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
You did not choose your name. It was given — almost always after someone who came before you.
The number of your name is 176. The Torah word פוץ — “to dash in pieces, literally or figuratively” — has the same.
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.
מבן עשרים שנה ומעלה כל יצא צבא בישראל תפקדו אתם לצבאתם אתה ואהרן
Numbers 1:3
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, מ, and ends with the last, נ.
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
A word with the number 176 appears in 10 of the 54 weekly portions. That is a rare number: most numbers appear more often.
You are not alone in this number
The same number belongs to these names:
What is left
We counted your name in one system. There are nine, and they give nine different numbers. When several systems lead to the same portion, the tradition reads that theme as strong. So far you have one.
Below — how this was counted, letter by letter.
Mason — The customary Hebrew spelling of this name. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
מייסון
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is מייסון. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 176 — the same as the Torah word פוץ, “to dash in pieces, literally or figuratively”. That number points to Torah page 176 of 354 — in the portion Tzav. What that portion is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Numbers 1:3. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. There are no predictions or judgments here — only the text of the Torah and arithmetic you can check.
Adding up the letters of the name מייסון gives 176.
176
The number 176 is the Torah word פוץ — «to dash in pieces, literally or figuratively» (Genesis 10:18).
The number 176, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 176 in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus). These are its opening words:
אתם מאת בני ישראל חקת עולם לדרתם זאת …
The verse this place falls on is Vayikra (Leviticus) 7:36:
אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה ה׳ לָתֵת לָהֶם בְּיוֹם מָשְׁחוֹ אֹתָם מֵאֵת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל חֻקַּת עוֹלָם לְדֹרֹתָם
which HaShem commanded to be given them of the children of Israel, in the day that they were anointed. It is a due for ever throughout their generations.
This is from the portion Tzav. What it is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons.
The same number, 176, is given by these biblical names:
עמינדב · עמוס · יויקים · צוף
Nine 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) — 826.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 23.
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 68. A Torah word with the same number is חלל — “to bore, i.e.” (Genesis 4:26).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 726. A Torah word with the same number is קדשברנע — “Kadesh-Barnea, a place in the Desert” (Numbers 32:8).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 7936.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 572. A Torah word with the same number is ברשע — “Birsha, a king of Gomorrah” (Genesis 14:2).
The word that comes out is יממחפט. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 187. A Torah word with the same number is מספוא — “fodder” (Genesis 24:25).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 358. A Torah word with the same number is חשן — “perhaps a pocket” (Exodus 25:7).
The number 176 appears in the classical books 8 times across 5 works. The earliest mention is עץ חיים (~1573).
The name מייסון 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 מייסון these are מ and נ. The Pentateuch has 4 such verses. The first of them is Numbers 1:3:
מבן עשרים שנה ומעלה כל יצא צבא בישראל תפקדו אתם לצבאתם אתה ואהרן
This is from the portion Bamidbar. What it is about: The census in the desert: 603,550 men; the order of the camps around the Tabernacle; the Levites and their service.
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.
Биньямин Пичхадзе, «Хумаш 354» (חומש 354), Бней-Брак, 2002 / התשס״ג · A calculation, not a prediction.