The name Gershon in Hebrew letters is גרשון. Below: how its number adds up, which page of the Torah it falls on and what verse stands there. Everything is computed, nothing is guessed.
גרשון
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is גרשון. A Tanakh name: the name of an Israelite (first in Genesis 46:11; 17 mentions in the Tanakh). Meaning, per Strong’s dictionary (1890): “a refugee”. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 559 — the same as the Torah word גרשון, “Gershon, son of Levi”. That number points to Torah page 205 of 354 — in the portion Emor. What that portion is about: Laws of the priests; animals without blemish; the calendar of festivals — from the Sabbath to Sukkot; the lamp and the showbread. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Deuteronomy 28:50. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Gershon” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: גרשון. A name from the Tanakh — its Tanakh spelling is used. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
Adding up the letters of the name גרשון gives 559.
559
The number 559 is the Torah word גרשון — «Gershon, son of Levi» (Genesis 46:11).
Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen, or scabbed, or scurvy, ye shall not offer these unto HaShem, nor make an offering by fire of them upon the altar unto HaShem.
This is from the portion Emor. What it is about: Laws of the priests; animals without blemish; the calendar of festivals — from the Sabbath to Sukkot; the lamp and the showbread.
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) — 1209.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 64. A Torah word with the same number is נטה — “to stretch out, pitch” (Genesis 12:8).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 2112.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 132545.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1777.
The letters that come out are רגבפט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 294. A Torah word with the same number is ארגמן — “purple” (Exodus 25:4).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1071.
The number 559 appears in the classical books 3 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is ציצים ופרחים (יעב"ץ) (~1750).
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 — 559. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.
Hebrew is written from right to left. גרשון has 5 letters: ג Gimel, ר Resh, ש Shin, ו Vav, ן final Nun. The first letter is Gimel, the last is final Nun.
For an engraving, a sign or a tattoo, show the spelling to someone who reads Hebrew: transliterating a name is a choice, not the only option.
The name גרשון appears in the Torah as a word 11 times. The first time is Genesis 46:11. Another 2 times it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.
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 גרשון these are ג and נ. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Deuteronomy 28:50:
גוי עז פנים אשר לא ישא פנים לזקן ונער לא יחן
This is from the portion Ki Tavo. What it is about: “When you enter”: the first fruits and the declaration; the stones on Mount Ebal; blessings and admonitions.
The name גרשון has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 559 is not among them. Half of all names are like this — neither good nor bad, just a fact of counting.
Add a date of birth and the verse of meeting from that week's portion is added to the reading.
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.
