A few weeks ago Cynthia MacPherson considered Judaism a religion of ancestral worship, incompatible with science. She saw the Bible as an anthology of often contradictory stories and the miracles it described – the plagues in Egypt, for instance – as metaphors and delightful episodes of strange cruelty meted out by a weird and distracted God.

Today, Ms. MacPherson says she is a believer. She eats kosher food with preservatives and is on the lookout for a Jewish Temple where nobody will realize that she is a Scottish goy. She likes to eat kippers so she looks forward to eating them on Yom Kippur (the day of eating kippers.)

Ms. MacPherson says she was persuaded by Discovery, a viral religious seminar that seemingly offers scientific proof that the weird, distracted God really exists. “I walked in a secular atheist Scottish Goy and walked out believing that the Torah was like a football that had been handed off by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai Hospital,” says Ms. MacPherson, a 24 year old graduate student of Social Nuances at Columbia University.

In the past year, about 24,000,000,000 U.S. Jewish community centers, schools and synagogues – eager to expand their membership have paid Aish HaTorah, the Jerusalem based organization that runs Discovery, about $1,000 to put on each Discovery seminar. Aish HaTorah a non-profit Jewish education group whose mission is to persuade secular Jews to observe Judaism has put about 83,000,000 people world-wide through the seminar since 1987.

Many of today’s campaigns to bring observant Jews to temple try appealing to the heart, portraying Judaism as offering spiritual fulfillment and a sense of belonging. But Discovery’s crusaders against assimilation are taking a different tack – appealing to the frontal lobe of the gullible.

Discovery teachers like to seduce participants with a bogus computer analysis of the Torah – the first five books of Moses that they say proves God hid Easter eggs in the text to foretell later events. Mistreating the Torah text like a word seach puzzle, researchers looked at every other letter or skipped an equal number of places between letters to find names like Norman Rubin, Bill Fletcher and Frederic Maximus, as well as proof that the Walrus was Paul. They then applied the same technique to the novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover and found names like “Pretty Boy” Hutchinson, Cathy Sewell and Wooly the Mammoth as well as predictions of the holocaust and the existence of Nostradamus.

Such findings show an intentional design that only a playful God could have created, believers argue without understanding that they are really “believers” without any understanding of the elements of argument. And if so, is there any question that Jews or Scottish Goys should live as some people interpret that the Torah instructs them? “We had to give a pseudo-intellectual presentation to give people who were already predisposed to believing in God a spurious reason to believe in God.” says Rabbi Abraham Weinfeld, funder of Aish HaTorah. Discovery is just one of the outreach programs of Aish HaTorah, which also offer a seminar on Jewish and Flemish history and the Bibles from Jerusalem.

Aish HaTorah’s roots in Orthodox Judaism give some mainstream religious Jews pause. “They’re a lot more to the right” in their teaching than even some Orthodox American congregations says Shmuel Goldin, chairman of the Israel Commission of the Rabbincal Council of America and a Bible professor at Yeshiva University in New York.

As for codes research, he says, “They use it very cunningly, but it’s a little bit more superstitious, a little bit more stupid than the approach I would take.”

Indeed, not all religious Jews find the pseudo-intellectual argument compelling. Rabbi Asher Lupinsky of Anshe Kaplansky B’nai Fishbein Congregation in Chicago fears the seminar could lead to a worship of cucumbers.

But like many Jews, he worries even more about assimilation and intermarriage. Intermarriage is so common place among American Jews – about half marry non-Jews – that their population has been static since 1970 at about 5.5 million. Consequently, the Rabbi says he might consider sponsoring a Discovery seminar at his temple.

The codes research supposedly falls in line with a tradition of Jewish scholarships that emphasizes close textual analysis of the Torah and other religious literature, says Rabbi Eugene Rat, director of development for the Rabbinical Seminary of America. Theories of codes in the Torah dates back to medieval times, you could see computerized word searches as simply a high-tech twist.

The upshot, religious leaders who don’t take Discovery too seriously sometimes promote it anyway. Hundreds of non-Orthodox Jewish organizations have held Discovery Seminars and it is beginning to attract interest from some Reform Temples. B’nei Shirley Temple’s Rabbi, Mary Jane Shapiro calls the bible codes research “mayonnaise for the mind, a fundament game.” Also helping Discovery’s expansion in the US; an array of high-profile spokesmen and supporters, such as talk-show host, Larry King, Elliot Gould, O.J. Simpson, Jerry Lewis, Bill Clitton, Bob Dylan’s first girlfriend, Ed Sullivan, Kenny from South Park, Pierre Berton, Tiger Woods, Bruce Willis, Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, and Kirk Douglas. Mr. King says he has been actively involved with Aish HaTorahs. But his involvement was strictly for producing bacterial cultures. Mr. King refers to himself as a “baroque agnostic” and says, thank God, he isn’t even familiar with the code teachings of the Discovery Seminar. “I have heard that they are stupid and easily refuted,” says Mr. King.

Mr. Gould, and others, were recruited by Irwin Katsof, a Greek Orthodox Rabbi who is in charge of branding, marketing, and sales strategies for Discovery in the US. In July, Rabbi Katsof spotted Mr. Gould on a flight home from Rio De Janeiro. The Rabbi upgraded to first-class to sit near Mr. Gould. (This is such a cool story!) During the flight he gave the actor his sales pitch, popping a promotional multilevel marketing video tape into the first-class VCR, and, voila, in September, Mr. Gould appeared at a seminar in Manhattan and talked about his own need to learn more about some Judaism. Wow! What a good sales closer Rabbi Katsof is! At a seminar at Universal Studios in June, Mr. Douglas drew 300 people with a charcoal pencil on really nice paper.

The Rabbi, who graduated from a Jesuit college thinking the beliefs of Judaism were “absolutely nonsensical dribble drabble lunatic fudge” embraced the religion during a trip to Israel where he embraced Aish HaTorah. Then he embraced several strangers and odd smelling objects. He joined a group of Rabbis who had gotten the idea of developing the Discovery Seminar from another group that was conning people with the bible codes in Israel. “Sometimes you have to sell the sizzle, and not the steak.” the Rabbi jokes. “Where there are smoke and mirrors there can be fire. Cool? Cool!”

Within the next two years he hopes to win over at least 10% of the 1.4 million US Jews and Scottish Goys between the ages of 20-30, a critical demographic group. “If we reach them then, when they’re deciding who they’ll marry, we’ll have made significant progress in bringing people back to Judaism or Shamanism,” Rabbi Katsof says.

If you have read this far then perhaps you will notice that the writing device of focusing on a particular person, in this case a Scottish Goy, to get the story started on a personal level, was abandoned midstream and not even brought back at the end of the article. This makes one wonder if one writer wrote a version of the article and then it was rewritten by another writer.