The name Lester in Hebrew letters is לסטר. 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.
לסטר
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is לסטר. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 299 — the same as the Torah word הארגמן, “the purple”. That number points to Torah page 299 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 31:27. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Lester” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: לסטר. 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 לסטר gives 299.
299
The number 299 is the Torah word הארגמן — «the purple» (Exodus 28:5).
Behold, I have taught you statutes and ordinances, even as HaShem my G-d commanded me, that ye should do so in the midst of the land whither ye go in to possess it.
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) — 299. A Torah word with the same number is הארגמן — “the purple” (Exodus 28:5).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to be, become” (Genesis 1:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 56. A Torah word with the same number is יום — “day” (Genesis 1:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1200. A Torah word with the same number is קשקשת — “scales” (Leviticus 11:9).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 44581.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 518. A Torah word with the same number is חריש — “plowing” (Genesis 45:6).
The letters that come out are כחנג — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 81. A Torah word with the same number is אנכי — “I” (Genesis 3:10).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1123.
The number 299 appears in the classical books 1 time across 1 work. The earliest mention is פרי עץ חיים שער השבת (~1573).
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 — 299. 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. לסטר has 4 letters: ל Lamed, ס Samekh, ט Tet, ר Resh. The first letter is Lamed, the last is Resh.
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 לסטר 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 לסטר these are ל and ר. The Pentateuch has 8 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 31:27:
למה נחבאת לברח ותגנב אתי ולא הגדת לי ואשלחך בשמחה ובשרים בתף ובכנור
This is from the portion Vayetzei. What it is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return.
The name לסטר has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 299 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.
