Utterances repeated; “Hear, O Israel”; the warning against forgetting. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 32:16. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Gortenziya” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: גורטנזייה. Spelled by the Academy of the Hebrew Language rules for foreign names. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
Adding up the letters of the name גורטנזייה gives 300.
300
The number 300 is the Torah word כפר — «to cover; atone» (Genesis 6:14).
and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, thou be drawn away and worship them, and serve them, which HaShem thy G-d hath allotted unto all the peoples under the whole heaven.
This is from the portion Vaetchanan. What it is about: Moses pleads to enter the land; the Ten Utterances repeated; “Hear, O Israel”; the warning against forgetting.
Other ways of counting
The tradition counts the same name in several ways. The main one is above: each letter is its number. The other eight are old and checkable too; each gives its own number, and many of them have a Torah word with the same number.
Final letters as 500–900 (mispar gadol) — 300. A Torah word with the same number is כפר — “to cover; atone” (Genesis 6:14).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 39. A Torah word with the same number is גאלה — “redemption” (Leviticus 25:24).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 84. A Torah word with the same number is ידע — “to know” (Genesis 3:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1215.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 42900.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1862.
The letters that come out are רפגנטעממצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 582. A Torah word with the same number is למצותיו — “to his commandments” (Exodus 15:26).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1243.
The number 300 appears in the classical books 50 times across 27 works. The earliest mention is פירוש קדמון על ספר חסידים (~1200).
The name גורטנזייה does not stand as a word in the Pentateuch — as with most names, including many Tanakh names from the later books.
The verse of your name
There is a custom: at the end of the prayer one says a Torah verse that begins with the first letter of one's name and ends with its last. For גורטנזייה these are ג and ה. The Pentateuch has 2 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 32:16:
גמלים מיניקות ובניהם שלשים פרות ארבעים ופרים עשרה אתנת עשרים ועירם עשרה
This is from the portion Vayishlach. What it is about: Wrestling with the angel and the name Israel; the meeting with Esau; Dinah in Shechem; the birth of Benjamin and Rachel's death.
Every letter of the name explained, the words and namesakes with references, the Hebrew date, the letter and tribe of the month, day 861 of your life (±1), the psalm by age, the attestations from the classical books — a PDF sent to your email.
The number of the day, every morning
Every date has a number too. Once a year it will match the number of your name — 300. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.
The name גורטנזייה has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 300 is not among them. Half of all names are like this — neither good nor bad, just a fact of counting.
How it is counted
Each Hebrew letter has a number; a word's number is their sum (alef 1 … tav 400). The page is the remainder modulo 354: the Torah divided into 354 pages of 861 letters, as the lunar year has 354 days. Everything can be checked by hand.